party of friends and going out to a large estancia, where a great barbecue is held. He indulges in the national custom, prevalent here as in Argentine, the other great cattle country, of sitting around a great fire over which an ox is roasted whole, and armed with a huge knife slicing off a generous piece of the fresh roast, which is held in one hand. Then, with a generous piece of the meat in his teeth, the dexterous manipulator of the knife, is supposed with one slash to cut this off as close to his face as his nose will allow. One would surmise that the President

owed his superiority in this exercise to the fact that his Executive nose is rather flat than long. One plainly observes that this is no game for one of Hebraic features.

That DR. VIERA is practically well disposed to the United States and to American institutions was brought out by the statement that he was in favor of sending increasingly the students of this Republic to the United States for education.

"I am sending three of my boys at present" said he, "to American schools."

The individual must be the unit of teaching. No two pupils are alike. The demands of modern industry forces upon the manufacturer the creation of the fiction of "types." Ready-to-wear clothing is made to fit the individual by free recourse to alteration of "standard sizes." The school prepares courses of study on the same principles; but it advertises no "alterations." The school books adapt themselves to the course of study and not to the individual pupil. The intellectual "stouts" must fashion their own mental habiliments or go indefinitely dressed. The educational world is as unconcerned for the exceptional child as the industrial world is unmindful of the needs of the very fat man who can buy

nothing ready made outside of a handkerchief.

One course of study for all children of a cosmopolitan city is as unsatisfactory as one size hat for all men. Not a curriculum is wanted but many curricula; not a course of study but many courses suitable for different localities and schools. A neighborhood with a foreign born population must have a course of study keyed on the language note. The individual child with a noticeable limp in his English must be sent not to a particular grade but to a particular teacher; there must be a flexibility both in school and in class organization. There must be an organization for backward and exceptional children.

"Class" teaching is one source of

flagrant educational educational waste that

scientific management may help to remove. Its elimination may be brought about by the employment of efficiency engineers. The number of these educational experts is mounting daily. The Meumans, the Lays, the Thorndikes, and Deweys have done noble pioneering in the province of psychologic and pedagogic experimentation. Every school system should have its own research bureau in which educational theories are given the acid test of a class-room practice; and the dissemination of successful methods and devices should engage the whole time of a corps of field experts charged with the duty of initiating the teacher and pupil into proven time-saving operations.

These educational experts are discovering many mental "laws." These "laws" are increasing in number. Many phases of the human mind are so complex that they resist the experimenter's attempts to resolve them into their component elements; other forms of consciousness have given up their secrets. Memory is one of them; its scientific study has resulted in a perceptible elimination of "lost motion." We find, for instance, that repetition is not the best way of memorizing: that many people have a "preferred sense"-that they can remember what they see better than what they hear; that a good memory is not so much a matter of concentration, but is rather a method of attacking the subject matter. It may prove a source of poignant regret to be informed that the "Village Blacksmith" may be

memorized with less time and labor than formerly attended our efforts. Reading and re-reading the poem from beginning to end is more efficient and less wearing than studying line by line; that distributing this study over a number of days is more efficacious than essaying its memorization in one sitting. What a wealth of "motion" the child has frittered away to the detriment of its spirit and health. Nevertheless memorizing continues to be a sort of a mental Fletcherism, a monotonous repetition that affords more exercise for the lips than for the brain.

Not the least worthy of the labors of educational experts should lie in the revision of the aim and ideals of the Public School. Our necks have grown submissive to the yoke of tradition; we no longer think our thraldom galling. It has been decreed that the child must wear the educational harness for eight years; we have never grown restive over the duration of this servitude. The dullard and the genius must serve the same time. The public school is a marathon; every child is expected to make the distance; we hold no stop-watches on him because we have cared very little for speed records. Plans to test the. validity of this practice have only reached the "conversational stage." We are still without experimental data on which to base a reconstruction of the school curriculum. This momentous problem can only be settled in the educational experimental stations. Reports are reaching us of successful school organizations based on a six-year course;

wherefore it behooves in the interest of preparedness and efficiency to experiment farther with a view to its adoption; and in communities where the interaction of supply and demand multiply the rungs to the ladder of success, it is incumbent on us to give the youth as much time as possible in which to develop surefootedness for the climb towards the upper reaches of the ladder, Acceleration of the preparatory steps is becoming increasingly urgent in view of the growing obliteration of the line of demarcation between youth and manhood, between school and life. The boy must be prepared to don the toga virilis long before his appointed time because of the compulsion of economic want; the school must help him burst his chrysalis through educational Burbanking.

