The New Republic

Articles published in 1924, includes "The College Girl's Mind", "Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher", and "The Drama of Intelligence"

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<author>Scudder, Vida D. (Vida D. Scudder), 1861-1954</author>
<title level="a" type="main">The College Girl's Mind</title>
<date when="1912-04">October 1, 1924</date>
<title level="j">The New Republic</title>
<biblScope unit="volume">XL</biblScope>
<biblScope unit="page">123-124</biblScope>
 <author>Unknown</author>
 <title level="a" type="main">Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher</title>
 <date when="1912-04">November 12, 1924</date>
 <title level="j">The New Republic</title>
 <biblScope unit="volume">XL</biblScope>
 <biblScope unit="page">263-264</biblScope>
 <author>Ayres, C. E. (C. E. Ayres), 1891-1972</author>
 <title level="a" type="main">The Drama of Intelligence</title>
 <date when="1912-04">November 19, 1924</date>
 <title level="j">The New Republic</title>
 <biblScope unit="volume">XL</biblScope>
 <biblScope unit="page">300</biblScope>
 
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<div1 type="article">
<head>The College Girl's Mind</head>
<ab type="subhead">An article written for THE NEW REPUBLIC</ab>

<figure></figure>
 <fw>October 1, 1924 The New Republic 124
</fw><p>It is normal for elderly folk to be disconcerted by the rising generation; but since the War, the outcry of shocked distress, especially about our girls, has been a little louder than usual. Perhaps a brief glance at the other side of the shield may be cheering. For bobbed hair, made-up faces, a taste for jazz and a distaste for chaperons, light-spoken familiarity with much that grandmother never knew, and a general attitude of fevered defiance, are very far from the whole story.</p>

 <p>A college teacher of many years' standing likes to bear her witness that she never enjoyed youth more than now. In the last century, when women students were still a picked lot, and earnest sentimentality plus lingering trouble over the Darwinian theory was an ordinary pose, one never encountered more keen and serious thinking than one does in the young women of today. Manners have changed; but not so much, after all. Even if girls no longer move with ankles entangled in their skirts, even if their emancipated feet are several sizes larger than of old, essentials remain. The freed legs and ankles imply more freedom in the attack on life; but the gentleness, dignity and gayety which mark the well-bred woman are not hard to find; simplicity and modesty are still native to girlhood.</p>
  
  <p>It would be dull and untrue to paint a rose-colored picture. Girls with strained faces and piteous sullen ways (these come, one often finds, from homes ravaged by divorce) noisy girls, vulgar girls, girls clever and unpleasant, do sometimes force themselves on the attention. Yet, by and large, the "granddaughters" whom the colleges begin to receive, are much like their mothers. The years around twenty have always been for women a difficult period of adjustment in family relations. In some ways the problem grows easier, in some harder, as the rational feminine demand for economic independence and satisfying occupation gains more recognition. But a great many college girls appear really to love their fathers and mothers; and a reasonable percent of them make fairly intelligent choice when it comes to getting married, and establish fairly satisfactory homes of their own.</p>

<p>As for their intellectual activities&#8212;ah, now we are at the angle from which this article contemplates the student.</p>
 
 <p>A teacher moving through the buzzing corridors of her institution between classes, may murmur to herself the Wordsworthian line:</p>
 
 <ab>The face of every one</ab>
 <lb/>
  <ab>Who passes by me is a mystery</ab>
 
 <p>What are they thinking about, these young people? Oh for a cross-section of the ideas of youth in 1924! Now the X-ray to photograph the contents of consciousness is not yet invented; but once in a blue moon the class-room can offer a clumsy substitute.</p>
 
 <p>First meeting of the class. Twenty-five unknown faces: languid some, eager some, curious all. Longing for that X-ray takes sudden possession of the instructor. Instead of questioning the students, she will bid them question her: a time-honored pedagogic device, as old as Socrates.</p>
 
 <p>"Please take ten minutes to write for me five questions on which you would like to receive light from the reading to be done in this course." The subject of the course, by the way, appears in the catalogue as "Social Ideals in English Letters."</p>
 
 <p>Heads black, brown, yellow, straight and curly, bobbed and fluffed, bend intently over the paper. Girls are really more attractive than kittens, thinks the instructor dreamily, as she leans back for her ten minutes, shapes her inward ambitions for her new class, and wonders what Mr. Addison or Mr. Shakespeare would think of their occupation.</p>
 
 <p>"Time up!" Papers handed in. And here they are, presented more or less at random, classified a little, but not reworded:</p>
 
 <p>"Can we ever have perfect international understanding, and preserve at the same time a love for our own country and a sense of its special importance?" More students agree on this question than on any other: nine have written it down, with varied phrasing.</p>
 
 <p>"How meet the problem of racial antagonisms, especially in America?" Three students.</p>
 
 <p>"Is communism possible? Can class distinctions ever be done away with?" It is surprising to find how small a number have put this type of question: And only one student, the teacher observes with a sigh of relief, has asked: "Is war ever justifiable?"</p>
 
 <p>But more than one put most of the following; though wording naturally varied:</p>
 
 <p>"Must we destroy what we have in order to start anew?" "How far can the idealist countenance compromise?"</p>
 
 <p>"Were the status of the classes reversed, should we be better off? What in such case would be the policy of the working class?" "How can forces of heredity and environment be so controlled that we may gain equality?" "Is a middle class desirable?" "If equality is to prevail, can art and letters be fostered?" "How combine democracy and efficiency?"</p>
 
 <p>"What does literature show as the chief forces operative in the transition from an aristocratic regime to our own?"</p>
  
  <p>"Is there a definite sequence in evolutionary stages, which can not be broken or abridged? Or could a stage conceivably be skipped?" (Probably she is thinking of Russia: a debate on recognition of the Soviet government is imminent.)</p>
 
 <p>"How remove the stigma attached to the word, Labor?" "Why is the person who struggles for a living, least regarded in law? Or is this really the case?" "How make workers appreciate managers who are trying to benefit them?" "What should be the next step in improving labor conditions?"</p>
<p>"Differing attitudes of the church and law: for instance on divorce. Justifiable?"</p>

<p>"The relation of religion to social progress."</p>

<p>"Relation of the college girl to the working girl." "What can the thinking students of America do to help the world?" (Easy to answer: "Think some more," remarks the teacher.) "Are service and self-expression compatible?"</p>

<p>"Would outward change facilitate inward change?" "How far should the state control the individual?" "In the light of human nature, can we hope for the perfect state?"</p>

<p>"Are the 'times' never ready for the ideas?"</p>

<p>And a miscellaneous lot, too long to list: dealing with Eugenics, with Education, with the Status of Woman, with policy toward the dependent defective and delinquent classes. Also&#8212;plaintive enquiry&#8212;"How <hi rend="italics">can</hi> a thing like the Ku Klux Klan exist in America?"</p>

