Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/372

366 from the field of political spoils. These are the men who have invented the term 'fads and frills' to designate art, manual training, music and nature study. It must be theirs to learn that it will require something more than a stupid alliteration to stem the tide of those irresistible forces that are making the modern school the faithful counterpart of the modern world and an adequate preparation for its activities. The saving common-sense of the common people, when deliberately appealed to, will always come to the rescue of the schools.

2. The reactionary tendency is due in part to an extremely conservative element that still exists among the teaching force. For the most part, teachers who are extremely conservative were themselves brought up chiefly on the dry husks of a formal curriculum. They find it difficult to learn and to teach the new subjects. They dislike to be bothered by the assistance of special teachers. Accustomed to mass work both in learning and in teaching, they regret the introduction into the school-room of arts which demand attention to individual pupils.

3. The reactionary tendency has its roots even among the more progressive teachers in a vague feeling of disappointment and regret that manual training, correlation and nature study have probably not accomplished all that their enthusiastic advocates promised ten to twenty years ago.

The feeling of disappointment, we might say even of discontent, among the more thoughtful and progressive teachers, is what might have been anticipated. In the first place, public education has become a much more difficult thing than it was half a century ago. It has become more difficult for two reasons:

1. Because of the constantly increasing migration of population from the country to the cities. Children removed from rustic to urban life lose that most valuable education which comes from the work and the associations of the farm-yard and the fields.

2. Because of the enormous increase in immigration from abroad, and particularly because the character of the immigration has changed. Up to the middle of the last century the majority of our immigrants were of kindred blood with the American people and a large proportion spoke our language. Gradually, however, the tide of immigration, while swelling until it has now reached the enormous total of one million a year, has shifted its chief sources from the shores of the North and the Baltic Seas to the shores of the Mediterranean. The peoples of southern Europe, illiterate, accustomed to tyranny, without individual initiative, and habituated to a low standard of living, huddle themselves together in our large cities and factory towns under conditions inimical alike to morals, to physical well-being and to intellectual advancement. Teachers have a good right to complain that municipal authorities in permitting the over-crowding of