Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/515

Rh schools will never take their place as true culture schools. There is in Europe, and notably in Germany, a strong nationalistic element in current educational thought. We have a national spirit here in America, but it is apt to take a bad form, a form well expressed in that street cry familiar to you all—"America for Americans"—a cry, by the way, that is commonly uttered with either a brogue or an accent. But the national spirit that we want to cultivate is something quite different. We do not want national pride so much as we want national interest. This can be done by concentrating attention upon the national life, the national problems, the national literature. Furthermore, by this means we could hope to truly nationalize our very heterogeneous population, and weld it into one nation; not one as against the rest of the world, which is the spirit of the cry "America for Americans," but one nation strong enough and alive enough and good enough to work sturdily with the rest of the world toward that federation of the nations which is the dream of every lover of humanity.

The three hours a week are given to the study of obvious solecisms and crudities, and to the reading of American authors—Burroughs, Emerson, Thoreau, and others. The instruction fails in not giving the boys a command of the mother tongue, and in not arousing them to a sincere national life. It makes a brave attempt to do this, and it only fails for lack of time.

In the matter of foreign languages, much the same thing must be said. At first only modern languages were taught, and many of the schools adhere to that practice. In Baltimore, only German is offered; in Boston, only French; in Philadelphia, it is German or French; in Brooklyn, German or Latin, with a chance for some French later; in St. Louis and in Denver, Latin, German, and French are electives; in Chicago, only Latin is offered, with French the third year; in San Francisco, German, French, and Spanish are elective; and so on. I am quoting at such length from these representative schools both to show how variable the practice is, and also to point out that in the more progressive Western schools the studies are largely elective. The customary thirty periods a week are required, for either three or four years, but each student makes out his own roster, subject to the approval of the head master. Here, again, I think they are much ahead of us. In the older Eastern manual training schools the boys take their German or French but twice a week during the first and second years, and three times a week during the third year, and I am afraid that they come out of the school unable to read or write or speak the language with any degree of practical fluency. The time is too short and too scattered.

In the second year history appears in the curriculum—ancient,