Home-Study Reform

In matters scholastic the sole guide and inspiration has been tradition. Like the Chinese wall which barred from entry the civilizing influences of modern times, the tradition of conventional methods in education has generally frowned upon new thought and plans not based upon precedents. It is our purpose to break an opening in this Chinese wall of educational traditions by forcing through it humane, common-sense innovations on a vital matterhome study. Has it ever occurred to the teacher that he deals with living material souls ? If so, then let them be treated as something more than material which must perhaps, figuratively speaking, be molded and handled to suit the artificial conditions of traditional origin and present convenience. It is, as a matter of course, easier to move along beaten paths than to make new roads which in the end may prove more advantageous. Unfortunately many of us are not ready for new doctrines when we find that they mean more work for the teacher. If the creed, the schools are for the boys and girls and not for the teachers, except in so far as the teachers are there for the pupils, be accepted, you will have at least one basis for the statements and experience herewith presented. What a school is, does not require definition. The teacher is the important factor of the school. The modern teacher has too often, per force of tradition and method, become a mere automatic recitation-receiving device and a machine lesson-assigning apparatus. This implies that lessons are assigned to school attendants. Less than 50 per cent of the pupils, as teachers well know, do the unreasonable amount of home study required of them; the other 50 per cent "kill time" at school. Just bear this in mind, however. The municipality, the state, and the United States have established eight hours as the legal day for manual workers. I do not think it right or even humane that we educators should work young 526