The educational proving-grounds must eliminate wasteful "motions" in teaching and learning, in class management and in class organization. Experimentation and revision must lead to improvement in technique; it is left to the teacher to lay it under constant requisition. Wholesome ingredients and a scientific cook-book do not always result in palatable food; the cook must be reckoned with. The weight of the teacher's personality tells heavily in the balance of educational preparedness. By precept and example she can inspire the child with lively ideals of accuracy, neatness, orderliness and cheerfulness. Gratuitous assumption of the role of employer, exaction of unquestioning obedience, insistence upon giving directions but once, penalization for

uneconomic use of school supplies, constant iteration of the money value of time and diligence will improve the child's chances to live completely.

Analysis is essential in discussing a subject; a resolution into component parts adds to the better envisagement of the whole. We must not forget, however, that synthesis is the crowning act; the parts be reassociated, reassembled. For in the interests of charity the child is considered as an intellect, as a character and as a self-acting organism.

But the business man is interested in the whole boy (using this term generically). He is not a receptacle for the Three R's, a force for a courtesy industry and concentration, or a cog in a complicated industrial machinery. Borrowing an analogy from the advertising world, we may say with C. C. Winingham that "we are not selling six cylinders, a set of wheels, a type of tire, a kind of starter. We are selling a motor car complete

The boy as a human being and therefore as a potential private in the army of producers, must be trained not only for an industry but for humanity. Such training will make him more efficient by educating him for the recreational hours that make or mar a worker.

Common sense recognizes that the worth of the anecdotal horse warranted the careful preservation of the nail; that thru the interdependence that obtains in this world the loss of the nail ultimately led to the loss of the horse. Schools that are laboring long and incessantly for a better school product

can ill afford to see their work undone by neglecting the child's leisure. Such neglect may lead to the acquisition of habits which might tend to undermine that efficiency the child had been so long in achieving; obviously educators would be well advised to keep the saloons and pool-rooms on short rations lest the

economic world cut off the employee's rations altogether.

To accomplish this we must include in our curriculum those studies and accomplishments that would serve to engage the youth's attention during the customary eight hours of recreation. The library habit, the reading of good, wholesome fiction, is a veritable steel armor, proof against attack of immoral forces that strive to prevail against social purity and morality. The child must be encouraged to read books and he must be trained to get the thought out of the printed page thru the judicious use of the dictionary. The ad

vantage of a counter attraction to the nickel hair-raisers is apparent.

The so-called fads are the other means of education for leisure. ing will tend to improve the boys' Music, drawing and physical trainchances for complete living. These subjects, aside from their inherent capacity to train the mind and body, possess wonderful potentialities for amusement and recreation. It is largely owing to the rudimentary knowledge of these fads that our children shun the concert and the museum.

We must, then, educate the whole child for complete living. In the words of W. H. P. Faunce, "If we educate the man for the job, and for the job alone, there will be one set of men to work with their hands and another set of men to work with their brains. I want to educate the man for his life as well as for his living. The schools should give not simply skill; they should give right habits, methods, and ideals."

W. C. O'Donnell, Jr.

WHEN

it

began to dawn upon educators, psychologists, physicians and sociologists that there were deeper causes for criminality than mere "viciousness," and for pauperism and general failure than mere "laziness" and "goodfor-nothingness"; that there might be explanations of a

scientific nature which would show why one individual rises to success and fame while another is a ne'er-do-well: the world was full of talk about "mental defect." The criminal was a mentally defective person, or morally imbecile; feeble-mindedness, constitutional inferiority of some kind or another, easily accounted for the slums, the poverty of the masses, prostitution, and economic dependence. The terms applied to different members of this great group of "defectives" varied and were distinguished by vagueness and arbitrary interchangeableness; they were quite numerous, including such expressions as "subnormal," "abnormal," "weak-minded," "imbecile," "idiot," and a great many more, all sporting in a most delightful anarchy of application. Each investigator chose whatever he wanted and when

he wanted it. There was no agreement upon a clear-cut classification, because there was no common

scientific ground for diagnosis. Gradually one began to see that some kind of tests were needed to assist in properly placing an individual in a mental scale, or in diagnosing him as to his

human efficiency. At that time, American psychologists welcomed the efforts of the French savant, Binet, to establish an "intelligence scale" by which they thought human intelligence and mental efficiency could be appropriately measured.

It required some further time to convince research workers not only that these tests, or any "mental" tests, for that matter, were insufficient, but that the Binet scale, even as an intelligence scale, was inconclusive and misleading. That any attempt at diagnosing an individual as to his mental and social efficiency had to include facts of his personal history, his environment and social conditions and opportunities of his health and disease, etc. No sizing up of an individual case can be complete without a clear valuation of all