because he chased them," she explained. As this duty was performed two children came to Mary, who was Mayor of Boxtown, one to ask if he could have a new box for a railroad station for the village, and another to ask if the Mayor thought it was fair for a group of children to put Joseph out of their house just because he did not want to have a door cut between

the two rooms.

During the first period of the morning, termed practice time, Mary made out a list of words of five letters for the game of Foot Ball Spelling invented by Robert. Words of five letters spelled correctly permit the player to advance five steps towards the goal. She also helped Jane to practice and check off the table of 4's, as it requires three checkings before a table is put aside as finished. In the meantime the banker and storekeeper balanced accounts and announced that the store and bank would be open tomorrow. It was then reported that the third group were working behind closed doors as they were making scenery for their play and they wished to surprise the school; also that the second group were out in the orchard in their Indian houses. This gave the oldest group of nine and eight year old boys an opportunity to practice some acrobatic feats for their circus.

As the fourth group of girls served the morning lunch of milk and crackers, they told of the wonderful costumes the youngest group of four year old children were making. The barn had been renovated and was to be dedicated this morning, so all the activities of the school were in preparation for this event.

During the playtime of half an hour outof-doors, Mary was in her office in Boxtown making out checks for lumber, wallpaper or roofing paper, while individuals or groups were working on their houses,

picking up winter pears, playing games or looking for moles.

During the next period Mary and her group worked on their Hallowe'en poems (original) which were to be recited in strange tones while the speakers were hidden so that others could have the fun of guessing to whom these strange voices belonged. This group were reminded that they must work quietly as the little children must have a very good rest time today, for they would have so much fun at the barn frolic.

Soon after eleven o'clock the procession for the barn dedication was formed, headed by the drum corps. Each group contributed its share for these ceremonies. The little children marched around the barn in costumes of their own making, a queen and her train bearers, Hallowe'en sprites, and fairies; the second group gave a Brownie Play; the third group gave a play in a most realistic way, for the barn stage with stalls for dressing rooms, seemed to encourage the dramatic spirit; the fourth group gave their circus, a vaudeville of fun and acrobatic efforts and the reciting of their Hallowe'en poems; and at the close of the performance the girls of this group gave to each of the teachers and the help of the school a dust cloth of their own hemming.

During the noontime, while the eight waiters were setting the tables for the rest of the children, it was rumored that the grape marmalade which Helen and Lucy had made was to be served for lunch. After lunch the children gathered around the piano for fifteen minutes of community singing before rolling themselves in their blankets for a forty-minute rest and sleep out on the porches. Soon after this rest time all were busy for a short reading or story time.

The last period of the day was experi

mental time when all the children of the school scattered to different parts of the building or the orchard, some to the brush pile to saw fly-wheels or sticks for their pump drills for their weekly work in wood craft, some to the shop to make violins for the weekly work in music appreciation, or to make their own toys, playhouses, boats, furniture or benches, and nail-boxes for the school; others exploring over the orchard bringing in wonderful spider nests and spiders with "Indian designs in their backs;" some working on clay bowls for their bulbs being grown for the Children's Hospital (the James Whitcomb Riley Hospital).

As the children left this afternoon they were planning the costumes they would make at home for Mary's Barn Party.

Many members of the Progressive Education Association heard with deep regret last spring that the School of Organic Education at Fairhope so heroically supported by Mrs. Johnson for seventeen years would have to close for lack of adequate financial backing. Mrs. Johnson's many friends who have not already heard the good news will rejoice with us in the following information which has come to us:

"In August, when word had come from Mrs. Johnson that the school could not open this year, a number of residents of Fairhope met to consider ways and means of continuing the school.

"Mr. Paul Nichols, Principal of the High School, pointed out that if the school was to continue it would be particularly important for the High School to go on without interruption, in order to be able to continue its accredited stand with the state authorities. He offered to serve for one

year without salary, in order to effect this continuance, and he thought it would be possible to find two or three other teachers to do the same.

"Just at this time word was received from Mrs. Johnson that she had received and accepted an offer of $10,000 as a loan without interest, but with the school buildings as security. This made it possible to pay all the debts of the past year and to have a small surplus ahead for the new year.

