Rose is a little Italian girl with a hopeless home life. Her mother is perpetually sick and the family are sordidly poor. Rose was stupid and backward in school and withal as restless and naughty as she could possibly be. She had absolutely no control, was nervous to the last extreme. Nothing interested her. The regular teachers had given her up as hopeless. Finally as last resort, Rose was put in a special class. She was sent to various clinics where her mental and physical difficulties were diagnosed carefully. Her eyes and her teeth, her nose and her throat were attended to. The teacher in the special class found things that Rose really liked to do. She has been under this training about six months and the teacher says she has never known any child to improve so much in that length of time. There is no doubt now that Rose is not feeble-minded and she is learning to behave almost as well as the ordinary child. It seems a pity that only in the special classes for comparatively a small per cent of defective children is school work being done as it ought to be done for many children in all classes.

In considering this matter of prevention of mental disease through the school system, the notion that one can pick out the child who is doomed to insanity must be guarded against. Undoubtedly it would often be possible to detect future dementia praecox cases among high school pupils but that is because certain symptoms of the disease are actually present to the trained observer. If one goes back into the grades, however, where only traits and tendencies are to be seen, one would seldom dare to make a prophecy of definite disaster to come for any particular child. We continually see persons who go through life without mental disease and who still possess unhealthy traits and abnormal tendencies. The child with such characteristics may also succeed in escaping mental shipwreck.

The fact that we cannot be sure of the future of the child, however, does not make prevention useless. The child who is forming certain habits and getting into certain attitudes which interfere with his adaptation to life now and are bound to continue to do so in future, needs to find in school that which will give him all the help possible in learning to make more suitable adjustments. He needs to have every constitutional handicap modified as far as it can be modified by training and this is of supreme importance whether or not the child runs any risk of mental disease. We know as fact, that the individual is bound to go through with unnecessary struggle and suffering if he is allowed to develop traits which inevitably interfere with his successful meeting of conflicts, problems and crises in his life. That this lack of adaptability never comes to the point of absolute mental breakdown does not alter the resposibility of the school. Of what use is education which fails to touch our most fundamental need-the need to adjust our own instincts, desires, emotions, to an organized social world? If education is to become thus thorough-going and dynamic, the teacher will have to know her pupils much more intimately than she is ordinarily permitted to do at present in our over-crowded schoolrooms. One teacher

could be responsible for a small group only if her knowledge of that group extended, as it ought, to the home, the neighborhood, and the life of the child outside the school. Not until the teacher knows her children as they express freely and spontaneously desires and interests which are ordinarily kept down by schoolroom atmosphere, does she really understand them or what constitutes a problem from their standpoint. If the teacher made a personality study of her children as a good physician does of his patient, she would not only be in a position to solve some of her disciplinary problems but she would find that children who had hitherto passed unnoticed as model pupils, should, in reality, have had her most careful attention. The irritable, explosive, egotistic child with the epileptic make-up, the truant, the delinquent, all need the most careful handling, it is true, but as Dr. Adolph Meyer puts it:

"Let us get over the notion that only the bad pupil needs attention. A thing that is less often thought of is that the so-called 'very good pupil,' the extreme at the good end of the scale, is very much more likely to be injured by mental disease and nervous states than the frankly and outspokenly bad and happy-go-lucky child. School excuses, headaches, and attempts to get relieved from various studies, ought to be subjected to the attention of the school physician much oftener than is the case at the present time. The requests for dispensation from various sources are often the first signs of a need of attention. "*

There are many who will say that it is folly to expect the schools to come up to any such impractical standard. As a matter of fact such a demand is no more farfetched than our first attempts to introduce physical hygiene into education once seemed. We have, after years of effort, finally brought the schools to the point where they accept responsibility for the bodily health and training of children. Already in the cities, the schools have taken up mental hygiene to the extent of recognizing that the feeble-minded child lacks much of the mental equipment which is necessary to make successful adaptation to society. It is only a step to the point of view which will see that education to be vital, must be a training for making the most intelligent and satisfactory adjustments to life of which the individual is capable. When the psychology which goes with such a point of view finally becomes effective in our public schools, they will have become the greatest agency in the world for the prevention of mental disease.

*Organizing the Community for the Protection of Its Mental Health-Survey, Sept. 18, 1915.

SUBJECT MATTER AND METHODS

READING

PRIMARY READING

1. Learning to talk well precedes learning to read.

2. Story-telling and learning to reproduce stories, more or less in imitation of the teacher, is the school's earliest and best means of cultivating vigor of thought and power of language.

3. In story-telling the teacher cultivates a vivid imagination combined with simplicity and clearness in the choice of words, and with accurate and pleasing tones.

4. The interest of children in good stories strengthens the attention and exposes their minds to the full force of language in the direct expression of thought. No other means can be devised so effectual in molding a child's thought and speech.

