individual for citizenship, for life in institutions and for some form of productive participation in present social activities; in a word, that one must learn to serve himself by serving others.

CURRENT EDUCATIONAL TENDENCIES.

- A more profit

able and more concrete summary of the past can be made in terms of present tendencies. Most evident of all to the teacher are the many changes now being made in the curricu lum, in the attempt to make it expressive of present social activities and aspirations. Such changes are chiefly an outgrowth of the sociological tendency. Following this there is the effort toward making educational method and the procedure of instruction more definite, more scientific, and more universally followed. This requires the further preliminary training of teachers and continuous professional study by the teacher and oversight by the supervisor throughout the teaching experience. This, above all, is the result of the psychological tendency. Connected with this change is the correlated tendency to closer articulation of subjects within the curriculum and of the various types of schools within the system. This is a result of the recognition of the significance of education as a social process, of the more scientific character of schoolroom work, and of the more general attention to administration and the perfection of institutions. Hence there is at present a combination of psychological, scientific, and sociological influences.

The growing centralization in school administration and the more thorough and scientific school supervision are the outcome of new economic conditions bringing about centralization in all lines of social activities and a specialization in all lines of work. The latest phase of this tendency to specialization is revealed in all the professions, among them that of teaching. This results in another tendency, - the recognition of teaching as a vocation and as a profession

with higher and more definitely recognized standards. This recognition depends primarily upon two conditions; namely, the demands for higher qualifications by those who employ teachers, and the incorporation of instruction in education and training in teaching into the professional work and cultural investigations of higher institutions of learning.

One of the present tendencies gives rise to, as well as solves, an important educational problem. The complete secularization of schools has led to the complete exclusion of religious elements in public education, and the very general exclusion of the study or even the use of the Bible and all religious literature. Thus the material that a few generations ago furnished the sole content of elementary education is now entirely excluded and a problem of very great importancethat of religious education-is presented. Little or no attempt at solution is being made and little interest aroused. The problem for the teacher comes to be quite similar to that formulated by the Greek philosophers, to produce character through an education that is dominantly rational and that excludes all recognition of the traditional religious element. It does not assist in solving the problem, to deny that as a people through our schools we have definitely rejected revealed religion as a basis for morality and seek to find a sufficient basis in the development of rationality in the child. One most important phase of education is left to the Church and the home, neither of which is doing much to meet the demand.

This tendency exists along with another, which might seem to be contradictory, — the expansion of the scope of school work. Much of the work recently included within the scope of schoolroom instruction is yet inadequately organized and hence indifferently presented. Unsatisfactory results follow. But undoubtedly the need is simply for more experience. What new social conditions have demanded, new school conditions must supply. The work of the school

can no longer be restricted to the merest rudiments or instruments of learning; what is now demanded are the rudiments of living, the instruments needed for successful life in complex modern civilization. The most prominent phase of this tendency of the present is the incorporation of the industrial element in all school work. This argues a radical reshaping of our idea of education as well as of the instructing process. Education is to be broader, schoolroom instruction more helpful, more immediately practical, more directly related to conduct, and hence more moral. Whether this is a great concession to materialism or not, cannot be discussed here; whether it is, in any individual case, depends for the most part on the teacher. This new tendency which bids fair to increase far beyond present experience is wholly in answer to new social demands. And society must accompany these demands with a corresponding service, -liberality in the support of education greater than ever shown before. The expenditures for education in the present are unprecedented; but they are not to be a precedent for the future; the tendency is toward much greater expenditures in the future. Ard if much more is given, much more will be required.

Thus the movements characteristic of the past, which we have sketched in greater detail, are working themselves out in these tendencies of the present.

The

HARMONIZATION OF INTEREST AND EFFORT. eclectic character of present educational thought and practice is shown not only by the fusion of the psychological, scientific, and sociological views of education, but also by the endeavor made to unify in theory and in schoolroom procedure the elements of interest and effort. The long period of peace, during which the conception of education as effort or as a discipline prevailed, was succeeded by a period of conflict between the idea of education as discipline and the idea of education as a natural process determined wholly by the

interests of the child. Both practical experience and further heoretical investigation are showing that the interpretation of education from the point of view of interest is as partial as the old interpretation of education as discipline; consequently the present tendency is one of reconciliation, of harmonization of interest and effort, as the basis of educational practice. The period of conflict occupied the second half of the eighteenth and practically all of the nineteenth century. The period of reconciliation of the two conceptions in our own country is practically that of the present generation.

Interest is essential as the starting point of the educative process; effort is essential as its outcome. The purpose of appealing to the interest of the child is to lead him to the point where he will put forth effort to master the unsolved problems, the undetermined relationships of his environment, whether of the schoolroom or of life. The object of the old education of effort was to develop in the child the power of voluntary attention, of application, of strength of will, that would enable him to overcome the obstacles or to accomplish the tasks of each day's experience. The object of the new education of reconciliation is to reach the same end through immediate appeal to spontaneous attention and to the native interests of the child. The old, like Aristotle's solution (p. 152), was valid only for the comparatively few who were of such native ability as to profit by the training; the new, by building upon the essentials of human nature itself, seeks to secure that development for all. In both, the purpose is to produce that motivation in moral judgment and that power of accomplishment in action, the combination of which is character. The aim of the new, no less than of the old, is to produce "that making in the selection of the good and the rejection of the evil which we call character" (p. 631).

Neither interest nor effort is an end in itself; neither interest nor effort alone is a sufficient guide to the educative process. Interest is the condition of mind arising out of the

child's own powers and needs in response to stimuli from his environment; effort is the other side of the same situation and represents the discharge in response to the stimuli,-a response that calls for a greater expenditure of energy than can be sustained by the original exciting interest. What is aimed at in education through a use of or combination of both interest and effort is the production of a type of mind, or rather of the whole being or nature of an individual, that includes power of rational insight, of deliberation, of independence of judgment, of firmness of decision, and of effective action. To secure this, both interest and effort must be depended upon or called forth in the educative process.

The problem of the schoolroom, then, is neither by authority to hold the child to the mastery of certain tasks which are uninteresting in themselves and from which his attention. is withdrawn the moment the external pressure is removed, and thus to develop will power and moral character; nor, on the other hand, is it the work of the school so to surround the needed activities or learning processes with factitious interests as to sugar coat the pills of schoolroom tasks. The harmonization of the problem of effort and interest consists in so relating the tasks of the schoolroom to the real life and activities of the child, by drawing them directly from the life activities of the child and of society, that he grows into his fuller adult self through assimilation into his own personality of that which is, and which he recognizes to be, an essential part of the life of society around him. This activity is effort; interest consists in arousing in the child the realization of its vital relation to his own life. Personality is expanded and character developed as this possible relationship is developed into a normal and an abiding reality in the life of the individual.

THE MEANING OF EDUCATION, as conceived in the present, is found in this harmonization of interest and effort