"The residents and visitors to Fairhope, have always responded to the calls for support of the school. Efforts are now being made to crystallize their interest. The above-mentioned group of residents which informally became known as the Committee for the Continuance of the School of Organic Education, was, formally organized as the Fairhope School Community, 'to work for the development and sustaining of the School of Organic Education as a permanent institution, and to serve as a social center for those residents and visitors to Fairhope.'

"In spite of the fact that the school was not expected to open and that it opened half a month later than usual, it has now one hundred and thirty pupils and a teachers' training class of about ten, as against one hundred and sixty pupils and only four in the training class last year.

"Mrs. Johnson's lecture tour in California has been very successful; great interest in her idea has been shown and she has been asked to extend her tour to the southern part of the state. This she will do. Her tour was, as you know, undertaken under the auspices of the La Vero Institute of San Francisco. She has lectured in the hall of that institution, and also at the University of California, the Leland Stanford University, Mills College for Girls, and the State Normal School."

THE DISCOVERY OF INTELLIGENCE. By Joseph K. Hart. The Century Company. Pp. 431 (xvi).

This is a mind-opening book. It is so from the start-off; for it begins with a title which promises something vigorously new. In a moment of academic accommodation, Dr. Hart might have named his book a "History of Education"-for that is what, in a high sense, it really is. In that case he would have induced all the regulation shudders which greet such a title. What doleful things most histories of education are! Written from the outside-accounts of institutions, procedures, pedagogic theories, methods, and so on. Dr. Hart turns the whole process outside in. He asks what we human beings have been driving at throughout history. Education, he sees, is not and never has been a kind of institutionalized thing apart from the major business of life. It is life formulating and perpetuating its own basic desires. Hence, if we know the educational outlook of a people, we know what that people fundamentally demand of life; as, in like manner, if we know what a people fundamentally demand of life, we can predict their educational outlook. For this reason the study of the history of education should be, in truth, the study of the history of civilization; but more particularly, the study of civilization at its inmost, its philosophy.

There follows from this point of approach the most striking characteristic of the book: it is a re-writing of the history of philosophy, a re-writing, however, on

the assumption that philosophy has actually functioned, and still does function, in social history. This, of course, is disturbingly unusual. The history of philosophy, among academic teachers, has long since been conveniently standardized into the study of successive metaphysical systems. These systems are seldom known in their social setting and effect. Accordingly, they have come to be like the butterflies we find in our collections, dead things stuck on pins, or like those pale laboratory fish which we preserve pickled in alcohol. The result is that, on the one hand, philosophy has lost a large measure of its vitality; while on the other hand, busy, practical folk, like teachers and scientists, have lost philosophy.

Dr. Hart restores historic philosophies to their living form as powerful systems of ideas tending to organize and direct the successive life of civilization. So Socrates is a civilizational hero. So Plato and Aristotle, each in his time, sets the pace for the intellectual and social enterprises of man. So Rome is the expression of a philosophy of life. So mediaevalism is a philosophy. One sees, in short, that one cannot really understand what the history of education is about until one sees what the basic ideas have been which have fought each other or supplemented each other throughout the successive periods of man's life on earth.

Here again Dr. Hart is mind-opening; for with the vast jungle of history to explore, he quite stubbornly refuses to suffer the fate of so many of our historians of

civilization and education-to become a pathetic, lost babe in the woods. He keeps his trail blazed. He knows whence he has come and whither he goes. So that when the last chapter is reached, the reader is not left in a muddle, but can see quite clearly the central significance of the historic process.

That central significance, according to the author, lies in the age-long struggle between the "folkway" and the "freedom" habits of mind. The battle of civilization has been to win the liberty to make discoveries; the liberty, in short, to be truly and effectively intelligent. It is this liberty which the new education is seeking for itself and for its children. Opposing it is the age-old traditionalism which clutters up our curricula and stultifies so many of our pedagogic procedures. In education today, in brief, there is being fought precisely the same battle between the creative and the acceptive spirit as has been waged throughout human history.

It is this "clue" idea which gives us new angles of approach to the historic heroes of philosophy and education. Plato, for example, descends somewhat from his exalted pedestal; Aristotle is made a good deal less the majestic father of logic; mediaevalism is estimated in a significantly new way; Luther gets a gentle setback; the spirit of the modern age receives a suggestively new interpretation. Also, new significances attach to such pedagogic heroes as Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Herbert, etc.

