to constitute a new book. The work has been in active preparation for many years by a large staff of experts, assisted by the contribution of eminent specialists, under the general supervision of Dr. W. T. Harris, recent U. S. Commissioner of Education. The number of words and phrases defined has been greatly increased, mainly from the fresh coinage of recent years, both in popular speech and in the various arts and sciences. The revival of early English studies is recognized by such an inclusion of obsolete words as to give a key to English literature from its earliest period. The little words in the vocabulary are more than doubled in comparison with the old International, now exceeding 400,000. The number of illustrations is increased to over 6000. The book contains more than 2700 pages. By ingenious methods of typography and arrangement, the increased amount of matter is now contained in a single volume, not perceptibly larger than its predecessor and no less convenient for the hand and eye. The Twenty-Second Educational Conference of Academies and High Schools in relations with the University of Chicago, has an interesting program for the two days in which it is in session, Friday and Saturday, November 19 and 20. On Friday, at 2:30, in Haskell Assembly Hall, Professor Walter Sargent, of the University of Chicago, makes an address on "The Place of Manual Arts in the Secondary Schools". Lester Bartlett Jones on "Music appreciation versus Practice in Secondary Schools." At 10 a. m. on Saturday, the General Conference will be held in Mandel Hall. Dr. Ella Flagg Young, Superintendent of Schools, will⚫ speak on "The Public High School-its Principal and its Teachers," and an address will be given by Professor Charles H. Judd, Director of the School of Education, the University of Chicago, whose topic is "The Science of Education." These addresses will be of the utmost importance and there should be a large attendance of public school teachers. A new magazine is to enter the educational field. It is to be known as the Journal of Educational Psychology and will be issued monthly except July and August. The first number will appear in January, 1910. The advance pamphlet states that its purpose is the scientific study of education; that experimental psychology is its central theme, and that mental development of the child both normal and abnormal, child psychology and hygiene, the social aspects of education, the treatment of educational statistics, and their bearing on school problems, are topics which fall within its scope. A second aim will be the encouragement of scientific research in the field of education, and a number of research articles will appear in early numbers. A third aim of the Journal will be the presentation of detailed accounts of work in educational psychology carried on in Europe. The list of contributors contains many wellknown names, among them are: E. B. Titchener, J. R. Angell, Hugo Muensterberg, M. V. O'Shea, E. L. Thorndike. In order that the Journal may reach as wide a reading public as possible, the Williams & Wilkins Publishing Company, 2427-2429 York Road, Baltimore, Md., have placed the subscription price at $1.50 per year. Editorial The general public as well as educators have received with approval the announcement of the introduction into the eighth grade of the elementary schools of the new course on Chicago. The public interest was due, no doubt, to the general feeling that the pupils of the city schools ought to know their own city and that they could not readily gain such a knowledge without systematic study under competent guidance. The teacher and educator while sharing the attitude of the public experiences perhaps two additional elements of interest. On the one hand, there is the feeling that the algebra in the eighth grade was there not because of its value just there, but as a preparation for high school algebra, a getting-ready for something else. Mere getting ready is about played out in educational practice. Whatever algebra belongs legitimately in the elementary schools should be brought in as a matter of course with the mathematical work of the schools. On the other hand, there is the positive desire to have the experiment tried on a large scale for the possible educational results. The whole modern movement in education is based on the conviction that the liberalizing and humanizing of the children must begin with the facts and problems of their experience and must lead them into standpoints and methods of work that will give them control over and proper valuation of their experience. Modern geography passed through one of its great creative and significant periods under the guidance of Richter who was inspired by just this educational conviction. We are likely to hear a great deal in the near future about experimental education. We have been talking about it for some time and a fair amount of good work has been done and reported upon. The more definite and specific knowledge that can be made available for teachers, the better will be their method and the more certain their results. Meantime, it may be well to remind ourselves of the nature, purpose, and bearing of these experiments, so that we may not feel that our work is rendered out-of-date because not based on the latest technical investigations. The first and fundamental requisite for success as a teacher is just the experimental attitude towards one's work, the ability to stand over against a method and technique that one has already acquired and found fairly adequate, the readiness to seek how they may be improved. This attitude means personal growth and increasing efficiency. The results of the special investigations are in the nature of refinements on processes already fairly well understood. These results are not so inaccessible that the average teacher may not appropriate them. But the experimental attitude must be there first, and this is attainable by all. W. B. O. The Educational Bi-Monthly FEBRUARY 1, 1910 T The Function and Development of the T MAY be well to state at the outset, with what must be a fragmentary treatment of so complex a subject, the two main points which are taken for granted in the presentation: first, that in any