nd explain their theories of
education, and at which Professor James should come from Harvard to
preside, while Professor John Dewey looked in to make a few remarks,
would never persuade that parent that her child's progress was not to be
gauged by an ability to spell obsolete words, and to worry her way
through complicated problems in long division.

"Why, she's been to school every day for seven months; rain, nor snow,
nor sleet has daunted her. She has an umbrella, a mackintosh, and a pair
of rubbers. And yet with all these aids to education she cannot spell
'parallel.'" If you are rash you will inform her that the rubbers, the
mackintosh, and the umbrella may travel to school for yet another seven
months, and the child may still remain unable to spell "parallel." If
you are patient and "so disposed," you would deliver a little lecture
on the new methods of teaching reading, in which first a whole sentence
is used as a unit; later a phrase; later still a word; and last of all a
letter; but do not hope for a favorable reception of this theory. The
ex-teacher of high-school mathematics, who, in her own far-distant
youth, excelled at spelling-bees, could name the capital of every State
in the Union and every country in the world; who could recite the names
and dates of the Presidents, "The Village Blacksmith," "The Old Oaken
Bucket," "The Psalm of Life," and the Declaration of Independence, is
not prepared to accept a method of teaching based upon the interests and
the reason of the child, and never upon its mechanical memory. "Things,"
she will tell you, "are changed since my day," and she allows you very
thoroughly to understand that they are changed most mournfully for the
worse.

Changed they emphatically are, whether for worse or better. Almost every
scientific, medical, and sociological discovery of the century has
influenced the school. The single theory of the microbe as the cause of
disease has well-nigh revolutionized it. It does not require a very long
memory to reach back to the days of slates and slate rags, with their
attendant horrors of sliminess and sucked pencils. In those dark ages,
too, a school-book was used by successive generations of children for as
long as its print was legible to the keenest eye. Lead-pencils were
collected at the end of the day and dealt out again promiscuously, and,
marvellous to reflect upon, several children survived their schooling.

In these days the well-equipped and w