<p>These questions were no result of suggestion from the teacher, or of study accomplished. They were written down impromptu before the year's work had begun, and by students who in many cases had taken no previous work in sociology. Nor were the students chosen in any special way, except as a free elective course draws those of a certain type to it. The college cannot, at least on its academic side, claim credit or responsibility for putting these things into the girls' minds. There they were, pressing for utterance. And if you want a cross-section of the mind of youth, peruse these paragraphs.</p>

<p>Well! It is for the sake of young people seeking the solution of questions like these, that colleges exist, primarily. And it is because there are many such young people that the teacher, in spite of all attacks on our goose-step march in education, dares to regard these ancient institutions as true centres of the ageless quest for wisdom.</p>

 <p>But one marks the little papers in a sober mood: aware that on some of the questions&#8212;that concerning international relations, for instance&#8212;the experience of the English race as recorded in literature throws little or no direct light; and wondering what will have happened to the minds of the young pioneers by the end of the academic year.</p>
 <byline>VIDA D. SCUDDER</byline>
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    <head>Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher</head>
    <ab type="subhead">An article written for THE NEW REPUBLIC</ab>
    <figure></figure>
    <fw>November 12, 1924 The New Republic 263</fw>
    <p>In the supplement which accompanies this issue of the New Republic we have attempted to present to our readers a discussion of some of the most important problems that confront the American public school. The purpose of this supplement is not to set forth a program nor even to marshal the arguments for any special point of view in educational theory. Our contributors are by no means in complete agreement: that, indeed, would be undesirable. Yet they begin their various essays with a common recognition of a general condition the recognition of which is inescapable at the present time, the condition of change. Whatever any one may think of our educational practices, past, present or future, no one can deny that they are undergoing alteration. More than that, among the welter of educational theories characteristic of a period of rapid evolution another general tendency is manifest. It also is recognized by practically all writers upon educational problems at the present time. Throughout our common schools there is an unmistakable drift away from formalism. The routine of school life, accentuated by the unprecedented growth of the entire public school system until it had begun to appear an end in itself, has at length become insupportable.</p>
   
   <p>Typical of the conflict between theory and practice is the experience of a graduate of one of our best known institutions for training teachers who had just commenced teaching. It happened that she had had a private education prior to attending the school for teachers; she was ignorant of the actual practice of school instruction and administration. At this time she was in a state of discouraged perplexity and amazement. In her candid innocence, she had assumed that the theories and principles into which she had been inducted were the guiding principles of school work. Had they not been taught in substance by the wise of all ages, and were they not urged, and in detail as well as in substance, by the pedagogical authorities of the present? Not having the background which enables the average teacher to discount educational theories by knowledge of actual school practices, and to interpret them as uttered in a Pickwickian rather than a literal sense, the zeal and sincerity which she brought to the application of these theories in the school room received a great shock.</p>
    
    <p>The experience is but one illustration of the old, old fact. In social matters, theory is theory and practice is practice, and rarely shall the twain meet. The first is governed by thought, and perhaps in a way which gives confirmation to the contention of some "behaviorists" that thinking and speech are identical&#8212;with a minimum of test in action; the second is governed by habit, custom, routine, modified by necessary accommodations to immediate conditions, with a minimum of thinking that goes beyond the range of present circumstances.</p>
    
    <p>What are the causes of the split between principles and facts, theory and practice, in education? One of them is the human and personal separation between theorists and practitioners. Most discussions concerning the relations between theory and practice are vitiated by neglect of this human factor. The real problem concerns the separation between two kinds of practitioners, one practising theorizing and the other practising details of executive work.</p>
    
    <p>Theorizing is not used here in a disparaging sense: it is meant to include investigation into matters of fact as well as reflection upon the data which inquiry reveals. But in its very best sense, as matters are now constituted, educational research and reflection constitute an occupation which is remote from the occupation of teaching school.</p>
     
     <p>Conditions in the latter occupation create and widen the breach. They are such that it is hard for the teacher to be anything but a teacher, and especially hard to be a student. This does not mean that teachers are in general not students; considering the amount of time at their disposal, they are, the best of them, quite devoted to increasing their knowledge of what they teach. But the conditions under which they teach are unfavorable to their being students of educational principles and of the application of these in their teaching. They are almost compelled to take educational principles as true in general but not applicable in practice, and to render them only lip service.</p>
      
      <p>Many new and young teachers come to their work with enthusiasm for ideas; they, at least, are going to be different; they are going to apply what they have learned regarding children and education. How many older teachers talk to them in kindness rather than in cynicism to the following effect: "We too were like you when we began; we made things uncomfortable for others and in the end only for ourselves. Don't try to change things, if you are wise. Adapt yourself to existing conditions and make the best of them." And when the young teacher finds that his zeal for ideas comes to little, not so much because of overt opposition as because of delays, lack of materials, inertia, red-tape and routine, he usually ends by joining the ranks of those who pass on similar advice to the next generation of the zealous.</p>
    
     <p>By the nature of the case the system is traditional, and it is of the nature of the traditional system to resist change; to perpetuate itself intact. Otherwise it would not be the traditional system. And a scheme of indifference, of yielding in details, and protective colorations of language and outward forms, has been found by long experience to be much more effective in self-perpetuation than is active antagonism to change. Fire is best extinguished by smothering; other methods let in air, and fan the flames. Energy is soon diverted to lines of least resistance. Schools are in many respects more open to change than most human institutions. Every two or three years there is a wave of something new which sweeps across the country, from methods of teaching penmanship, spelling and percentage to addition of new studies to the curriculum. Teachers are honestly perplexed when accused of over-conservatism; many of them know that things are already changing altogether too rapidly for them to do their best. But most of this change is in effect simply a direction of energy into channels where it will keep "reformers" busy on side-tracks. The forms of academic bookkeeping are altered while the substance of the business goes on unchanged. They relieve the conscience of conscientious teachers by giving them something to do which is novel and to which great expectations may be attached. Some of the most touted of present reforms are hardly more than devices for reconciling educators to the absence of thought by giving them new things to do.</p>
    
    <p>A survey of educational literature, including contributions to educational conferences and conventions, will reveal that the contributions of the classroom teacher are insignificant, and in the case of primary education, virtually negligible. This fact is a register of the existing separation of educational ideas and educational practice. When the situation changes, there is a sure means of detecting the alteration. <hi rend="italics">Teachers in class-rooms out of the experience of the class-rooms will write the bulk of educational contributions.</hi> Then we shall have a condition like that in the natural sciences where workers in laboratories as a matter of course furnish the bulk of scientific literature. But as long as the thinking is done at arm's length from actual teaching, the results of the thinking handed over ready-made to the teacher, the latter will not by the very nature of the case be engaged in thinking, and consequently the thought itself, the ideas, will largely evaporate in the process of so-called application. Reforms in theories taught to teachers and in administration and organization of schools will remain remote and ineffectual for the most part, or simply mark new styles in vocabulary, until classroom teachers are freed, and all thereby given a chance to become the authors and not simply the executors of educational ideas and principles. For that reason we look with growing scepticism on all plans of educational improvement which do not centre in the liberation of the teacher in the place where teaching is carried on: the class-room.</p>
    
