T Columbus Elementary School HE first volume of a small series of supplementary geography readers. It is a series of short stories about two boys who tour the United States to see the inside of many industries. They catch cod off the Maine coast, go down into a marble quarry in Vermont, work as breaker boys in a Pennsylvania coal mine, visit an oyster farm in Chesapeake Bay, pick cotton in Georgia, watch the harvest of oranges in Florida, learn of rice growing in Louisiana, see sulphur mined in Texas, drill for oil in Oklahoma, "ride fence" on the range, saw lumber in Washington, and enjoy many other like activities. There are 117 illustrations, most of them photographs. Price 96 cents Write for our catalog of Supplementary Readers THE MACMILLAN COMPANY New York Chicago Dallas EDUCATION Devoted to the Science, Art, Philosophy and Literature W. D. ARMENTROUT, DIRECTOR OF TRAINING SCHOOLS M GREELEY, COLORADO. COST of the teachers in our better high schools are educated in colleges and universities and these institutions deny the accrediting relation to high schools unless they employ teachers with degrees. This compels the pre-service high school teacher to secure four years of college. But what about the pre-service elementary school teacher? There is no requirement demanding that the elementary teacher shall secure a degree. The elementary teacher in comparison to the high school teacher has more pupils, less pay, and less preparation. Do parents care less about their child's training during the first eight years than the last four? Is there any reason why a boy or girl should have better prepared teachers when they enter high school than when they enter elementary school? What are the grounds for this distinction occurring sharply at the end of the eighth year or grade? One line of argument says a longer and better training has been demanded for teachers of the high school because there were fewer of them and a more rigid selection was therefore possible and natural. There appears to be no valid reason for believing that this is true. Secondary teachers are fewer than elementary teachers because the number of secondary pupils has been proportionally smaller. If the inference of better training were correct, it would hold good also between grammar grade teachers and primary teachers when the same relative difference in the number of children exists. The same line of reasoning might be used between teachers of the twelfth and those of the ninth grades. There seems to be no good reason why teachers should be better prepared for their work simply because the group is small. A second reason offered for the difference in the preparation of the elementary and high school teacher is that the work of the high school is advanced work and therefore requires advanced preparation; elementary instruction is elementary work and requires elementary preparation. But in what sense are studies elementary and higher? We must remember that elementary studies are elementary to human activity and not to our school years. In our colleges we find elementary calculus, elementary astronomy, elementary psychology and sociology, and elementary philosophy. We should recognize but one kind, and various degrees of education, the broad and narrow or, when looked at from the standpoint of time, the long course and the short one. The object of education is the same for every one whether he is in the elementary school, the high school, college or university; it is the conscious reorganizing of experience in order to shape it into the best possible tool to meet the present and anticipate the future. The teacher of reading and writing might think of her work as elementary, but the college or university can only do for us what the elementary school began doing-teach us to read. Every college teacher is doing the same thing that the ele mentary teacher is doing, namely, finding out whether his students can make for themselves meanings which they are challenged to make by the printed page. This is a process which cannot end when the student leaves the college, but one which he must continue as long as he lives. According to Moore, "Education is one and the same process in all grades of school, and that the activities which we learn to perform with the help and guidance of teachers are the very activities which we shall continue to perform until we die." Teachers are apt to take pride in the fact that they teach the so-called "higher" subjects. To pass from an elementary school position to the high school is rated as promotion among many teachers, likewise the passing from junior high to senior high school, and being given all senior classes instead of freshmen. As long as the situation requires that a teacher rise by changing his work, instead of capitalizing his experience and improving his work, little genuine progress toward professional efficiency can be realized. The historical development of elementary and secondary education explains much of our present distinction between elementary and high school teachers. Elementary and secondary education in America had distinctly different origins. Secondary education had its origin in the demands made by the colleges for preparatory schools. Naturally the work of these schools has been shaped by the college ideal. As the college changed, so the preparatory school changed. As the college took on more work it raised its admission standards and crowded more of its work back into the preparatory school. At the other end of the ladder stood the elementary school, at first satisfied merely with securing but a small degree of literacy; merely teaching children to read and write. Neither the Latin grammar school nor the academy nor the high school was at its origin regarded as the connecting link between the elementary school and the college. The relation was an after-thought which the university of Michigan did much to make effective. The secondary school in the beginning was the institution for the education of children from relatively the wealthy and cultured social groups while the 1 Moore, E. C., "What is Education?" great majority of the people were to receive their education in the "common" elementary school. Thus we see that the elementary school has had no higher institution to cling to for sanction of its aims, methods and programs. The result has been that elementary education remained until the middle of the 19th century informal, unsystematic, and voluntary in respect to both parents and community. Content and material of instruction in the elementary school was at first very meager and limited to the three R's. This naturally required very little preparation on the part of the teacher. Contrast the elementary school of today with that of even twenty years ago. The teacher in every grade has a broader and richer field and needs a larger vision. In the past the elementary schools were limited to the tools of learning, then came geography, language, music, history, nature study, civics, literature and hygiene. Now we are revising these studies, adapting them to the interests, abilities, and real needs of boys and girls and we are adding newer subjects such as industrial arts, general science and social science. We shall always find it necessary to teach the three R's in the elementary school, and in addition, we must use the material which is provided in science, literature, and history for the purpose of forming certain ideals and to give a new and meaningful significance to the facts of every-day living. And as we come to recognize more clearly the function of education in a democracy, we shall stress more and more that type of education which will explain the meaning and purposes of a democratic society and which will give larger opportunity for actual participation in the duties of citizenship, even while boys and girls are still enrolled in our elementary schools. It should be apparent to all that the professional preparation of it must not be determined by the traditional and narrow horizon of even ten or twenty years ago. Another argument not always stated but generally implied, is that the high school teacher must be better trained than the elementary teacher, for the high school teacher is a teacher of |