instruction to his poor visitors. Now, in 1684, eight years before Francke settled in Halle, St. John Baptist De La Salle had done in Rheims all that Francke did later in the Saxon city on the Saale. The Saint gave away a large fortune and devoted himself by vow for a long lifetime to the arduous labors of schoolmaster. Francke deprived himself of comforts to administer to the necessities of the poor; St. John Baptist De La Salle had eight years previously deprived himself of even necessaries for the relief of the indigent, and that he might, in the interests of the most needy class of society, found a teaching congregation on the enduring cornerstone of evangelical poverty. Francke did something for the people of one small town; St. De La Salle founded schools in Rheims, Paris, Rouen, Marseilles, Grenoble and Rome, and moreover, he instituted a society of teachers that has long since spread the world over. With all these differences of priority, excellence and universality in favor of St. John Baptist De La Salle, he gets no mention whatsoever from Mr. Painter in "A History of Education;" whereas an imitator, Francke, is credited with methods that had been devised and publicly followed years before by the founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools.

Here we have a suppression of important facts and an undue prominence given to such as are merely secondary-a distortion all the stranger as it proceeds from a presumably enlightened source. If such wrongs can not be entirely righted, it were well that they should at least be exposed. The publication of a Catholic source book of the history of education would do much to eradicate error, to advance the cause of truth, and to bring to light hitherto unrecognized contributions to the developing science of pedagogy.

Clason Point Military Academy,

West Chester, New York City.

JOHN J. TRACY.

SURVEY OF THE FIELD

If there is any one lesson taught by the history of civilization in such a manner as to leave no room for doubt or misinterpretation it is that reckless and wholesale experimenting in the field of education should not be permitted. Of course, progress in education, as in other fields, demands that experiment be employed to test the validity of theory, but the experiment must be conducted with all the care which the gravity of the situation demands; and it should be limited to as small a number of children as the nature of the case will permit, for under the best of circumstances the happiness and wellbeing of the children experimented upon are at stake, and where no restrictions are placed upon the numbers the stability of the social order may easily be undermined. Whether it be due to the intoxication caused by our incalculable natural resources or to the fact that our

RECKLESS

population, upon whom ultimately rests the responsibility of government, is made EDUCATIONAL up largely of the millions who have been EXPERIMENTS pushed out of older countries and have not yet had time in this country to develop respect for authority or to set up sane standards, it remains true that we have been indulging in educational experiments with a recklessness and on a scale that have never before been attempted by any civilized nation. However, if not in justification, at least in palliation of this procedure, it should be borne in mind that our situation in this country is characterized by many special difficulties. Our population is heterogeneous to the last extreme, our cities are the meeting-ground of the nations of the earth. Out of the babel of tongues, the conflict of national customs and the clash of divergent religious beliefs the schools are called upon to develop a homoge

neous nation. The history of education provides no adequate solution for the difficulties which confront us, and hence it was to be expected that educators would resort to theory and experiment for light in the shaping of our policies. It is not, therefore, the fact of experimenting, but its extent and recklessness, that is open to objection.

AND THE

Our democratic form of government rests on the intelligence of the individual citizen and hence it is most natural that we should adopt the policy of COMPROMISE affording to each child born to the nation an opportunity of obtaining at least an eleLITTLE RED mentary education. Since English is the SCHOOLHOUSE language of the country, all of our children should be taught its use; otherwise, they will not be able to take an intelligent part in the life of the commonwealth. Under these circumstances, the common school in which the children of every nationality should meet on an equal footing to study our language and to learn the duties of citizenship seemed to be demanded. Prudence might have suggested the advisability of testing the plan thoroughly on a small scale, but with our characteristic impatience of delays we straightway decreed that the common school should be called into existence in every village and hamlet in the land. And once this decree of the sovereign people went forth, it were high treason to question its wisdom. The fact that it was a compromise begotten of dire necessity was soon forgotten, and the little red schoolhouse was enthroned on the altar of the nation.

In several of the countries of Europe the children are bi-lingual or multi-lingual, but in the common schools of this country the children acquire a very questionable mastery of English alone. We OPPORTUNITY cannot teach all the foreign languages, and as one nationality has as good a right as another to have its language taught, if any language

MISSING AN

other than English is to find a place in the curriculum, we compromise by teaching English alone and straightway convince ourselves that this is the best conceivable system and look down with pity on the ignorance of poor benighted foreigners, who grow up with the easy use of several languages. Nor are we concerned with the comments sometimes passed upon us by students of education who point out the wonderful opportunity for learning the various languages afforded our children through the cosmopolitan character of our school population, and the incomprehensible neglect of our natural resources in this direction by those who are responsible for our educational system.

HASTY

Again, we are so anxious to make patriots or ward politicians in the shortest possible time out of the multitudes who annually reach our shores in search of gold that we cannot wait for our AMERICANIZATION customs to solidify or for our traditions to take root in the lives of their children. We deem it our chief duty to remove from the children of our immigrant population all trace of the national customs and family traditions that for countless generations served in guiding the footsteps of their forefathers through the formative period of childhood and youth to secure manhood. That the children lose their respect for authority and their reverence for parents does not seem to concern us. Since the education which we give our children in the public schools usually results in depriving them of virtues that were long held to be necessary to the wholesome development of their characters, we STRANGE immediately conclude that we have made another VIRTUES great discovery. What was formerly supposed

to be virtue is now seen to be vice, and what many reactionaries and old fogies believed to be vice, we now know to be virtues. Mr. LaRue, former Superintendent of Schools in Augusta, Maine, assures us that "so-called irreverence, disobedience, and impudence are

but the first crude expressions of a fiery, straightforward, independent nature-something to thank God for, not to wail over.

A FATAL

In the matter of religion, as in that of language and national customs, we proceeded without hesitation. It was apparent that the various forms of religion which counted their adherents among COMPROMISE Our citizens could not all be taught in the school. Horace Mann found the remedy in banishing religion from the school and leaving the religious instruction of the children to the churches. It is true that the Catholics and the Lutherans protested, but their protest went unheeded. They built and supported their own schools so that religion might be developed in the hearts of their children and enthroned as the guardian of morals and the saving influence in forming the characters of our future citizens. The proposal of the Catholics and Lutherans to have denominational schools supported out of the public funds met with little favor among the denominations that feared the Catholic Church, through her teaching orders, would thus gain an undue advantage. While it was suspected that the banishing of religious instruction from the schools might weaken the religious life of the nation, it was thought better to compromise, even at this cost; if they could not have the whole child, like the false claimant before the throne of Solomon, they demanded their half, and as a consequence religion died in the hearts of the children.

Seventy years of this experiment have resulted in emptying our churches and in filling our prisons. We are not daunted by the fact that during the last decade GLORYING We averaged 147 felonious murders per million IN OUR per annum, as against 3 in Canada, and 14 as the highest record in Europe. We have more divorces in a year than all the rest of the civilized world. Our carelessness of human life permits an

SHAME

*Daniel Wolford LaRue, The Church and the Public Schools, The Educational Review, May, 1909.