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    <head>The Drama of Intelligence</head>
    <ab type="subhead">
     <hi rend="italics">The Discovery of Intelligence, by Joseph K. Hart. New York: The Century Company. $4.00.</hi>
    </ab>
    <figure></figure>
    <fw>November 19, 1924 The New Republic 300</fw>
    
    <p>Some discoveries require to be made only once. A new continent is perceptible and in a sense accessible to all the world so soon as its coast line is charted. A new idea, say the differential calculus, may be too recondite for a large public. But the few whose training does enable them to grasp to make it forthwith the basis of a superstructure of mechanical achievements susceptible to general use and appreciation. Such a thing be henceforth has a definite place in civilization. Its loss is impossible: the surrounding culture holds it fast.</p>
    
    <p>"Intelligence" is like none of these things. Abstract principles, or daring feats of exploration, require intelligence for their inception and realization. They are products of the process; intelligence is the process itself. As a state of being it precedes the consummation of all discoveries. Wherever things are happening the mind is hard at work. But wherever men are gathered together, no matter how sodden with custom and tradition those particular individuals may have become, there is intelligence in the midst of them, a human quality, more inalienable than any customary rights, ready to take effect in action the instant circumstances require it.</p>
    
    <p>To define this quality or process is a rather difficult undertaking as the intelligence testers have made abundantly clear. The difficulty arises from the fact that it is neither an organ like the mechanism of taste nor an occupation like the performance of eating. For one thing, it presumably goes on all the time with more or less intensity. No doubt both the organism and the institutional system are involved in its operations. Roughly speaking, the organism exhibits two opposite dispositions, each one equally the expression of the obvious structural economy of the human body: habit and intelligence. Human beings are disposed to drop into set ways of conducting their affairs. They are also extraordinarily restless, perpetually casting about with all sorts of random movements for a fresh grip on things. On the institutional side these dispositions spell order and revolution, the two ultimates of civilization everywhere. The social economy is always crystalline; it is also simultaneously more or less fluid. Any moment of history can be taken as the expression of a certain established system of social life. But it can also be taken as a turning point, an axis of transition. Civilization itself, which is only a longer word for man, is a perpetual amalgamation of habit and intellect.</p>
    
    <p>Dr. Hart, being an educational philosopher, speaks of intelligence almost entirely in institutional terms. Its opposite, in his definition-by-contrast, is the folkway, custom, convention, in short, order. The life of the intellect appears to him, as to many sociologists of the present generation, a struggle of the liberated mind against the bonds of dogma. The things which interest him most in modern civilization are the evidence of change, growth, free movements, new institutions. Not so much any particular discovery of modern times appeals to him as the supreme justification of our civilization as the onward rush itself, the realization, increasingly, of movement, which is to say progress, as the central ambition of the human intellect. The triumph of the modern age is not the solution of problems set by an earlier order but the sweeping away of the order which set the problems. Dr. Hart sees this in the history of education. The whole gospel of modernism is the revolt against routine. The function of education is to cultivate the intellect; intelligence is inward freedom; ergo, the schools must be liberated from all rigid formulas. For the moment the formulas seem to have become too rigid and to have cracked in consequence, and intelligence may be seen all up and down the land peeping through, naked and free, ready, it would appear, to join hands all round and dance across the Arcadian meadows of the future swinging the garlands of perfect understanding.</p>
     
     <p>Nothing could be more stimulating to the imagination than this picture. Exhibited in historical terms, as Dr. Hart presents it, the realization of the new freedom seems to be indeed the consummation of the noblest qualities of the human soul. To look back is only to see in the dim distance of ancient culture, murky with primitive folkways and savage despotism,the earliest glimmering of the light of reason. Further along the light steadies to a continuous gleam shining down the centuries to the present with ever increasing candle power: the light that never fails. This, our history, is a Promethean drama. There are many acts and myriad characters. No single version contains them all. Dr. Hart intends his to be the drama of the schools, and draws in the general background only to provide a setting in which to unfold the processes of education. His story is always interesting and sometimes exciting. Everyone who goes to school can understand it, and no one who cares about the adventures of the mind should fail to read it.</p>
    
    <p>But it is not necessary for the appreciation of a play to confuse drama with reality. This account of European civilization is good theatre, as Stark Young says, but very conscious art. Like all art it selects and magnifies and generally heightens its effects to the greater glory of the play and exaltation of the audience. Dr. Hart is a playwright no less than the rest, though no more. His dramatic principles are precisely the same as those of James Harvey Robinson, for instance. They include, in particular, the assumption of the benighted savagery of our ancestors and its corollary, our own consummate cultivation, both quite contrary to fact. Thus Dr. Hart pictures primitive man as completely ridden by his bugaboos. "Primitive men are almost always tender-minded. They want security, escape from uncertainty, a world in which all questions have been answered, which taxes the mind in no unusual way." And so might we but for our savior, Socrates. There once was a man named Socrates. According to Aristotle, he discovered intelligence. "The discovery of intelligence was the greatest event in human history."</p>
    
    <p>What delicious nonsense! The human intellect is an adventurous affair. But the moral of its perpetual struggle with habit and institution for fresh experience is not that of a single discovery and unitary d&#233;nouement. Audacious as our present ventures seem, they cannot, in the nature of things, be essentially different from the hazards of our ancestors of the old stone age. While as for bugaboos, how many voters have just now recorded at the polls their deep-set yearning for security, escape from uncertainty, a world in which all questions have been answered, which taxes the mind in no unusual way?</p>
    <byline>C. E. AYRES.</byline>
    
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The College Girl's Mind Scudder, Vida D. (Vida D. Scudder), 1861-1954 Transcription, Proofreading, and Encoding Larkins, Taylor M. 2019 Publications from 1924 Taylor Larkins Matt Cohen Scudder, Vida D. (Vida D. Scudder), 1861-1954 The College Girl's Mind October 1, 1924 The New Republic XL 123-124 Unknown Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher November 12, 1924 The New Republic XL 263-264 Ayres, C. E. (C. E. Ayres), 1891-1972 The Drama of Intelligence November 19, 1924 The New Republic XL 300

The digital text makes some attempt to reproduce features of magazine publication such as headline formatting for titles of works. The digital text presents the original without change. Obvious typographical errors are indicated with [sic], but expressive and irregular spelling, punctuation and capitalization are neither altered nor noted with an editorial comment.

