"CABIN'D, CRIBB'D, CONFIN'D"

A bombshell has fallen among the country's educators. It was tossed by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, in the form of a simple question: What is a school for? At present, the Foundation suspects that the country it wasting its good money, and its children's time, by filling the mind of Youth with superficialities and smatterings of everything in general. If the school curriculum were confined to four courses, relentlessly pursued--arithmetic, the mother tongue, government, and a speaking acquaintance with science--many would be saved and children made sincere and earnest. Prominent men have, in a suitably dignified fashion, raised their cudgels across the body of the issue, prostrate in the lists although very much alive. The schools need money, democracy demands free and adequate schooling; hence the importance of the decision to the future of American education.

Among the programs submitted by various educators, there is only one point of agreement--that financially the school system is under-fed. The majority agree with the Carnegie Institute in condemning the present school menu as too rich and varied. What the children of the nation need is hard, simple fare. This is doctrine which will soon have nervous prostration from overwork. When so many are now condemning the schools for teaching frills instead of ramming home the R's with a poker, it is well to pause and wonder where the individual child comes in.

The most ambitious and therefore the most interesting program is that of President Eliot. Educators agree to the general proposition that schools should produce better and more intelligent citizens. Is this to be achieved by turning out stock products who can extract the square root of 1492 in three seconds, or by giving pupils, as Dr. Eliot desires, a training of all the senses? The pupil must, of course, know his arithmetic, reading and spelling, history, geography, and natural sciences, taught in their simple relations. But Dr. Eliot's program goes farther: it seeks to awaken the pupil's interest, to cultivate the power of seeing and describing, to teach manual dexterity and expression by word and musical note; above all, to develop individuality rather than to compress into uniformity. It is ambitious; it does not meet the plea for greater economy. But unlike the other programs, it considers the child. In the tender years when the nature of the child is expanding, when its vivid imagination is struggling for expression, the curriculum must give it elbow-room instead of cramping and stunting it within the bounds of the three R's. And certainly, as one educator says, when the American people spend twenty two billions of dollars yearly on luxuries, they should be willing to spend more than a single billion a year in educating the coming strength of the nation.