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DEPARTMENT OF NORMAL SCHOOLS.

Centennial Thoughts on Normal Schools. By the President Dr. Ed-

ward Brooks.......

Personal and Acquired Gifts of Teaching. By H. B. Buckham.........

A Professional Course of Study for Normal Schools. By John Ogden..203

DEPARTMENT OF ELEMENTARY INSTRUCTION.

Characteristics of Froebel's Method, Kindergarten Training with illus-

trations. By Mrs. John Kraus-Boelte............................

Election of Officers........

.211

Address by the President, S. R. Thompson....

.237

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GENERAL ASSOCIATION.

First Day's Proceedings.

MORNING SESSION.

THE Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the National Educational Association met in the Academy of Music, in Baltimore, Md., at 10 o'clock, a. M., Monday, July 10th, 1876. After the calling of the Association to order by the President, W. F. PHELPS, the Rev. Dr. J. AVERY SHEPHERD opened the exercises with prayer.

The President then introduced His Excellency JOHN LEE CARROLL, Governor of Maryland, who welcomed the Association in the following words: We have been favored in this country during the past few months with a great number and a great variety of conventions. Of these our city of Baltimore has had her full share, and although some of our meetings have not been as exciting as those to which we might refer, on other questions, yet doubtless they have been replete with interest, and have accomplished fully the purposes for which they have been convened.

We are called upon to-day to welcome to our midst those who have gathered here from every quarter of our country, as the voluntary contributors to the greatest source of strength that we possess as a nation. Without offices to bestow upon expectant candidates, without the intense excitement that stirs to its depths the gathering of political bodies, we have the calm and quiet advocates of education, assembled to renew their allegiance to the cause, and particularly to propose the changes and improvements which experience has shown are required. Here, indeed, is a spectacle that may well call forth the admiration of an intelligent people, and honored is the State or city that is made the theatre of their useful deliberations.

We have a national, a patriotic feeling of pride in our great system of free education, and long ago the sentiments had become deeply impressed on the public mind that one of the first duties of the government is to provide for the instruction of its youth. Hence, in the strong remarks of one of our leading statesmen, "for the purposes of instruction, every man is subject to taxation in proportion to his property, and we look not to the question whether he have or have not children to be benefited by the education for which he pays. We regard it as a wise and liberal system of police by which life and property and peace and safety are secured. We

hope for a security above and beyond the law-in the prevalence of an enlightened moral sentiment, and knowing that our government rests directly on the public will, in order that we may preserve it we endeavor to direct into safe and proper channels."

These are noble words and purposes, well calculated to encourage all who are interested in the cause. Nor at the same time can we deny that our free-school system has become an engine of mighty power, that may be used for evil as well as good. How important, then, becomes these annual conferences of gentlemen who are interested in the great cause of education. How important that acting under the instructions of those who interest themselves for the public good, we should, in the eloquent language of Webster, "sometimes stop and take an observation, to see how far the elements may have driven us from our true and proper course."

This I take to be the right purpose of this assemblage here to-day, and feeling that the appreciation of the people of Maryland of the great blessings of free education can be second to none in our broad land, I have the honor, gentlemen, in their name, to welcome you to your labors, with the assurance and belief that they can only be directed for the benefit and prosperity of all.

F. C. LATROBE, Mayor of Baltimore, then welcomed the Association. He spoke as follows:

Gentlemen of the National Educational Association.-The Governor of Maryland has welcomed you to our State, I now bid you welcome to its chief city. We are glad that you have selected Baltimore as your place of assembling for the centennial year. The great cause of education, in the furtherance of which your society is so earnestly engaged, is regarded by our people with an especial interest, manifested by a system of public schools, which we believe compares favorably with that of any of our sister cities. In 1875 our schools numbered 125, with an attendance of 46,000 pupils, and were supported by an expenditure of $717,000. I make this statement to show that the people of Baltimore are alive to the necessity of a general diffusion of knowledge among our citizens.

The great liberality of a fellow-townsman has enabled us to establish the Johns-Hopkins University, which we hope is destined to be not only the pride of our State and city, but valued and appreciated throughout the whole country. I am sure that much good to the cause of education must result from your deliberations. Coming, as you do, from all sections of the Union, your experience and knowledge of the subject necessarily gives to your discussions a value from which those having control of this most important national institution cannot fail to derive great benefit. We in this city will watch your proceedings with no small degree of interest, and as you have honored us in the selection of your place of meeting, we would be false to our reputation for hospitality did we fail to extend to you a right hearty Maryland welcome to the city of Baltimore.