 Taylor Larkins digital scan review Taylor Larkins tei encoding
The College Girl's Mind An article written for THE NEW REPUBLIC
October 1, 1924 The New Republic 124

It is normal for elderly folk to be disconcerted by the rising generation; but since the War, the outcry of shocked distress, especially about our girls, has been a little louder than usual. Perhaps a brief glance at the other side of the shield may be cheering. For bobbed hair, made-up faces, a taste for jazz and a distaste for chaperons, light-spoken familiarity with much that grandmother never knew, and a general attitude of fevered defiance, are very far from the whole story.

A college teacher of many years' standing likes to bear her witness that she never enjoyed youth more than now. In the last century, when women students were still a picked lot, and earnest sentimentality plus lingering trouble over the Darwinian theory was an ordinary pose, one never encountered more keen and serious thinking than one does in the young women of today. Manners have changed; but not so much, after all. Even if girls no longer move with ankles entangled in their skirts, even if their emancipated feet are several sizes larger than of old, essentials remain. The freed legs and ankles imply more freedom in the attack on life; but the gentleness, dignity and gayety which mark the well-bred woman are not hard to find; simplicity and modesty are still native to girlhood.

It would be dull and untrue to paint a rose-colored picture. Girls with strained faces and piteous sullen ways (these come, one often finds, from homes ravaged by divorce) noisy girls, vulgar girls, girls clever and unpleasant, do sometimes force themselves on the attention. Yet, by and large, the "granddaughters" whom the colleges begin to receive, are much like their mothers. The years around twenty have always been for women a difficult period of adjustment in family relations. In some ways the problem grows easier, in some harder, as the rational feminine demand for economic independence and satisfying occupation gains more recognition. But a great many college girls appear really to love their fathers and mothers; and a reasonable percent of them make fairly intelligent choice when it comes to getting married, and establish fairly satisfactory homes of their own.

As for their intellectual activities—ah, now we are at the angle from which this article contemplates the student.

A teacher moving through the buzzing corridors of her institution between classes, may murmur to herself the Wordsworthian line:

The face of every one Who passes by me is a mystery

What are they thinking about, these young people? Oh for a cross-section of the ideas of youth in 1924! Now the X-ray to photograph the contents of consciousness is not yet invented; but once in a blue moon the class-room can offer a clumsy substitute.

First meeting of the class. Twenty-five unknown faces: languid some, eager some, curious all. Longing for that X-ray takes sudden possession of the instructor. Instead of questioning the students, she will bid them question her: a time-honored pedagogic device, as old as Socrates.

"Please take ten minutes to write for me five questions on which you would like to receive light from the reading to be done in this course." The subject of the course, by the way, appears in the catalogue as "Social Ideals in English Letters."

Heads black, brown, yellow, straight and curly, bobbed and fluffed, bend intently over the paper. Girls are really more attractive than kittens, thinks the instructor dreamily, as she leans back for her ten minutes, shapes her inward ambitions for her new class, and wonders what Mr. Addison or Mr. Shakespeare would think of their occupation.

"Time up!" Papers handed in. And here they are, presented more or less at random, classified a little, but not reworded:

"Can we ever have perfect international understanding, and preserve at the same time a love for our own country and a sense of its special importance?" More students agree on this question than on any other: nine have written it down, with varied phrasing.

"How meet the problem of racial antagonisms, especially in America?" Three students.

"Is communism possible? Can class distinctions ever be done away with?" It is surprising to find how small a number have put this type of question: And only one student, the teacher observes with a sigh of relief, has asked: "Is war ever justifiable?"

But more than one put most of the following; though wording naturally varied:

"Must we destroy what we have in order to start anew?" "How far can the idealist countenance compromise?"

"Were the status of the classes reversed, should we be better off? What in such case would be the policy of the working class?" "How can forces of heredity and environment be so controlled that we may gain equality?" "Is a middle class desirable?" "If equality is to prevail, can art and letters be fostered?" "How combine democracy and efficiency?"

"What does literature show as the chief forces operative in the transition from an aristocratic regime to our own?"

"Is there a definite sequence in evolutionary stages, which can not be broken or abridged? Or could a stage conceivably be skipped?" (Probably she is thinking of Russia: a debate on recognition of the Soviet government is imminent.)

"How remove the stigma attached to the word, Labor?" "Why is the person who struggles for a living, least regarded in law? Or is this really the case?" "How make workers appreciate managers who are trying to benefit them?" "What should be the next step in improving labor conditions?"

"Differing attitudes of the church and law: for instance on divorce. Justifiable?"

"The relation of religion to social progress."

"Relation of the college girl to the working girl." "What can the thinking students of America do to help the world?" (Easy to answer: "Think some more," remarks the teacher.) "Are service and self-expression compatible?"

"Would outward change facilitate inward change?" "How far should the state control the individual?" "In the light of human nature, can we hope for the perfect state?"

"Are the 'times' never ready for the ideas?"

And a miscellaneous lot, too long to list: dealing with Eugenics, with Education, with the Status of Woman, with policy toward the dependent defective and delinquent classes. Also—plaintive enquiry—"How can a thing like the Ku Klux Klan exist in America?"

These questions were no result of suggestion from the teacher, or of study accomplished. They were written down impromptu before the year's work had begun, and by students who in many cases had taken no previous work in sociology. Nor were the students chosen in any special way, except as a free elective course draws those of a certain type to it. The college cannot, at least on its academic side, claim credit or responsibility for putting these things into the girls' minds. There they were, pressing for utterance. And if you want a cross-section of the mind of youth, peruse these paragraphs.

Well! It is for the sake of young people seeking the solution of questions like these, that colleges exist, primarily. And it is because there are many such young people that the teacher, in spite of all attacks on our goose-step march in education, dares to regard these ancient institutions as true centres of the ageless quest for wisdom.

But one marks the little papers in a sober mood: aware that on some of the questions—that concerning international relations, for instance—the experience of the English race as recorded in literature throws little or no direct light; and wondering what will have happened to the minds of the young pioneers by the end of the academic year.

VIDA D. SCUDDER
Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher An article written for THE NEW REPUBLIC
November 12, 1924 The New Republic 263

In the supplement which accompanies this issue of the New Republic we have attempted to present to our readers a discussion of some of the most important problems that confront the American public school. The purpose of this supplement is not to set forth a program nor even to marshal the arguments for any special point of view in educational theory. Our contributors are by no means in complete agreement: that, indeed, would be undesirable. Yet they begin their various essays with a common recognition of a general condition the recognition of which is inescapable at the present time, the condition of change. Whatever any one may think of our educational practices, past, present or future, no one can deny that they are undergoing alteration. More than that, among the welter of educational theories characteristic of a period of rapid evolution another general tendency is manifest. It also is recognized by practically all writers upon educational problems at the present time. Throughout our common schools there is an unmistakable drift away from formalism. The routine of school life, accentuated by the unprecedented growth of the entire public school system until it had begun to appear an end in itself, has at length become insupportable.

