self with a game of logarithms. And those very parents will say later that they have not seen any result from the study of English in high school. If the average boy, on going home from school, should find any member of his family reading, of deliberate choice, for entertainment, any one of the classics read at school, the boy would be stricken beyond power of expression. As for poetry, the connection of that with any natural order of things is inconceivable. If anyone should quote Shelley or Browning at the dinner-table, he would do it shamefacedly, and the whole family would be embarrassed.

Even the sifted-out number who go from high school to college are still marked by the limitations of their training, or lack of training. If an instructor ventures to ask a class of undergraduates, even upperclassmen, what their unrequired reading is, the thing he learns casts a pall over his teaching for weeks. He finds that the very ones who are now dutifully reading Arnold and Meredith and Keats under his enthusiastic and sympathetic direction, are doing their outside reading from sources quite within their own generation. They ingenuously acknowledge preferences for Harold Bell Wright and Gene Stratton Porter and Myrtle Reed. They are not without literary standards for their choice, however; they find that these writers are "true to life," that you can "almost see" their characters, that their "Nature deseriptions are so beautiful." College training has left the students' early taste undamaged.

The present liberality of theory in education—a conscious and striven-for catholicity-tends to put every kind of learning upon the same level. At least that seems to be the application of this catholicity. If a boy can't learn Greek or chemistry, let him make a horse-shoe; if a girl can't read poetry, let her trim a hat. In either case, the youth is being educated; and is not one result as good as the other, if not better? Democracy through education, is the cry. All learning or training is of the same grade. The Greek or science-trained boy and the hattrimming girl are one, with the advantage on the side of the girl; the only purpose of education anyway is to show one how to make a living. If a man is making a living he is functioning in the highest possible way. English teachers have to hear from

the practical man, "The trouble with English teaching is that all the material of it is impractical and quite out of touch with modern life. Give them something up to date. Substitute Shaw for Shakespeare and George Ade for Bacon and you will get some result." Well, perhaps you would; the force of gravity does assist results.

We make this sort of democracy a slogan without considering whether there is any possibility in it or not. Calling tatting and Æschylus the same thing does not make them so. Pedagogy joys in talking lightly of impossibilities. And in fact we nearly all leave gaps in our recognition of things. We avoid the word aristocracy, in our speech, and all terms that imply serious admission of class distinctions. And yet we all know, whether we are honest enough to acknowledge it or not, that distinctions are going to exist. We may achieve an ideal social scheme in which there will be no artificial gradations, but there will always be natural ones. We talk of universal education, but we really know that it will never come about. Some will be educated and some-even of those who go through high school and college will not. There will never be a level. Education is not a levelling but an individualizing process. Children of all grades and classes enter high school; and they emerge, not in the same grades and classes, for some will rise and some will sink in the process, but in quite as many. The shifting is determined in part by the school, but more by factors which lie outside of it. The English teacher, for example, wishes that all who pass through his hands might emerge lovers of good reading, prepared to use all that literature has to offer. In his heart, however, he knows that that will never be. Their attainment was determined largely before they ever came to him, determined by their home and its irresponsibility, by their parentage, by the whole course of creation, which may have made all men free, but by no means gave them all the same literary

taste.

We need a new distribution of responsibility, and the school should really assist in it, instead of making the division constantly more unequal. In English, some means of uniform grouping of pupils would be of much assistance and would do

away with the heterogeneity which gives a sort of dazedness to much of the present instruction. What I should like to propose as a natural and practical basis for the gradation of these pupils would be, not their age or head-measurements, nor a record of their previous work in other subjects, but an examination of their parents. Examinations, I know, are falling into disrepute— among lecturers especially, who are fond of coming among us and saying that it is a sign of inefficiency for a teacher to give an examination. But this would be one of those practical examinations, which we are all passing or failing in, consciously or unconsciously, all the time. Even those lecturers do not know, perhaps, that we are really examining them while we listen, and sometimes finding them below the passing mark.

This method would require both parents, when they wish to enter a child in high school, for instance, to give a list of their own reading for the past year, the magazines they subscribed for and especially those they bought at the news-stands, the daily paper the father took regularly, as well as the one he read on the car going home, dictagraph records of the family conversation for an entire week, a catalogue of the family library and an explanation of how it was acquired, a list of amusements, both those the parents took alone and those they shared with the children and anything else the examining board might think pertinent. With these points in hand there would be little difficulty in forming a prompt estimate of the taste of the pupil, his speech usage, general knowledge, and many other things about him. A board would readily determine what work he needed and was capable of doing. The families of a town could be graded as A, B, C, and so on down to Z;—if that did not furnish low enough grades the Greek alphabet could be added below Z, and kept on record in that way. As they sent up successive children to be entered in school, it would be necessary for the authorities only to look at the family record and assign the youth to his natural place. If at any time the parents should become ambitious to raise the initial rating of their children, they could apply for a new examination, to show that the character of the home had appreciably improved.

The teacher or principal, on entering a new pupil from a family

already on record, would merely look at his register and say, "Robinson? C. W., on Fortieth Street? Let me see-Your family subscribed last year for such and such magazines. They bought pretty regularly such others. They haven't in five years read a book that was more than six months old-generally the very latest possible. They read all the works of So-and-So-consider him the best writer they know. They attend some movingpicture show twice a week. Ye-es. Well, we'll start you in Class W and see what you can do." The method would be very simple.

It might be a good thing to institute a similar test for patrons of colleges. It would doubtless lower the mortality rate there. In this case there should be added an affadavit, taken under stern oaths, of the parents' purpose in sending their offspring to college, and especially of their hope and expectation regarding the result. The college could reserve the right to reject any applicants, or accept them only on probation.

Of course a pupil should not be held absolutely to this resulting classification; he could have a chance to show that by some exception to law, or some outside opportunity or special effort of the teacher, he had better taste or judgment than his parents. That often happens. The plan would not necessarily lead to caste-making. It might even have a good reflexive effect, in that the pupil might, for the sake of his own credit and standing, take in hand the reading and amusements of his parents and the choice of a family library. A general intellectual advance might come about through it, if parents were once convinced by such a definite and authoritative sign that the home did function in relation to its children.

English is the most obvious and natural field for an initial experiment of this sort, but there are doubtless other departments where it would also be effective. If it were proved to all parents that they were actually affecting their children's intellectual progress it would be worth while. This plan would really be the basis for a new sort of Parent-Teacher Association, a very natural and potential one. There might in time be developed a new activity of the parental conscience, which has by no means been dormant in all its functions. A beautiful emu

lation might arise between the school and the home, and a parental avarice of duties equal to that of the school at present. The school would still be the dominant element, of course, and there would be no reason why emulation should pass into jealousy. The home has really been a very good thing, considering everything. Some of us, if we had to choose between what we learned at school and what we learned at home, would take the latter accumulation, not for any sentimental reasons but merely on its merits. It would be a pity, on the whole, to do away with the home, as some educators practically propose. Would it not be better to make it an important annex to the public schools, than to discard it entirely?

University of Kansas.

MARGARET LYNN.