The President then responded to these words of welcome as follows: Governor Carroll and Mr. Mayor:-When nearly one year ago the American Educational Association assembling and deliberating in the salubrious atmosphere of the Northwest, received a telegram from Baltimore inviting the Association to assemble in this place in this centennial year,

we were perfectly well aware that we should receive a warm reception. Not that we expected the visitation that the clerk of the weather seems to have bestowed upon us; but we were aware of the notable and generous provisions made by the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland for the education of her people. The reputation of its splendid system of public schools, culminating in the Baltimore City College; the magnificent endowment of the Johns-Hopkins University, by the munificence of one of your citizens: the grand provision made here for your reformatory and correctional institutions, extending their blessings to every class and every form of human want and human suffering, had given to your city a reputation which is as extended as our country itself. It was on this account more than upon any other that we were induced to select this city as the location of the present meeting.

Allow me, therefore, in the name and in behalf of this Association to tender to you its grateful acknowledgements for your warm words of welcome, and for the generous reception which you have accorded to us. I will only say in this connection-for the temperature admonishes us that we should be brief-that it will be our earnest endeavor to show ourselves to have been worthy of the kind and generous words with which you have addressed us.

After this response he proceeded to deliver the following

INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the National Educational Association: Allow me to congratulate you upon the auspicious circumstances under which you meet to celebrate another anniversary of this cherished organization.

Nineteen years ago, a few earnest spirits assembled in that city of brotherly love where the Declaration of Independence was proclaimed, and a new nation was born, to inaugurate this movement designed to aid in giving full effect to the ideas upon which that nation was founded.

Some of these worthy spirits are with us to rejoice to-day. Others, through the chances and changes of time, have been borne to distant places and into different pursuits. Others, still, as we may reverently trust, are looking down approvingly upon us from the serene heights of that Better Country which is the exceeding great reward of life's toilsome march bravely and worthily endured.

It is meet that we should mingle our congratulations on this occasion, that the seed thus sown in weakness has been raised in power; that the acorn thus planted by loving hands, in 1857, has continued to expand until, in this Centennial of the Republic, it has become a vigorous oak in the grateful shade of whose wide-spreading branches are gathered the representatives of our whole country and of many lands beyond the sea.

It is a noteworthy coincidence, too, that while we are here to discuss the true principles of national greatness, welfare, and happiness, in that city where the inalienable rights of man received their noblest and best expression, there is an august assemblage of the people of every clime, to study in one vast object lesson the palpable demonstration of the truth that

knowledge is power; that liberty is the birthright of man; that virtue and intelligence universally diffused are not only a nation's greatest wealth and surest defense, but the world's most imperative need.

In that grand concourse we behold the representatives of our good old mother-country, merry England, upon whose dominions it is said the sun never sets. She is there to bear witness to the marvellous progress of her children through that brief cycle in a nation's history, a hundred years of peaceful development. And "sunny France," chastened by the humiliation of recent defeat, yet emerging, as we may fervently hope, from the darkness of despotism into the clear light of liberty, equality, and fraternity ; United Germany, whose "thinking bayonets," in 1870, reversed the disasters of 1806; imperial Russia, stretching across two continents, with longing eyes turned toward the Bosphorus and the plains beyond; Turkey, "the Sick Man;" classic Greece, nursery of sages and heroes; Italy, Queen of the Mediterranean; Austria, Spain, and the Norseland-all are there to participate in the great pageant in honor of the victory that free thought and free labor have won.

Nor are these all. In that eager throng we may see the representatives from India's coral strand; from China, the Flowery Kingdom, the land of Confucius, shut up for a thousand years within the impenetrable walls of her own exclusiveness, yet in these latter days opening her gates to the march of progress; from Japan, that marvellous example of a nation born to new life in a day-Japan, aglow with the throbbing pulsations of modern civilization; stirred to the very depths of its social and political being by American ideas, American institutions, and American industries, inspired and directed by American educators and American artisans.

And so, too, from Afric's sunny fountains; from the banks of the famous yet mysterious river; from the shores of the historic sea whose waters were parted that the elect of God might escape from the marshalled hosts of the vindictive pursuer; from Egypt, "ancient of days," whose traditions are lost in the mists of five thousand years; whose pyramids, temples, and obelisks are the mausoleums of buried labor, have come a new race of wise men to witness the miracles that have been wrought by free toil upon the free soil of this land of the Occident.

And last, but not least, we cannot omit, on this occasion, an honorable mention of that vast continent, linked alike in physical structure and political destiny with our own; that land where a Bolivar once struggled and triumphed in the cause of liberty; where a Sarmiento, prince among statesmen and patriots, still lives and labors, and where a Dom Pedro rules, earnestly seeking to enlighten and to bless. That land so long torn by internal dissensions, catching the spirit of the age, has vigorously begun the work of national regeneration, by sending the schoolmaster instead of the soldier abroad. The Argentine Republic, under the eminently wise and statesmanlike leadership of Sarmiento and his compatriots, recognizing that the common school is the corner-stone of a free government, is laying broad and deep the foundations of future prosperity. Normal schools are there being established in every province, under the direction of American teachers whose acceptable services command a most generous reward. And the Emperor of Brazil, like another famous monarch of the East, lays aside

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