Typical of the conflict between theory and practice is the experience of a graduate of one of our best known institutions for training teachers who had just commenced teaching. It happened that she had had a private education prior to attending the school for teachers; she was ignorant of the actual practice of school instruction and administration. At this time she was in a state of discouraged perplexity and amazement. In her candid innocence, she had assumed that the theories and principles into which she had been inducted were the guiding principles of school work. Had they not been taught in substance by the wise of all ages, and were they not urged, and in detail as well as in substance, by the pedagogical authorities of the present? Not having the background which enables the average teacher to discount educational theories by knowledge of actual school practices, and to interpret them as uttered in a Pickwickian rather than a literal sense, the zeal and sincerity which she brought to the application of these theories in the school room received a great shock.

The experience is but one illustration of the old, old fact. In social matters, theory is theory and practice is practice, and rarely shall the twain meet. The first is governed by thought, and perhaps in a way which gives confirmation to the contention of some "behaviorists" that thinking and speech are identical—with a minimum of test in action; the second is governed by habit, custom, routine, modified by necessary accommodations to immediate conditions, with a minimum of thinking that goes beyond the range of present circumstances.

What are the causes of the split between principles and facts, theory and practice, in education? One of them is the human and personal separation between theorists and practitioners. Most discussions concerning the relations between theory and practice are vitiated by neglect of this human factor. The real problem concerns the separation between two kinds of practitioners, one practising theorizing and the other practising details of executive work.

Theorizing is not used here in a disparaging sense: it is meant to include investigation into matters of fact as well as reflection upon the data which inquiry reveals. But in its very best sense, as matters are now constituted, educational research and reflection constitute an occupation which is remote from the occupation of teaching school.

Conditions in the latter occupation create and widen the breach. They are such that it is hard for the teacher to be anything but a teacher, and especially hard to be a student. This does not mean that teachers are in general not students; considering the amount of time at their disposal, they are, the best of them, quite devoted to increasing their knowledge of what they teach. But the conditions under which they teach are unfavorable to their being students of educational principles and of the application of these in their teaching. They are almost compelled to take educational principles as true in general but not applicable in practice, and to render them only lip service.

Many new and young teachers come to their work with enthusiasm for ideas; they, at least, are going to be different; they are going to apply what they have learned regarding children and education. How many older teachers talk to them in kindness rather than in cynicism to the following effect: "We too were like you when we began; we made things uncomfortable for others and in the end only for ourselves. Don't try to change things, if you are wise. Adapt yourself to existing conditions and make the best of them." And when the young teacher finds that his zeal for ideas comes to little, not so much because of overt opposition as because of delays, lack of materials, inertia, red-tape and routine, he usually ends by joining the ranks of those who pass on similar advice to the next generation of the zealous.

By the nature of the case the system is traditional, and it is of the nature of the traditional system to resist change; to perpetuate itself intact. Otherwise it would not be the traditional system. And a scheme of indifference, of yielding in details, and protective colorations of language and outward forms, has been found by long experience to be much more effective in self-perpetuation than is active antagonism to change. Fire is best extinguished by smothering; other methods let in air, and fan the flames. Energy is soon diverted to lines of least resistance. Schools are in many respects more open to change than most human institutions. Every two or three years there is a wave of something new which sweeps across the country, from methods of teaching penmanship, spelling and percentage to addition of new studies to the curriculum. Teachers are honestly perplexed when accused of over-conservatism; many of them know that things are already changing altogether too rapidly for them to do their best. But most of this change is in effect simply a direction of energy into channels where it will keep "reformers" busy on side-tracks. The forms of academic bookkeeping are altered while the substance of the business goes on unchanged. They relieve the conscience of conscientious teachers by giving them something to do which is novel and to which great expectations may be attached. Some of the most touted of present reforms are hardly more than devices for reconciling educators to the absence of thought by giving them new things to do.

A survey of educational literature, including contributions to educational conferences and conventions, will reveal that the contributions of the classroom teacher are insignificant, and in the case of primary education, virtually negligible. This fact is a register of the existing separation of educational ideas and educational practice. When the situation changes, there is a sure means of detecting the alteration. Teachers in class-rooms out of the experience of the class-rooms will write the bulk of educational contributions. Then we shall have a condition like that in the natural sciences where workers in laboratories as a matter of course furnish the bulk of scientific literature. But as long as the thinking is done at arm's length from actual teaching, the results of the thinking handed over ready-made to the teacher, the latter will not by the very nature of the case be engaged in thinking, and consequently the thought itself, the ideas, will largely evaporate in the process of so-called application. Reforms in theories taught to teachers and in administration and organization of schools will remain remote and ineffectual for the most part, or simply mark new styles in vocabulary, until classroom teachers are freed, and all thereby given a chance to become the authors and not simply the executors of educational ideas and principles. For that reason we look with growing scepticism on all plans of educational improvement which do not centre in the liberation of the teacher in the place where teaching is carried on: the class-room.
The Drama of Intelligence The Discovery of Intelligence, by Joseph K. Hart. New York: The Century Company. $4.00.
November 19, 1924 The New Republic 300

Some discoveries require to be made only once. A new continent is perceptible and in a sense accessible to all the world so soon as its coast line is charted. A new idea, say the differential calculus, may be too recondite for a large public. But the few whose training does enable them to grasp to make it forthwith the basis of a superstructure of mechanical achievements susceptible to general use and appreciation. Such a thing be henceforth has a definite place in civilization. Its loss is impossible: the surrounding culture holds it fast.

"Intelligence" is like none of these things. Abstract principles, or daring feats of exploration, require intelligence for their inception and realization. They are products of the process; intelligence is the process itself. As a state of being it precedes the consummation of all discoveries. Wherever things are happening the mind is hard at work. But wherever men are gathered together, no matter how sodden with custom and tradition those particular individuals may have become, there is intelligence in the midst of them, a human quality, more inalienable than any customary rights, ready to take effect in action the instant circumstances require it.

To define this quality or process is a rather difficult undertaking as the intelligence testers have made abundantly clear. The difficulty arises from the fact that it is neither an organ like the mechanism of taste nor an occupation like the performance of eating. For one thing, it presumably goes on all the time with more or less intensity. No doubt both the organism and the institutional system are involved in its operations. Roughly speaking, the organism exhibits two opposite dispositions, each one equally the expression of the obvious structural economy of the human body: habit and intelligence. Human beings are disposed to drop into set ways of conducting their affairs. They are also extraordinarily restless, perpetually casting about with all sorts of random movements for a fresh grip on things. On the institutional side these dispositions spell order and revolution, the two ultimates of civilization everywhere. The social economy is always crystalline; it is also simultaneously more or less fluid. Any moment of history can be taken as the expression of a certain established system of social life. But it can also be taken as a turning point, an axis of transition. Civilization itself, which is only a longer word for man, is a perpetual amalgamation of habit and intellect.

