attention is being given to the ventilation and lighting of the home and the school. Many states have passed laws fixing the standard of lighting schoolrooms as to amount, direction, and quality. Never before has ventilation, heating, and sanitation received the attention that now obtains. As a natural result, sensible decoration, cleanliness, and beautification follow. This is as it should be, for the æsthetic, the ethical, and the intellectual are a trinity that should never be divided.

UNIFORM REPORTS

The work of the Committee on Uniform Reports approved and adopted by the Department of Superintendence at its St. Louis meeting was a valuable contribution to the educational progress of the year. These are days of investigation--days when we seek and want to know the truth. It is far more important that we should find this out for ourselves in our own schools than that it should be left for commissions or committees to find it out for us, however much we might appreciate their approval or confirmation.

The primary object of this committee was to have reports prepared in a sufficiently uniform manner to make comparisons between different school systems fair and useful; but the effect upon the different systems of schools in making it possible to study their own internal workings from different points of view will prove more valuable than the outside comparisons.

As the schools have passed thru different stages of growth and development three steps should be noted:

1. At first, the one great question was that of growth, and statistics were of greatest value chiefly from that point of view. In those days the American common-school system was an experiment that had to be tried out and numbers were supposed to indicate the degree of approval. As Columbus was the second city in America to employ a superintendent of schools, the speaker has had opportunity to note the importance attached to figures merely.

2. From the days of Horace Mann, whose devotion to secondary education meant so much a half-century ago, until quite recently, the high schools of our cities have been measured largely in the same way. Of course numbers mean something, but size is not the vital question of the present day.

3. With the compulsory school law, so universal now, came a careful study of the quality of attendance. The chief question was: Were the children getting the benefit of the opportunities which the schools have to offer? Did they attend school?

While not overlooking the value of such general information as indicated above, the uniform reports bring to the front a more vital question than that of growth. What are the schools doing for those who attend? If there is a large percentage of nonpromotions, how is it accounted for?

No teacher can study the causes for nonpromotion in her class, taking into account irregular attendance, physical or sense defects, personal illness, mental incapacity, and indifference, without becoming more sympathetic for those who need sympathy and more interested in their welfare. Besides, the facts thus noted must come to the attention of those in authority and lead to such changes in conditions as may be necessary. No true teacher can take the pupil's cumulative card where presented, without having a special interest awakened in the child who presents it. No principal or superintendent can take the facts of failures by subjects as they come to him, without being in a measure startled by the excess in certain directions. A more careful study of the causes for failure in certain subjects is immediately started and plans for their correction are prepared. As the expert in any branch of study considers the large number of failures in his special line as reported by practically all of the school systems of the country, he will also apply himself to the solution of the problem by the preparation of a textbook better suited to the conditions and needs of the schools as thus shown.

The study of internal conditions and their improvement is the greatest school question of the present day.

We have tried to touch upon a few of the problems which have been uppermost in our minds during the year. We could not consider all, there is still much to be said: social centers, vacation schools, bibliography. As our vision enlarges, our ideals advance, and what seemed impossible at the beginning becomes surprisingly easy with knowledge and experience. The work of the year has had its special problems and difficulties for each. But forgetting the unpleasant parts of these problems and difficulties, we should press forward to a new and more advanced position, and attack the new problems with courage, hope, and enthusiasm, thinking as we see them looming up before us, as Byron said of the great St. Peter's:

Enter; its grandeur overwhelms thee not;

And why? It is not lessened; but thy mind,

Expanded by the genius of the spot,

Has grown colossal.

So, before careful preparation and thought, all difficulties must vanish.

DISCUSSION

GRACE C. STRACHAN, district superintendent of city schools, Brooklyn, N.Y.Following is a brief outline of the plan of organization followed in New York for taking care of the exceptional child.

Special classes are established for the blind, the deaf, the crippled, the anæmic, and the mentally defective. These classes are not housed in special schools; neither does every school have any or all of these classes. For instance, in the twenty schools which I supervise, the total register of which is over 33,000, I have eight classes for mentally defective children in six schools, one class for the blind, two classes for the deaf, four classes for the crippled, and four "open-air" classes.

The crippled children are gathered from various parts of the districts, and carried in stages to the school.

The teacher of each of these classes is paid an additional salary of $100. The register in the deaf and the blind classes is ten, in the mentally deficient and the crippled, fifteen, and in the open air about thirty.

For children not afflicted in any of the ways described above, but who are not fitted for the work of the regular classes done by children of the same age, classes which we name "C," "D," "E," "Rapid Progress," and "Slow" are established.