consideration of the teaching of the several forms of art, there is recognized the close relation which. exists between play and art; secondly, that simplification of the art studies in education means a readjustment according to the interpretation of life as a process of growth, development-such a conception of the evolutionary view-point as conceives of past, as well as present life, as a living, expressing, functioning form. Play in education is understood as a certain mental attitude on the part of the player, the doer. The effectiveness with which any result is obtained is due, in a large measure, to the manner in which the child relates himself to the thing to be done. In the action between the child and the world, this mental condition must be attained before the factors on both sides dissolve, to blend or fuse into a new whole. This conception of play has been brought out by the emphasis placed on the study of growth, and this attitude, called playful in quality, is found to exist when and where growth seems marked and continuous. As a factor in education, then, it stands for a demand for more rather than less effective results. The idea of playful activity presents such a changed view-point from the older conception of play and work as two separate parts of the total life that it is not surprising to find a good deal of confusion as to what it involves, in the minds of the several groups of people most closely allied in education. On the part of those responsible for the investment of public funds, there is the demand for a more effective .160 EDUCATIONAL BI-MONTHLY showing in the product, while with those directly engaged in teaching there is a very evident and increasing desire to conform more closely to the child's ability to do and become. The difference in emphasis, at times, becomes marked and distressing. The public accuses the teacher of introducing material not essential to the product of the school, and the teacher feels that she is driven, in spite of her effort to work in accord with the child's power, to force mechanical, and consequently, external results into the product. Here are really two sides of the same problem. The public has realized that effective co-operation in the life of the world depends upon the degree to which the individual can grapple with the problems about him as seen and felt by himself; on the other hand, the teacher is being forced to see that the material which the child must absorb for his growth is, after all, the stuff of daily work and effort. So while this reading of life as growth has resulted in a different understanding of the two great factors-the evolving individual and the evolving products of labor and effort -as yet the two groups of people have not seen the two sides of the problem with equal emphasis, nor even as parts of the same thing. On the one hand, we make a great point of training our teachers in child psychology. There is as great a change of view-point necessary in our study of the subjects of the curriculum, the occupations and arts of life. These, too, must be conceived of in a dynamic conditionas fluid and capable of evolving; as interpretations of life; as symbols, tools, by which, intellectually, the present forces are manipulated and constructed. Tools, which when found in the past are signs pointing toward the future, but never static, mummied forms preserved out of a dead past. The working world, on the other hand, has been forced to change its attitude toward the occupations, and the effectiveness with which modern industry and effort attain the ends set leads even an idle observer to recognize a play interest in much of the work of the world. But with a public still holding a medieval psychology, and with those in education trained yet in a medieval attitude toward labor, industry, culture, it is not strange that the problem of readjusting our education to affect both producer and product for the better seems one which requires concentrated effort on the part of a people democratically governed. Growth as an end, then, is also a criterion of the products of life, for obviously, those products are most worth while which promote development to the greatest extent. But such a reading, while it accents anew the importance of the occupations of life, gives us a changed basis for the values placed on them. This is where more definite restating and direction seem necessary in the present struggle of the arts in the educational curriculum. It is through education that industry and occupation may be controlled for the future growth of the race instead of the present industrial control of development. The great effort that is being made to discover more clearly the terms in the process of development is significant of the focusing of attention on the changed ideal. In connection with this more definite analysis of growth, there is also found the center from which issues the controlling and relating power of the various factors of life. As has been noted above, while the teacher has come to consider individual development as a continuous remaking, and therefore a living process, she still sees the curriculum as static. To study the rearrangement or adaptation of any special group of subjects necessitates the power to conceive of the relations existing between the several forms, as well as to understand the subject as an outward form of an evolving thought. With such a difficult matter as the relating of the several arts to each other, and to the necessities. of life and living, what are the guiding signs for the working out of the problem? The periods of development have been stated again and again from the standpoint of the individual, seldom have they been given in terms which include subject as well as individual. During the time called early infancy, the child is mastering, in the sense that he is experimenting with, getting hold of, certain acts which give him a partial acquaintance with, a kind of speaking knowledge of, many things. These activities become further controlled and directed through the repetition of his experiences with things about him. All of these acts "cash in" to *Chicago University Extension Syllabi, No. 87. "Educational Psychology."-John Dewey. |