Dr. Hart, being an educational philosopher, speaks of intelligence almost entirely in institutional terms. Its opposite, in his definition-by-contrast, is the folkway, custom, convention, in short, order. The life of the intellect appears to him, as to many sociologists of the present generation, a struggle of the liberated mind against the bonds of dogma. The things which interest him most in modern civilization are the evidence of change, growth, free movements, new institutions. Not so much any particular discovery of modern times appeals to him as the supreme justification of our civilization as the onward rush itself, the realization, increasingly, of movement, which is to say progress, as the central ambition of the human intellect. The triumph of the modern age is not the solution of problems set by an earlier order but the sweeping away of the order which set the problems. Dr. Hart sees this in the history of education. The whole gospel of modernism is the revolt against routine. The function of education is to cultivate the intellect; intelligence is inward freedom; ergo, the schools must be liberated from all rigid formulas. For the moment the formulas seem to have become too rigid and to have cracked in consequence, and intelligence may be seen all up and down the land peeping through, naked and free, ready, it would appear, to join hands all round and dance across the Arcadian meadows of the future swinging the garlands of perfect understanding.

Nothing could be more stimulating to the imagination than this picture. Exhibited in historical terms, as Dr. Hart presents it, the realization of the new freedom seems to be indeed the consummation of the noblest qualities of the human soul. To look back is only to see in the dim distance of ancient culture, murky with primitive folkways and savage despotism,the earliest glimmering of the light of reason. Further along the light steadies to a continuous gleam shining down the centuries to the present with ever increasing candle power: the light that never fails. This, our history, is a Promethean drama. There are many acts and myriad characters. No single version contains them all. Dr. Hart intends his to be the drama of the schools, and draws in the general background only to provide a setting in which to unfold the processes of education. His story is always interesting and sometimes exciting. Everyone who goes to school can understand it, and no one who cares about the adventures of the mind should fail to read it.

But it is not necessary for the appreciation of a play to confuse drama with reality. This account of European civilization is good theatre, as Stark Young says, but very conscious art. Like all art it selects and magnifies and generally heightens its effects to the greater glory of the play and exaltation of the audience. Dr. Hart is a playwright no less than the rest, though no more. His dramatic principles are precisely the same as those of James Harvey Robinson, for instance. They include, in particular, the assumption of the benighted savagery of our ancestors and its corollary, our own consummate cultivation, both quite contrary to fact. Thus Dr. Hart pictures primitive man as completely ridden by his bugaboos. "Primitive men are almost always tender-minded. They want security, escape from uncertainty, a world in which all questions have been answered, which taxes the mind in no unusual way." And so might we but for our savior, Socrates. There once was a man named Socrates. According to Aristotle, he discovered intelligence. "The discovery of intelligence was the greatest event in human history."

What delicious nonsense! The human intellect is an adventurous affair. But the moral of its perpetual struggle with habit and institution for fresh experience is not that of a single discovery and unitary dénouement. Audacious as our present ventures seem, they cannot, in the nature of things, be essentially different from the hazards of our ancestors of the old stone age. While as for bugaboos, how many voters have just now recorded at the polls their deep-set yearning for security, escape from uncertainty, a world in which all questions have been answered, which taxes the mind in no unusual way?

C. E. AYRES.

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The College Girl's Mind Scudder, Vida D. (Vida D. Scudder), 1861-1954 Transcription, Proofreading, and Encoding Larkins, Taylor M. 2019 Publications from 1924 Taylor Larkins Matt Cohen Scudder, Vida D. (Vida D. Scudder), 1861-1954 The College Girl's Mind October 1, 1924 The New Republic XL 123-124 Unknown Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher November 12, 1924 The New Republic XL 263-264 Ayres, C. E. (C. E. Ayres), 1891-1972 The Drama of Intelligence November 19, 1924 The New Republic XL 300

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 Taylor Larkins digital scan review Taylor Larkins tei encoding The College Girl's Mind An article written for THE NEW REPUBLIC
October 1, 1924 The New Republic 124

It is normal for elderly folk to be disconcerted by the rising generation; but since the War, the outcry of shocked distress, especially about our girls, has been a little louder than usual. Perhaps a brief glance at the other side of the shield may be cheering. For bobbed hair, made-up faces, a taste for jazz and a distaste for chaperons, light-spoken familiarity with much that grandmother never knew, and a general attitude of fevered defiance, are very far from the whole story.

A college teacher of many years' standing likes to bear her witness that she never enjoyed youth more than now. In the last century, when women students were still a picked lot, and earnest sentimentality plus lingering trouble over the Darwinian theory was an ordinary pose, one never encountered more keen and serious thinking than one does in the young women of today. Manners have changed; but not so much, after all. Even if girls no longer move with ankles entangled in their skirts, even if their emancipated feet are several sizes larger than of old, essentials remain. The freed legs and ankles imply more freedom in the attack on life; but the gentleness, dignity and gayety which mark the well-bred woman are not hard to find; simplicity and modesty are still native to girlhood.

It would be dull and untrue to paint a rose-colored picture. Girls with strained faces and piteous sullen ways (these come, one often finds, from homes ravaged by divorce) noisy girls, vulgar girls, girls clever and unpleasant, do sometimes force themselves on the attention. Yet, by and large, the "granddaughters" whom the colleges begin to receive, are much like their mothers. The years around twenty have always been for women a difficult period of adjustment in family relations. In some ways the problem grows easier, in some harder, as the rational feminine demand for economic independence and satisfying occupation gains more recognition. But a great many college girls appear really to love their fathers and mothers; and a reasonable percent of them make fairly intelligent choice when it comes to getting married, and establish fairly satisfactory homes of their own.

As for their intellectual activities—ah, now we are at the angle from which this article contemplates the student.

A teacher moving through the buzzing corridors of her institution between classes, may murmur to herself the Wordsworthian line:

The face of every one Who passes by me is a mystery

What are they thinking about, these young people? Oh for a cross-section of the ideas of youth in 1924! Now the X-ray to photograph the contents of consciousness is not yet invented; but once in a blue moon the class-room can offer a clumsy substitute.

First meeting of the class. Twenty-five unknown faces: languid some, eager some, curious all. Longing for that X-ray takes sudden possession of the instructor. Instead of questioning the students, she will bid them question her: a time-honored pedagogic device, as old as Socrates.

"Please take ten minutes to write for me five questions on which you would like to receive light from the reading to be done in this course." The subject of the course, by the way, appears in the catalogue as "Social Ideals in English Letters."

Heads black, brown, yellow, straight and curly, bobbed and fluffed, bend intently over the paper. Girls are really more attractive than kittens, thinks the instructor dreamily, as she leans back for her ten minutes, shapes her inward ambitions for her new class, and wonders what Mr. Addison or Mr. Shakespeare would think of their occupation.

"Time up!" Papers handed in. And here they are, presented more or less at random, classified a little, but not reworded:

"Can we ever have perfect international understanding, and preserve at the same time a love for our own country and a sense of its special importance?" More students agree on this question than on any other: nine have written it down, with varied phrasing.

"How meet the problem of racial antagonisms, especially in America?" Three students.

