school where the value of these branches to the mass of the people is particularly great. Our university and college professors and high school teachers are better paid and more highly honored than the grade school teacher. Indeed there is a gradation of salary and honor from university professors to the primary teacher; yet, pedagogically and sociologically considered, the latter is of greatest importance. Education began with the abstract and the far away, rather than as common sense and pedagogical science teaches, with the concrete and the near-at-hand. This fact can be explained on the basis of conflict of economic interests. Only within a few generations has the working class reached a position in the community from which they are able to effectively voice their demands. Higher education remains, in many cases, still merely a form of what Veblen calls conspicuous waste. The so-called "finishing school" may be classed under the head of conspicuous waste. The sons of many wealthy men do not go to college because of a thirst for knowledge, but because it will give them social prestige. College life is conceived to be a form of club life. In Belgium, Germany and France, where the social spirit is better developed, where the frontier influence has not been felt for generations, the education of the masses,-useful education as contrasted with ornamental and purely disciplinary education-has advanced further than in the United States.

The educator, like the politician, has in the past clung to the theory that well-defined class demarka

tion does not exist in America; but recent innovations in education disclose an unconscious modification. It must soon be consciously and unreservedly accepted that there are classes and conflicting interests on this side of the Atlantic; and we must act accordingly. Leaders in education must recognize the existence of great social and economic inequalities, and must strive to reduce to a minimum the differentiations which are undesirable and which lead toward class hatred and class exploitation. History in modern times is a record of the struggle of the workers upward toward equal political, educational and economic privileges. The great movements in history have been consciously or unconsciously dominated by the struggle for a living, for economic betterment. The school, the college, the university and the professional schools should calmly and impartially investigate and teach the facts which social and industrial evolution present. When this is not the case, education may be, and frequently is, perverted from its true mission; it becomes an engine which builds up and strengthens class animosity and social rigidity. Education should benefit all classes, agricultural, commercial, industrial and professional, and the subdivisions within each of these classes. In the eye of the educator each should be of equal value. The school has hitherto been unduly influenced by the ideals, and has taught the ethics, the morals and principles which the commercial and propertied classes have upheld. It has entirely overlooked the fact that the ethical code of the

industrial worker and the ethical code of the agriculturist are both of necessity different from this and from each other. In the future, if education is to perform its proper functions, a somewhat different set of ideals must find a place in our scheme of education.

Industry and education in early days went hand in hand. "Under Medievalism the guild and the university were not far apart." Early formal education was, however, directed chiefly toward letters and literature. The present-day separation of industry and education is a result of the carrying down of old conceptions into modern times. When science, industry, commerce and agriculture were first recognized as proper fields for school work, it was natural, perhaps inevitable, that machinery and methods similar to those which had been applied to the teaching of the classics and mathematics should still be used. The segregation of students, rigid class systems, the isolation of the students from the practical things of life, and the cultivation of the scholastic ideals, are, with slight modifications, still adhered to. But a reaction is at hand. The problem is to develop along with the purely cultural and disciplinary work of education, new functions which will increase the industrial, social and civic efficiency of young men and young women in the present industrial era. Both government and education need "democratising" in the best sense of the term. Education is now concerned with much more than the teaching of reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, political history,

languages, literature, and the like; it must be an integral and vital part of the experience of every future efficient member of the community.

The recent modifications and additions to the curriculum are indicative of unrest or of dissatisfaction with educational results. Our educational machinery has proved inadequate because it was only adapted to the performance of certain limited tasks. Great modifications are necessary in order to construct a system which will perform the varied and complex educational work which should be done to-day. New and fundamental concepts regarding educational principles are now needed which square with centralized and systematized industry, subdivision of labor, large urban populations, increase in the numbers of the laboring population, the growth of organized labor, dissimilar populations, enlarged governmental activities, and a democratic form of government. When our public-school system was devised only one of these conditions, the latter one, was in existence. Just as our representative form of government has broken down in an unanticipated way, so has our educational system failed to respond fully to the last call of the nineteenth, and the first demands of the twentieth century. In the educational, as in the political world, a bitter struggle is being carried on between those standing for the old and those advocating a newer, less individualistic conception and philosophy; and the latter are daily gaining ground.

Public education has for its goal the welfare of the individual in society, and of society itself. Urban populations and world markets have taken away much of the old, illusory freedom of the individual; he can at present do little for himself. Organized society must now do much which it formerly omitted. Coöperation is the watchword of to-day. Society must concern itself with the economic and social welfare of each and every individual member. Society controls through the state one of the great institutions-the school— which molds, develops and strengthens its future adult members. The school of to-day is distinctively a social institution. It aims at producing more than the intelligent citizen; it also seeks to produce the efficient worker, the efficient consumer, the morally and physically well-developed man or woman. Improvement of men, environment and institutions are the three prime essentials in the betterment of society; better educational methods and ideals are necessary in order that the work along the three interrelated lines may follow the much searched after path of least resistance. True education in the broadest sense of the term, involving both teaching and research, which is concerned with the improvement of men, the material and social environment, and of the legal, economic, political and religious institutions is then the vital and fundamental problem of modern times. To vitalize education, to keep it abreast with the demands of our social and industrial life is the