5. The process of learning to read in the first two or three years of school is largely the mastery of a formal art. It consists in acquiring a new set of symbols for receiving and expressing thought.

6. A very effective method of mastering the formal difficulties is that through the phonetic interpretation of new words. This presupposes the memorizing of the forms of letters with their associated sounds or values, and practice in their combination till quickness in interpreting new words is gained.

7. Lively and interesting stories are introduced very early into reading exercises. Children should read under the influence of quickening thought. The previous oral treatment of stories will contribute much to this thought impulse, and will create the desire for learning to read.

8. Lively questions by the teacher touching the forward movement and outcome of the story will give impetus to effort. This vigorous guidance of children's thought strengthens interest and attention.

9. Let children pass judgment on the truth and worth of what they read. They should thoroughly enjoy the early stories, even in the first grade.

10. The imagination of children should be prompted to build clear mental pictures of places, persons, and actions. Pictures and blackboard sketches or dramatic action are also suggestive, as expressed both by the teacher and by the children.

From "Handbook of Practice for Teachers,"

CHARLES A. MCMURRY,

Peabody Institute.

Published by The MacMillan Co.

CLASS MANAGEMENT

DISCIPLINE

The pedagogical method of observation has for its base the liberty of the child; and liberty is activity.

Discipline must come through liberty. Here is a great principle which is difficult for followers of common school methods to understand. How shall one obtain discipline in a class of free children? Certainly in our system, we have a concept of discipline very different from that commonly accepted. If discipline is founded upon liberty the discipline itself must necessarily be active. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent as a mute and as immovable as a paralytic. He is an individual annihilated, not disciplined.

We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore, regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy either to comprehend or to apply. But certainly it contains a great educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion to immobility.

A special technique is necessary to the teacher who is to lead the child along such path of discipline, if she is to make it possible for him to continue in this way all his life, advancing indefinitely toward perfect selfmastery. Since the child now learns to move rather than to sit still, he prepares himself not for the school, but for life; for he becomes able, through habit and through practice, to perform easily and correctly the simple acts of social or community life. The discipline to which the child habituates himself here is, in its character, not limited to the school environment but extends to society.

The liberty of the child should have as its limit the collective interest; as its form, what we universally consider good breeding. We must, therefore, check in the child whatever offends or annoys others, or whatever tends toward rough or ill-bred acts. But all the rest,-every manifestation having a useful scope,-whatever it be, and under whatever form it expresses itself must not only be permitted, but must be observed by the teacher. Here lies the essential point; from her scientific preparation, the teacher must bring not only the capacity, but the desire, to observe natural phenomena. In our system, she must become a passive, much more than an active, influence, and her passivity shall be composed of anxious scientific curiosity, and of absolute respect for the phenomenon which she wishes to observe. The teacher must understand and feel her position of observer: the activity must lie in the phenomenon.

Such principles assuredly have a place in schools for little children who

are exhibiting the first psychic manifestations of their lives. We cannot know the consequences of suffocating a spontaneous action at the time when the child is just beginning to be active: perhaps we suffocate life itself. Humanity shows itself in all its intellectual splendor during this tender age as the sun shows itself at the dawn, and the flower in the first unfolding of the petals; and we must respect religiously, reverently, these first indications of individuality. If any educational act is to be efficacious, it will be only that which tends to help toward the complete unfolding of this life. To be thus helpful it is necessary rigorously to avoid the arrest of spontaneous movements and the imposition of arbitrary tasks. It is of course understood, that here we do not speak of useless or dangerous acts, for these must be suppressed, destroyed.

The first idea that the child must acquire, in order to be actively disciplined, is that of the difference between good and evil; and the task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility, and evil with activity, as often happens in the case of the old-time discipline. And all this because our aim is to discipline for activity, for work, for good; not for immobility, not for passivity, not for obedience.

A room in which all the children move about usefully, intelligently, and voluntarily, without committing any rough or rude act, would seem to me a class room very well disciplined indeed.

From a biological point of view, the concept of liberty in the education of the child in his earliest years must be understood as demanding those conditions adapted to the most favorable development of his entire individuality. So, from the physiological side as well as from the mental side, this includes the free development of the brain. The educator must be as one inspired by a deep worship of life, and must, through this reverence, respect, while he observes with human interest, the development of the child life. Now, child life is not an abstraction; it is the life of individual children. There exists only one real biological manifestation: the living individual; and toward single individuals, one by one observed, education must direct itself. By education must be understood the active help given to the normal expansion of the life of the child. The child is a body which grows, and a soul which develops, these two forms, physiological and psychic, have one eternal font, life itself. We must neither mar nor stifle the mysterious powers which lie within these two forms of growth, but we must await from them the manifestations which we know will succeed one another.

From "The Montessori Method," by MARIA MONTESSORI.

Published by Frederick A. Stokes Co.