"Is communism possible? Can class distinctions ever be done away with?" It is surprising to find how small a number have put this type of question: And only one student, the teacher observes with a sigh of relief, has asked: "Is war ever justifiable?"

But more than one put most of the following; though wording naturally varied:

"Must we destroy what we have in order to start anew?" "How far can the idealist countenance compromise?"

"Were the status of the classes reversed, should we be better off? What in such case would be the policy of the working class?" "How can forces of heredity and environment be so controlled that we may gain equality?" "Is a middle class desirable?" "If equality is to prevail, can art and letters be fostered?" "How combine democracy and efficiency?"

"What does literature show as the chief forces operative in the transition from an aristocratic regime to our own?"

"Is there a definite sequence in evolutionary stages, which can not be broken or abridged? Or could a stage conceivably be skipped?" (Probably she is thinking of Russia: a debate on recognition of the Soviet government is imminent.)

"How remove the stigma attached to the word, Labor?" "Why is the person who struggles for a living, least regarded in law? Or is this really the case?" "How make workers appreciate managers who are trying to benefit them?" "What should be the next step in improving labor conditions?"

"Differing attitudes of the church and law: for instance on divorce. Justifiable?"

"The relation of religion to social progress."

"Relation of the college girl to the working girl." "What can the thinking students of America do to help the world?" (Easy to answer: "Think some more," remarks the teacher.) "Are service and self-expression compatible?"

"Would outward change facilitate inward change?" "How far should the state control the individual?" "In the light of human nature, can we hope for the perfect state?"

"Are the 'times' never ready for the ideas?"

And a miscellaneous lot, too long to list: dealing with Eugenics, with Education, with the Status of Woman, with policy toward the dependent defective and delinquent classes. Also—plaintive enquiry—"How can a thing like the Ku Klux Klan exist in America?"

These questions were no result of suggestion from the teacher, or of study accomplished. They were written down impromptu before the year's work had begun, and by students who in many cases had taken no previous work in sociology. Nor were the students chosen in any special way, except as a free elective course draws those of a certain type to it. The college cannot, at least on its academic side, claim credit or responsibility for putting these things into the girls' minds. There they were, pressing for utterance. And if you want a cross-section of the mind of youth, peruse these paragraphs.

Well! It is for the sake of young people seeking the solution of questions like these, that colleges exist, primarily. And it is because there are many such young people that the teacher, in spite of all attacks on our goose-step march in education, dares to regard these ancient institutions as true centres of the ageless quest for wisdom.

But one marks the little papers in a sober mood: aware that on some of the questions—that concerning international relations, for instance—the experience of the English race as recorded in literature throws little or no direct light; and wondering what will have happened to the minds of the young pioneers by the end of the academic year.

VIDA D. SCUDDER Educational Theory and the Class Room Teacher An article written for THE NEW REPUBLIC
November 12, 1924 The New Republic 263

In the supplement which accompanies this issue of the New Republic we have attempted to present to our readers a discussion of some of the most important problems that confront the American public school. The purpose of this supplement is not to set forth a program nor even to marshal the arguments for any special point of view in educational theory. Our contributors are by no means in complete agreement: that, indeed, would be undesirable. Yet they begin their various essays with a common recognition of a general condition the recognition of which is inescapable at the present time, the condition of change. Whatever any one may think of our educational practices, past, present or future, no one can deny that they are undergoing alteration. More than that, among the welter of educational theories characteristic of a period of rapid evolution another general tendency is manifest. It also is recognized by practically all writers upon educational problems at the present time. Throughout our common schools there is an unmistakable drift away from formalism. The routine of school life, accentuated by the unprecedented growth of the entire public school system until it had begun to appear an end in itself, has at length become insupportable.

Typical of the conflict between theory and practice is the experience of a graduate of one of our best known institutions for training teachers who had just commenced teaching. It happened that she had had a private education prior to attending the school for teachers; she was ignorant of the actual practice of school instruction and administration. At this time she was in a state of discouraged perplexity and amazement. In her candid innocence, she had assumed that the theories and principles into which she had been inducted were the guiding principles of school work. Had they not been taught in substance by the wise of all ages, and were they not urged, and in detail as well as in substance, by the pedagogical authorities of the present? Not having the background which enables the average teacher to discount educational theories by knowledge of actual school practices, and to interpret them as uttered in a Pickwickian rather than a literal sense, the zeal and sincerity which she brought to the application of these theories in the school room received a great shock.

The experience is but one illustration of the old, old fact. In social matters, theory is theory and practice is practice, and rarely shall the twain meet. The first is governed by thought, and perhaps in a way which gives confirmation to the contention of some "behaviorists" that thinking and speech are identical—with a minimum of test in action; the second is governed by habit, custom, routine, modified by necessary accommodations to immediate conditions, with a minimum of thinking that goes beyond the range of present circumstances.

What are the causes of the split between principles and facts, theory and practice, in education? One of them is the human and personal separation between theorists and practitioners. Most discussions concerning the relations between theory and practice are vitiated by neglect of this human factor. The real problem concerns the separation between two kinds of practitioners, one practising theorizing and the other practising details of executive work.

Theorizing is not used here in a disparaging sense: it is meant to include investigation into matters of fact as well as reflection upon the data which inquiry reveals. But in its very best sense, as matters are now constituted, educational research and reflection constitute an occupation which is remote from the occupation of teaching school.

Conditions in the latter occupation create and widen the breach. They are such that it is hard for the teacher to be anything but a teacher, and especially hard to be a student. This does not mean that teachers are in general not students; considering the amount of time at their disposal, they are, the best of them, quite devoted to increasing their knowledge of what they teach. But the conditions under which they teach are unfavorable to their being students of educational principles and of the application of these in their teaching. They are almost compelled to take educational principles as true in general but not applicable in practice, and to render them only lip service.

Many new and young teachers come to their work with enthusiasm for ideas; they, at least, are going to be different; they are going to apply what they have learned regarding children and education. How many older teachers talk to them in kindness rather than in cynicism to the following effect: "We too were like you when we began; we made things uncomfortable for others and in the end only for ourselves. Don't try to change things, if you are wise. Adapt yourself to existing conditions and make the best of them." And when the young teacher finds that his zeal for ideas comes to little, not so much because of overt opposition as because of delays, lack of materials, inertia, red-tape and routine, he usually ends by joining the ranks of those who pass on similar advice to the next generation of the zealous.

