tem with all its weaknesses has accomplished the
task of assimilating to American institutions and ideals and standards
the most heterogeneous infusion of alien stocks that ever went to the
making of a united people. The elementary teacher is criticized for all
the sins of omission that the calendar enumerates, and yet this same
elementary teacher is daily lifting millions of children to a plane of
civilization and culture that no other people in history have even
thought possible. I am willing to admit the deficiencies of American
education, but I also maintain that the teachers of our lower schools do
not deserve the opprobrium that has been heaped upon them. I believe
that in education, as in business, it would be a good thing if we saw
more of the doughnut and less of the hole. When I hear a prominent
educator say that we must discard everything that we have produced thus
far and begin anew in the realm of educational materials and methods, I
confess that I am discouraged, especially when that same authority is
extremely obscure as to the materials and methods that we should
substitute for those that we are now employing. I heard that statement
at a recent meeting of the Department of Superintendence, and I heard
other things of like tenor,--for example, that normal schools were
perpetuating types of skill in teaching that were unworthy of
perpetuation, that the observation of teaching was valueless in the
training of teachers because there was nothing that was being done at
the present time that was worthy of imitation, that practice teaching in
the training of young teachers is a farce, a delusion, and a snare.
Those very words were employed by one man of high position to express
his opinion of contemporary practices. You cannot pick up an educational
journal of the better sort, nor open a new educational book, without
being brought face to face with this destructive criticism.

I protest against this, not only in the name of justice, but in the name
of common sense. It cannot be possible that generations of dealing with
immature minds should have left no residuum of effective practice. The
very principle of progress by trial and error will inevitably mean that
certain practices that are possible and helpful and effective are
perpetuated, and that certain other processes that are ineffective and
wasteful are eliminated. To repudiate all this is the height of folly.
If the history of progress shows us anything, it s