er cent regime with the
utmost complacency and self-satisfaction. It is ever so with the
traditional teacher. He seeks to be let alone, that he may go on his
complacent way without hindrance. To him every innovation is an
interference, if not a positive impertinence. But, in spite of the
traditional teacher, the school is destined to rise to a higher level and
enter upon a more rational procedure. And we must look to the dynamic
teacher to usher in the renaissance--the teacher who has the vitality and
the courage to break away from tradition and write integrity into the
course of study as one of the big goals and think all the while toward
integrity, physical, mental, and moral.

CHAPTER FIVE

APPRECIATION

Education may be defined as the process of raising the level of
appreciation. This definition will stand the ultimate test. Here is
bed-rock; here is the foundation upon which we may predicate appreciation
as a goal in every rational system of education. Appreciation has been
defined as a judgment of values, a feeling for the essential worth of
things, and, as such, it lies at the very heart of real education. It must
be so or civilization cannot be. Without appreciation there can be no
distinction between the coarse and the fine, none between the high and the
low, none between the beautiful and the ugly, none between the sublime and
the commonplace, none between zenith and nadir. Hence, appreciation is
inevitable in every course of study, whether the authorities have the
courage to proclaim it or not. Just why it has not been written into the
course of study is inexplicable, seeing that it is fundamental in the
educational process. It is far from clear why the superintendent permits
teachers and pupils to go on their way year after year thinking that
arithmetic is their final destination, or why he fails to take the
tax-payers into his confidence and explain to them that appreciation is
one of the lode-stars toward which the schools are advancing. In his heart
he hopes that the schools may achieve appreciation, and it would be the
part of frankness and fairness for him to reveal this hope to his teachers
and to all others concerned.

It is common knowledge that business affairs do not require more than ten
pages of arithmetic and it would seem only fair that the study of the
other pages should be justified. These other pages must serve some useful
purpose in the thinking of those who retain them, and, ce