By the nature of the case the system is traditional, and it is of the nature of the traditional system to resist change; to perpetuate itself intact. Otherwise it would not be the traditional system. And a scheme of indifference, of yielding in details, and protective colorations of language and outward forms, has been found by long experience to be much more effective in self-perpetuation than is active antagonism to change. Fire is best extinguished by smothering; other methods let in air, and fan the flames. Energy is soon diverted to lines of least resistance. Schools are in many respects more open to change than most human institutions. Every two or three years there is a wave of something new which sweeps across the country, from methods of teaching penmanship, spelling and percentage to addition of new studies to the curriculum. Teachers are honestly perplexed when accused of over-conservatism; many of them know that things are already changing altogether too rapidly for them to do their best. But most of this change is in effect simply a direction of energy into channels where it will keep "reformers" busy on side-tracks. The forms of academic bookkeeping are altered while the substance of the business goes on unchanged. They relieve the conscience of conscientious teachers by giving them something to do which is novel and to which great expectations may be attached. Some of the most touted of present reforms are hardly more than devices for reconciling educators to the absence of thought by giving them new things to do.

A survey of educational literature, including contributions to educational conferences and conventions, will reveal that the contributions of the classroom teacher are insignificant, and in the case of primary education, virtually negligible. This fact is a register of the existing separation of educational ideas and educational practice. When the situation changes, there is a sure means of detecting the alteration. Teachers in class-rooms out of the experience of the class-rooms will write the bulk of educational contributions. Then we shall have a condition like that in the natural sciences where workers in laboratories as a matter of course furnish the bulk of scientific literature. But as long as the thinking is done at arm's length from actual teaching, the results of the thinking handed over ready-made to the teacher, the latter will not by the very nature of the case be engaged in thinking, and consequently the thought itself, the ideas, will largely evaporate in the process of so-called application. Reforms in theories taught to teachers and in administration and organization of schools will remain remote and ineffectual for the most part, or simply mark new styles in vocabulary, until classroom teachers are freed, and all thereby given a chance to become the authors and not simply the executors of educational ideas and principles. For that reason we look with growing scepticism on all plans of educational improvement which do not centre in the liberation of the teacher in the place where teaching is carried on: the class-room.

 The Drama of Intelligence The Discovery of Intelligence, by Joseph K. Hart. New York: The Century Company. $4.00.
November 19, 1924 The New Republic 300

Some discoveries require to be made only once. A new continent is perceptible and in a sense accessible to all the world so soon as its coast line is charted. A new idea, say the differential calculus, may be too recondite for a large public. But the few whose training does enable them to grasp to make it forthwith the basis of a superstructure of mechanical achievements susceptible to general use and appreciation. Such a thing be henceforth has a definite place in civilization. Its loss is impossible: the surrounding culture holds it fast.

"Intelligence" is like none of these things. Abstract principles, or daring feats of exploration, require intelligence for their inception and realization. They are products of the process; intelligence is the process itself. As a state of being it precedes the consummation of all discoveries. Wherever things are happening the mind is hard at work. But wherever men are gathered together, no matter how sodden with custom and tradition those particular individuals may have become, there is intelligence in the midst of them, a human quality, more inalienable than any customary rights, ready to take effect in action the instant circumstances require it.

To define this quality or process is a rather difficult undertaking as the intelligence testers have made abundantly clear. The difficulty arises from the fact that it is neither an organ like the mechanism of taste nor an occupation like the performance of eating. For one thing, it presumably goes on all the time with more or less intensity. No doubt both the organism and the institutional system are involved in its operations. Roughly speaking, the organism exhibits two opposite dispositions, each one equally the expression of the obvious structural economy of the human body: habit and intelligence. Human beings are disposed to drop into set ways of conducting their affairs. They are also extraordinarily restless, perpetually casting about with all sorts of random movements for a fresh grip on things. On the institutional side these dispositions spell order and revolution, the two ultimates of civilization everywhere. The social economy is always crystalline; it is also simultaneously more or less fluid. Any moment of history can be taken as the expression of a certain established system of social life. But it can also be taken as a turning point, an axis of transition. Civilization itself, which is only a longer word for man, is a perpetual amalgamation of habit and intellect.

Dr. Hart, being an educational philosopher, speaks of intelligence almost entirely in institutional terms. Its opposite, in his definition-by-contrast, is the folkway, custom, convention, in short, order. The life of the intellect appears to him, as to many sociologists of the present generation, a struggle of the liberated mind against the bonds of dogma. The things which interest him most in modern civilization are the evidence of change, growth, free movements, new institutions. Not so much any particular discovery of modern times appeals to him as the supreme justification of our civilization as the onward rush itself, the realization, increasingly, of movement, which is to say progress, as the central ambition of the human intellect. The triumph of the modern age is not the solution of problems set by an earlier order but the sweeping away of the order which set the problems. Dr. Hart sees this in the history of education. The whole gospel of modernism is the revolt against routine. The function of education is to cultivate the intellect; intelligence is inward freedom; ergo, the schools must be liberated from all rigid formulas. For the moment the formulas seem to have become too rigid and to have cracked in consequence, and intelligence may be seen all up and down the land peeping through, naked and free, ready, it would appear, to join hands all round and dance across the Arcadian meadows of the future swinging the garlands of perfect understanding.

Nothing could be more stimulating to the imagination than this picture. Exhibited in historical terms, as Dr. Hart presents it, the realization of the new freedom seems to be indeed the consummation of the noblest qualities of the human soul. To look back is only to see in the dim distance of ancient culture, murky with primitive folkways and savage despotism,the earliest glimmering of the light of reason. Further along the light steadies to a continuous gleam shining down the centuries to the present with ever increasing candle power: the light that never fails. This, our history, is a Promethean drama. There are many acts and myriad characters. No single version contains them all. Dr. Hart intends his to be the drama of the schools, and draws in the general background only to provide a setting in which to unfold the processes of education. His story is always interesting and sometimes exciting. Everyone who goes to school can understand it, and no one who cares about the adventures of the mind should fail to read it.

But it is not necessary for the appreciation of a play to confuse drama with reality. This account of European civilization is good theatre, as Stark Young says, but very conscious art. Like all art it selects and magnifies and generally heightens its effects to the greater glory of the play and exaltation of the audience. Dr. Hart is a playwright no less than the rest, though no more. His dramatic principles are precisely the same as those of James Harvey Robinson, for instance. They include, in particular, the assumption of the benighted savagery of our ancestors and its corollary, our own consummate cultivation, both quite contrary to fact. Thus Dr. Hart pictures primitive man as completely ridden by his bugaboos. "Primitive men are almost always tender-minded. They want security, escape from uncertainty, a world in which all questions have been answered, which taxes the mind in no unusual way." And so might we but for our savior, Socrates. There once was a man named Socrates. According to Aristotle, he discovered intelligence. "The discovery of intelligence was the greatest event in human history."

What delicious nonsense! The human intellect is an adventurous affair. But the moral of its perpetual struggle with habit and institution for fresh experience is not that of a single discovery and unitary dénouement. Audacious as our present ventures seem, they cannot, in the nature of things, be essentially different from the hazards of our ancestors of the old stone age. While as for bugaboos, how many voters have just now recorded at the polls their deep-set yearning for security, escape from uncertainty, a world in which all questions have been answered, which taxes the mind in no unusual way?

C. E. AYRES.