said to reign supreme. Hence the Ideal or the ought and freedom must be postulated of the noumenal self.

This attempt to base the science of education upon epistemology appears to me to be a serious error. Instead of being based upon the extensive inductive generalizations of the sciences it is being based upon a mass of hypotheses, some of which are held by many to be baseless speculations.

Too large demands are made upon our sense of credulity in reference to the constitution and nature of the noumenal or transcendental consciousness. An unknown r is a precarious foundation for the science of education.

The statement that the ought or the Idea is not a concept of psychology is also subject to criticism. Education as a science -qualitative tho it may be describes the laws of phenomena as they actually appear. What they ought to be is another matter. In that causal chain of phenomena which it attempts to describe, however, there are certain phenomena called ideals. Fixed ideas they are around which are associated certain acts of conduct and certain algedonic states of consciousness. Instead of there being one categorical imperative there are thousands of them. Although originally accompanied by associated ideas and feelings called reasons they gradually tend to drop their associations and become imperative of conduct or ideals. The various forms of politeness need only to be cited as examples of this general growth of ideals.

Professor Natorp in this book sustains his reputation as a distinguished thinker. The work is full of suggestiveness. One reads thru to the end with pleasure. The problem he sets before himself is that of the interaction and mutual relationship between education and the community. The innermost heart of education he sees in the education of the will as conditioned by the life of the community and again as conditioning that life. There are three grades or stages of will-activity: impulse, will in its narrower sense, and rational will.

The importance of technic in human culture and in the education of the will is well emphasized. Elevation to the community is the widening of the self. Cultivation of spontaneity in the will is the motto of individualism and progress.

There is certain progress from Heteronomy to Autonomy thru work and the proper regulation and training of the will. In this way rational law is attained. In the derivation of the chief concepts of ethics, i. e., the different virtues, Natorp proceeds, wrongly as I believe, from the individual will. The parallelism of function alleged to exist between the individual and society is the justification for extending this classification to society also. Thus the virtue of the reason is truth; the virtue of the will is bravery or moral energy (sittliche Thatkraft); the virtue of the life of impulse is purity or moderation; and the individual foundation of social virtue is righteousness or justice. The three fundamental classes of social activities based on the three stages of will-activity-impulse (work), will (regulation of work), and rational will (rational critique)— are activities in the provinces of economics, government, and culture. Each successive stage presupposes the earlier stage and regulates it. The social economy necessitates social regulation, and the latter stands in need of cultivation in science, morality, art, and religion (education). The importance to these three fundamental activities of the preservation of existence, the struggle for food, the unity of the sciences, the unification of the social whole thru technic, division of labor, adaptation to the needs of the environment, the increasing unification of national and international organizations, the systematization of moral ends and aims, the harmonization of the different classes in the community, and the all-round development of humanity, is thoughtfully and ably portrayed.

The latter part of the book deals with practical problems— organization and methods in the education of the will. The family, the school, and the life of the organized community are the essential factors in the education of the individual as a socius. A national kindergarten system is advocated as reproduction on the part of the state of the family life of the workman as it should be. In the school sense-training is seen to be brain-training and manual training to be in the same way mental training. In the school life intellectual training necessarily receives the chief emphasis. This should be not only a training in thinking correctly, but also in willing and wishing to

think correctly. The school is the state in miniature and in it social conditions should be reproduced. Hence the democratic evolution of the national school. The high school should be a school for the people and not a school for certain privileged classes. All should lead to a Miteinanderwollen.

In reference to the teaching of religion Natorp may be logically forced to go farther than he does, relying on the premises he does. Upon epistemological grounds he concludes that there can be no transcendental deity to worship. Hence all intellectual attempts to explain the relationship supposed to exist between this transcendental being and human beings, i. e., all dogmatics, must necessarily be given up. Moreover, all our conceptions of the deity are anthropomorphic, a raising of human characteristics to the nth power. It is therefore really a worship of humanity. Following Schleiermacher, religion is thought to be a matter of feeling rather than intellect.. The work as a whole is able, spirited, and very suggestive, and will form a very important landmark in the treatment of civilization's greatest problem-education.

UNIVERSITY Of Colorado,

BOULDER, COLO.

ARTHUR ALLIN

VII

DISCUSSION

PROMOTION OF BRIGHT AND SLOW CHILDREN

The amount of work apportioned to the year grades of our common schools is supposed to be gauged by the ability of the normal child. What is the normal child? Is he the child who is not noticeably dull, who accomplishes the year's work in a year, and who falls, it is taken for granted, under the class of the majority of children? Without doubt in the system of yearly promotions the majority of children-if we are concerned with mere majority-pass thru the year's work and are sent ahead into the next grade, and they are all called normal children, while the few left-overs are abnormal, are slow.

Are we right in calling this majority the normal? What does it consist of? A number who do the year's work easily, a certain number of unusually bright children who have time on their hands, and a number who keep up with difficulty and are promoted because it is hardly worth while to make them go over a whole year's work. Thus the "normal" has to borrow from the next above and the next below, if it is to coincide with the "majority," which does the year's work in a year under an inflexible system. In the yearly-promotion system it is admitted that injustice is done to a number of children, but it is said in defense that "we must arrange for the normal child, for in so doing we give the majority its due."

If the "normal" and the "majority" really coincide, the fact should be brought out in some more flexible system of promotion, which allows the individual child to progress as rapidly as his individual ability will permit. If such is not the case then the yearly system must fall, failing of the democratic argument by which it has hitherto convinced the susceptible American mind. The half-year system, very widely

adopted, is an improvement on the yearly system, allowing a more frequent separation of the sheep and the goats.

As this study is based on the results of a year's trial of a flexible promotion system in Santa Barbara, Cal., it may be well to explain the particular method made use of in that place. Soon after the beginning of the year 1898-99 the children in the different grades were divided into three groups, so that each grade had A, B, and C sections. The sections did the work of the grade concentrically. The B section covered the ground of the C section, but worked more intensively; the A section made still more ramifications in a subject than the B section. For example, if the study were map geography, the C section, composed of the least advanced children, would be given a limited amount of work-the most important cities, rivers, etc.; the B section, not requiring so much drill, would take up the same field, but in greater detail, and the A section in still greater detail. In arithmetic the C section would work on a subject in its more simple relationships, or perhaps attack it in objective form. The B class would take up the same subject in greater complexity and more abstractly, possibly. The A class would deal with it in a still more advanced

manner.

When a group in an A section was ready for the next grade it was transferred to the C section of that grade, this occurring perhaps three times a year; the other groups, if ready, slipping up in the same grade from the C to the B section and from the B to the A section under the same teacher, and doing the further work of the grade in a more intensive manner. Beside the group promotions from section to section, the concentric system admitted of individual promotions at any mature time. The child, judged at the teacher's discretion to be capable of faster work, was immediately transferred to the next higher section, where he found, not a bewildering field of entirely new ground, but one of which he already knew the compass points and the main highways. With this basis he could easily with industry enter upon the more detailed work of that section, which his slower companions, not yet mature enough for the advanced work, could not do. He would not in this way "skip" a section, but would merely be placed in a class