The "C" class is composed of foreigners. The work of such classes is the teaching of English to foreigners. As soon as any child in the class has a sufficient command of English to take up the work of any regular grade for which he may be fitted, he is transferred to such class. It is evident, therefore, that the register of such classes is variable, but we try to keep the maximum at twenty-five or thirty.

The "D" class is composed of children who will be fourteen years of age during the school year, who will want to get their working papers as soon as they have reached the age of fourteen and whose educational qualifications are such that it is evident they would not be fitted to pass the test required for working papers, if held in the regular grades. The register of these classes is also limited to about twenty-five, and the course of study is modified by cutting the time devoted to some of the so-called "fads and fancies," in order to increase the time for arithmetic, English, and geography.

The "E" classes are for the over-age children. Naturally they greatly exceed the other special classes in number. The register is kept below thirty-five if possible. As soon as pupils of the "E" classes are ready for the work of the regular grade in which the age of the pupils corresponds to their own, they are transferred to such regular grade. The course of study is modified also for these "E" classes. This modification is not formal, but is left more or less to the discretion of each principal. In large schools, there is likely to be an "E" class for pupils of each year or half-year-and the pupils who are decidedly over-age are often promoted from one "E" class to another "E" class for several terms. The beneficial effects of the organization of these special classes are:

1. The relief of the regular classes, resulting from taking out the mentally defective and otherwise afflicted children, and also those who are either abnormally bright or abnormally slow. The teacher of the regular class is therefore able to handle satisfactorily a larger number of pupils, and to accomplish much better results than under the old style of organization.

2. Much more attention is given to the individual needs of each child, as in the special classes the register is much smaller, the children of similar deficiencies are grouped together, and their progress is much more rapid.

3. The saving in money by the reducing of the number of "repeaters."

A. E. WINSHIP, editor of New England Journal of Education, Boston, Mass.-Notwithstanding the extended, detailed, and graphic portraiture of the progress of the year as presented by the chairman, it is probable that everyone of us has been thinking of what has not been said.

To my thinking, the great feature of the progress of the year has been the long strides taken away from the tyranny of tradition and from the artificiality which have held a superstitious sway over the schools all too long.

For a third of a century we have been working more or less seriously to put the whole child to school, and the year 1911-12 will be long remembered as the time when we first seriously said, "Educate the child everywhere and all the time." It has been assumed until now that the school furnished all the education that was received in more than six thousand working hours. Now that we have come out from under the sway of that spuerstition we wonder that we ever assumed anything of the kind. Mr. Alderman,

state superintendent of Oregon, is the leader in a group of earnest men who are helping in the child's education everywhere and all the time.

A few specific activities in the line of progress are also worthy of notice. More has been done toward the purifying of the outhouses in country districts than ever before. Teaching morals has had a new significance; the beginning made in studying how to teach sex-hygiene is significant.

There has been a great movement toward providing suitable home life for teachers in rural districts. For instance, Walla Walla County, Wash., has no teacher who has not a comfortable and reasonably attractive boarding-place. The county superintendent insists upon eating with every teacher where she boards. Already six school districts have built a teachers' house on or near the school lot. This movement for the decent housing of the teacher is coming to have national significance.

Neighborhood centers in connection with rural schools are assuming important proportions. In one school district, near Ellensburg, Wash., with thirty-two pupils enrolled, has been built, by public taxation, a neighborhood house costing $4,000. It has every social, physical, and public convenience of a city Young Men's Christian Association building, and brings together all the people frequently for social and public functions. While we have been investigating and talking there are great movements sweeping us forward in the social betterment of rural communities. In all this, the year 1911-12 has been memorable.

EDWIN G. COOLEY, Chicago, Ill.-Superintendent Shawan has spoken of the progress made in the study of retarded children and of school attendance. There is another phase of this question which I believe is worthy of notice. There appears to be an increasing appreciation of the fact that our customary period of compulsory school attendance terminating at fourteen is too short; that this terminus was not selected as the result of any careful study of the question, but is the result of tradition. In many civilized countries at present there is a movement on to lengthen this period from two to four years, either by adding one or more years to the period of attendance at the ordinary school, or by requiring part-time attendance at supplementary continuation schools. Both movements are to be seen in Europe and America. Several of the American states have enacted laws during the last few years requiring students between fourteen and sixteen who are not at work to attend school.

There seems to be a general feeling today that to permit the boy or girl at fourteen to leave school and enter the business or industrial world without further instruction and guidance is a mistake. At fourteen, parental control is relaxing, new passions and interests in the boy and girl are awakening, and they need guidance and instruction more than ever before. To turn them loose at this time in the commercial or industrial world without this educational guidance and instruction often leads to life as a vagabond, a parasite, or a criminal.