g, and behave themselves
in general as if they were savages. The pupils lolled in their seats,
passed notes, kept up an undertone of conversation, arose from their
seats at the first tap of the bell, and piled in disorder out of the
classroom while the instructor was still talking. If the lessons had
been tedious, one might perhaps at least have palliated such conduct,
but the instruction was very far from tedious. It was bright, lively,
animated, beautifully clear, and admirably illustrated. It is simply the
theory of this school never to interfere with the spontaneous activity
of the pupils. And I may add that the school draws its enrollment very
largely from wealthy families who believe that their children are being
given the best that modern education has developed, that they are not
being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school,
and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous
mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants. And yet soon
afterward, I visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts
of a large city. I saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to
their instructors, and to visitors. The instruction was much below that
given in the first school in point of quality, and yet the pupils were
getting from it, even under these conditions, vastly more than were the
pupils of the other school from their masterly instructors.

The two schools that I first described represent one type of the attempt
that education has made to pioneer a new path through the wilderness. I
have said that many of these attempts have ended by bringing the
adventurers back to their starting point. I cannot say so much for these
schools. The movement that they represent is still floundering about in
the tamarack swamps, getting farther and farther into the morass, with
little hope of ever emerging.

May I tax your patience with one more concrete illustration: this time,
of a school that seems to me to have reached the starting point, but on
that new and higher plane of which I have spoken?

This school is in a small Massachusetts town, and is the model
department of the state normal school located at that place. The first
point that impressed me was typified by a boy of about twelve who was
passing through the corridor as I entered the building. Instead of
slouching along, wasting every possible moment before he should return
to his room, he was walking briskly a