To those in the new movement of education who not only wish to know exactly where they belong in the historic process but who also wish, through historic orientation, to get a better grip of their presentday problems, Dr. Hart's book is finely illuminating. In fact it may be regarded as a necessary philosophic "apologia" for what many are today attempting to

achieve in education. It is written with an honest straightforwardness and enough dramatic charm to hold the reader to the end. Many of its contentions will, of course, be disputed; but it will not be denied an estimable rank for originality of insight, vigor of presentation, and suggestive application to present-day problems in education. H. A. OVERSTREET.

EXPERIMENTAL PRACTICE IN THE CITY AND COUNTRY SCHOOL. By Caroline Pratt. E. P. Dutton and Company. Pp. 301-(v-viii). Miss Pratt's book is bound to be eagerly read by progressive educators everywhere. It represents a first statement of aims and practices by a pioneer in experimental schooling, who for ten years has been saying little but achieving much in a relatively unexplored field. It is not a final report. Miss Pratt offers her statement of underlying principles and their application in the hope of inviting discussion and provoking thought about what is fundamental in education.

That Miss Pratt has come upon many of these fundamentals, most of us will not be inclined to question. Her threefold thesis that adaptable materials are essential to the creative development of every child, that children must have a strong healthy basis in motor life and first-hand experiences to build on, and that children learn most readily from experiences based on the here and now-these principles fortunately are becoming increasingly recognized as basic to all educational reform. In few centers, however, have they been so skilfully integrated and fruitfully applied to each stage of the child's development.

One reason for Miss Pratt's success perhaps lies in her insistence upon John Dewey's maxim that training is one thing and

education another. In the early days of her school, when the parents discovered that their children were not taught to read and write at six, many withdrew their support. Now, however, parents are moving into the neighborhood each year in order that their children may have what has become widely recognized as of first importance in the opportunities offered by this new type of school. This is not to say that the children do not acquire the ordinary "skills." In Miss Wright's record are tables giving the results of certain standard tests in reading and spelling which showed that the majority of the group of seven year olds far outran the requirements for their age, and there are many evidences that the children gained an unusual amount of information in the fields of history, geography and science."But," says Miss Pratt," these tests prove Miss Wright's ability to train these youngsters in the specific things they will have to know in carrying out a future program...They have little to do with the education of the children . . . A person is trained by another, but he educates himself. If he could once get that idea into the consciousness of our parenthood and our teacherhood, the revolution in our school procedure would be immediate."'

So it would be, provided that children are surrounded with materials which they can adapt to their purposes. Education in a room containing nothing but desks is manifestly an impossibility. It takes a long page of tightly packed type just to list the various materials used in the classroom of Miss Wright's seven year old group. The list of books which follows is equally long: books which probably never come into the ordinary schoolroom, dedicated though it be to paper learning and paper facts.

There is little doubt, according to Miss Pratt, that certain periods of development suffer more intrinsically from the training

method than others. "Very young children, let us say up to six, seven or eight, during which years a change of interest takes place, cannot stand up under it. They lose the play spirit and become more or less autonomous." (Who has not remarked the passive and rigid little automatons in an ordinary second or third grade?) Later, however, children not only submit to training but are apt to put themselves through their own courses of training when they have technical difficulties. "The key to the problem of when specific training may be suggested lies in whether or not the individual child or student can see its purpose. But waiting for this time does not mean that the gaining of technique is being put off. Children with strong motor drives, with keen desires, with information, brought together with suitable materials are getting technique in many directions. ...

This is amply borne out in Miss Wright's record, a vivid and enlightening account kept month by month for an entire school year. We watch a play city emerge-the central activity for the year-a city whose completeness of detail reflects their close observation of the real city surrounding the children; we follow the work in story telling, in shop, in cooking, in drawing and painting, science and sewing; we live over the expeditions to markets, and docks, and ferries, to the Woolworth Tower and Brooklyn Bridge, re-told in many lovely forms by the children; we witness plays, crude and fragmentary in part, but here and there full of real imaginative power and helped out by music of the children's own making; we see language, number, spelling and reading being mastered by methods, little tried hitherto, but intrinsically sound. We see all this and we feel with Miss Pratt that these children are "departing from the dictative, the imitative, and striking out into new and interesting