TEACHING AS A PROFESSION.

The position assumed by City Superintendent J. W. Anderson, on the question of recognizing all properly-earned teachers' certificates, will commend itself not only to teachers, but to the highest intelligence of the community. Practically, it is an argument in favor of a return to our former high State standard of certificating, and an obliteration of narrow local customs and jealousies.

Prof. Anderson's arguments are those consistently urged by the editor of the JOURBAL for ten years past.

All teachers, certainly, are agreed on the proposition that their occupation should take rank among the professions. That this may be done, there should obtain the same rules that prevail in the other professions. The doctor's diploma and the lawyer's license are prima facie evidences of fitness, for life, and are recognized wherever presented. In the eyes of the law, the various Boards of Education throughout the State are bodies of equal dignity and capacity; and it savors of pedantry and provincialism for one Board to set up its judgment and hold the certificates conferred within its jurisdiction to be of any greater value than those granted elsewhere.

A certificate once earned by fair examination should be for life, and valid everywhere. It is only through the recognition of this principle by teachers, and its universal adoption in the community, that teaching will grow into a profession.

In his advocacy of a broad policy of recognizing professional certificates, Superintendent Anderson makes the additional point, that if San Francisco takes the lead in accepting the certificates of other counties, the latter can but follow the same line of action. The scores of young teachers who yearly leave the city to find schools in the interior, will thus be saved the strain and anxiety of examination in every county where they may go.

It is to be hoped that the active initiative taken by the San Francisco Superintendent will command the approval and support of the educators of the State. If so, teaching may reasonably be counted on to assume a higher station among the professions than at present, and those who practice it may be regarded with more approbation and respect.

THE RESIDENCE OF TEACHERS.

There has been some discussion in the San Francisco Board of Education, recently, in regard to the passage of a rule requiring teachers to reside in this city. Director Rothschild very wisely and with much force, urged that the question of residence was not one for the Board to consider, that the ability and efficiency with which the daily school work were performed should be considered, and nothing else.

The Board came to the conclusion that this was the correct view of the situation, and by a vote of ten to two, decided that hereafter San Francisco teachers may reside where they wish, as long as they appear in good time at their places of work and do that work well.

THE PENSION BILL.

A bill to pension teachers who have had more than thirty years' experience in the schools of this State, has been introduced in the Senate by Senator Vrooman of Alameda. The principle of the bill is good; in its details there are some crudities and

errors.

We fear, however, that there is little or no chance for its passage, inexpensive as its provisions have been made. State Superintendent Hoitt has been active in urging action, but the pressure of other legislation is crowding this bill to the bottom of the list.

EDITORIAL NOTES.

The different school articles comprised under the head of EDUCATIONAL WORK AND THOUGHT in this number of the JOURNAL, will be found of practical benefit to every teacher in the daily work of the school-room. This is pre-eminently the practical department of the JOURNAL.

Written examinations for promotion have again been abolished in San Francisco. In principle, this is unquestionably correct; in practice, when recently tried for four or five years, it proved a failure. However, with the excellent supervision and inspection now prevailing in the Department, it may prove more successful.

The JOURNAL has again a permanent home in new and commodious quarters, at 209 GRANT AVENUE, Rooms 13 and 14. Here, it is proposed to make a sort of Educational headquarters for the teachers and superintendents of the State. All the leading educational periodicals of the world will be kept ou file, as well as the magazines of the country and our local Pacific Coast papers. We cordially invite our city teachers, as well as those from abroad, to make our office their frequent abiding place.

Among the measures before the Legislature is a bill to establish a Normal School in the northern section of the State. The Act is a good one and should pass. Unfortunately, there is such a feeling of rivalry between Tehama and Shasta counties, each of which wishes the new institution, that the bill may again come to naught, as it has on several previous occasions. The State needs an additional Normal School; it can afford to support one or two more; it will be real economy to establish this one for Northern California.

The Institute season has fairly opened, some counties having already held their annual gatherings. Kern County Institute commenced February 23d-Alfred Herrall, County Superintendent, at Bakersfield. Stanislaus County Teachers' Institute commenced February 21st, at Modesto. Shasta County Teachers' Institute commences March 9th. San Bernardino and San Diego Counties are expecting to hold a joint Teachers' Institute at Riverside, commencing April 18th. Nevada County Teachers' Institute will take place on the 4th, 5th and 6th of May.

The introduction of a thorough system of inspection has given the San Francisco School Department a shaking up and an awakening that has been needed for many a long year. And the most pleasant feature of the new work is that there is not a single competent principal or teacher but feels benefited by the copious hints and suggestions of the Inspectors and their admirable model lessons in the class-rooms. The object of this inspection work, and what it is certain to accomplish is, not as a few weak teachers suppose, to lift them out of the department, but to lift them up to a higher understanding of their duties, and a clearer conception of the best methods for their performance.

It is reported, on apparently the bsst authority, that with the new year in July, President Holden's connection with the State University will terminate, and that he will

devote himself exclusively to the Directorship of the Lick Observatory. This action is much to be deplored. After numberless changes, the one man for the head of our University was found in Professor Holden. During his short time, intelligent activity marked its operations in all its colleges and departments, and its influence radiated in a stimulating flood of light on the lower schools of the State. This renaisance has been the work of Professor E. S. Holden; if he severs his connection with the University, what probabilities are there that other shoulders will be found broad enough to bear his mantle?

An Eastern contemporary intimates that it is high time California teachers found out that training in parsing and analysis is not teaching language. If the constant discussion going on in these educational journals, on grammatical quibbles, are any indication, then California still leads in this as in other features of our educational system. We pay teachers better wages, spend less money on text-books, change the latter more rarely, have more uniform courses of study, and approach more closely to giving a professional rank to teaching than any other State in the Union. There are plenty of crudities and defects, joints enough in our educational armor, but these are common to the schools of the country at large, not peculiar to ourselves. The United States is a nation; and the quicker we have a uniform school system, as well as uniform marriage, divorce, bankruptcy and other acts, the better.

Senator Stanford is full of his great scheme to found a University that shall be a credit to the Pacific Coast, and in time rival the older institutions of learning in the Eastern States. "I shouldn't be here," he said to me to-day; "I should be at home, looking after the interests of the new University myself. I am getting on in years, and I should like to see my plans carried out, in part at least, before I am called away. Were it not for the fact that the California Legislature is Democratic, I should have been tempted long ago to resign my seat in the Senate and go home. The building plans have not been decided on as yet, but they are under consideration. Olmstead, the landscape gardener, is preparing a model of the grounds. This, when finished, will determine in a measure the character of the buildings. My idea is to have low, one-story structures connecting with one another by arcades and covering a liberal area." General Francis A. Walker, who, report says, may be President, has been here from the East, and has looked over the site at Palo Alto, in Santa Clara County. He is now in Europe, examining University work there.

In the February number of the JOURNAL was given an extract from Governor Bartlett's inaugural address, in which he takes strong grounds in favor of the introduction of industrial training in our common schools. The question is at present being discussed, pro and con., by all the educational journals of the country-the sentiment being about equally divided. In an able article on the subject, one of our exchanges admits that nobody doubts the importance of industrial training, but, at the same time, it thinks that it should not become a part of the general school work. In its argument against industrial training in schools it says: "There seems to be no reason why the teacher should leave his regular work, and necessarily neglect it, to do in a very imperfect way what can be done very much better outside the school and without interfering with the mental education of the child. And under mental training, of course, we include the moral training which, after all, is mind-culture, unless we claim that the sensibilities and the will are extraneous to the mind. We believe in physical education, but even this should not be made paramount to the training of the mind, and it should in no way be permitted to interfere with the latter."

I observe in this morning's Chronicle, March 19, 1887, a statement to the effect that the San Francisco Board of Education "will probably provide a fund of $2000 to purchase books for indigent children in the public schools. Permit me to suggest a few considerations in favor of a plan that should do away with this odious distinction between the children of well-to-do parents and the children of the hopelessly poor, this cruel requirement of confessed pauperism as the only condition on which thousands of children can receive the boon of education. The plan has been abundantly tested and found to work out most beneficent results. It is this: Let the Legislature compel Boards of Education and school authorities to furnish all text-books and supplies, loaning them gratuitously to every child in the public schools. I would base the argument, not on any right of the child or parent, though such ground might be sufficient; but on the right and duty of the State to provide for its own security.

It is to be assumed as a postulate that such instruction as the public schools impart is of vital importance to a community or a nation. Children and youth in our country must be trained up to an intelligent citizenship or there can be no assurance of either safe or honorable management of public affairs. The State must do this training or it will not be done at all, and that is just what the public schools are for. They are the only possible instrumentality through which the government can act in the accomplishment of this vital result. It needs to be reiterated that there is no other way in which the State can take the child by the hand and lead him in the paths of integrity, intelligence and honor.

Now, it is demonstrated that in all human probability the mere cost of text-books keeps many thousands of boys and girls of school age out of the California public schools a part or the whole of the time when they ought to be there.

When the rate bill, or tuition tax, amounting to two and a half dollars per pupil, which is about the average cost of text-books in the primary and grammar schools, was abolished in California by the Legislature in 1866, the consequent increase in the attendance at school was six and one-half per cent. That is to say, one-sixteenth of the pupils of school age had previously been deprived of instruction by the slight tax of two and a half dollars per year. [See Swett's History of the Public School System of California, page 44.] In 1869 I had the good fortune, as Chairman of the House Committee on Education in the Legislature, to assist in abolishing a similar rate bill in Connecticut. It amounted to between two and three dollars. The result of the abolition was an immediate increase of six thousand in the public schools of Connecticut the first year and an additional five thousand the second year, though there was no perceptible increase in the general population of the State. [See reports of Secretary Northrop and the Connecticut Board of Education for 1869, 1870, 1871.] In the State of New York a similar rate bill in 1867 amounted to two dollars and seventy-five cents. That year it was abolished by the Legislature. The increase in attendance in the public schools of that great State, in consequence of the cessation of this slight tuition tax, was declared by Hon. S. B. Woolworth, Secretary of the Regents, in a letter to me dated Albany, December 24, 1878, to be twenty-two thousand pupils the first year, fifty thousand the second year and seventy-eight thousand the third year! In 1884 it was my privilege to engage actively in securing the passage of an Act by the Legislature of Massachusetts whereby all text books and school supplies were to be purchased by the proper school authorities in towns and cities and loaned to the pupils without charge in all the public schools. There is hardly any act of my life on which I look back with more satisfaction than the preparation and publication of a pamphlet advocating the gratuitous supply of text-books which was placed in the hands of the Senators and Representatives. What was the result of the legislation? I quote in answer from an article by Hon. J. M. Dickinson, Secretary of the State Board of Education of Massachusetts, in the last September number of the magazine entitled Education: "First. The new mode of furnishing the means for school work has increased the school attendance from five to ten per cent. In the high schools [of which there are two hundred and thirty in Massachusetts!] there has been a much larger increase, amounting in one town reported to twenty per cent. Secondly. The children of poor parents are kept longer in school by the use of the free books, as by the aid thus furnished they are enabled to enter upon a high school course of study."

Such facts are conclusive. They show that so slight a tax as the