thls matter; that we are in earnest. When we appear at primary meetings and show that we are disposed to use the political influence we have, we shall succeed, and not before. GEO. S. ORMSBY: I am in favor of the resolutions, because I do not think it wise in this Association to run its head against a wall. It is not hard enough to stand it. This General Assembly will not pass the bill creating the office of county superintendent, and we might as well accept this as a fact. If there is any advantage in taking another.course, let it be done. We shall gain something, and from an advanced standpoint, it will not require so great a stride to reach the county superintendency. A. J. RICKOFF: I consented to this report of the committee, being a member of it; but I must confess that I do not sympathize with those who have no hope in the matter. It was only four or five years ago that the question of county superintendency came up before the Legislature of Michigan. It failed. I believe that four-fifths of the Legislature pronounced against the measure. The next winter, however, the measure was carried by four to one. We have seen such revolutions in Legislatures all over the country. It is not impossible that the Legislature of Ohio is somewhat like the Legislatures of other States. I don't know but that it would. be better to take the first of these resolutions and pass that, and then leave matters before the Legislature to the action of our State Commissioner. If we can get in an appeal with any possibility of success in favor of the establishment of district institutes, I think he will do so. It is very possible that we may meet with success, even before the present Legislature. The Legislature of Ohio, as every other Legislature in the United States, is anxious to promote the interests of the common schools. I believe that if we take the proper means to inform them what is good for the common schools, and give them time to rest, as they have had this summer, we shall be able to get the bill into the House at the first of next session. I think we had better pass the first resolution and pass by the second. ion on the report of the committee. suggest a divis ERRATA. For "varnish " p. 269, 1. 39, read banish; for "lies" p. 270, 1. 38, read lie; for "human" p. 274, 1. 10, read humane. EDITORIAL NOTE. We present this month the fullest report of the proceedings of the Ohio Teachers' Association given in its history. The discussions were reported by J. G. ADELL & Co., phonographic reporters of this city, and publishers of the Ohio Convention Reporter, who were engaged for the purpose by the Executive Committee. Their reports will be found remarkably accurate. The discussions are a credit to the Association, and the addresses and papers are equal, at least, to those of former years,-which is compliment enough. We feel that a majority of our readers will vote this number of the MONTHLY worth full one-half of the subscription price for a year. It is more than double size. The account of the entertainment at the Deaf and Dumb Institution will be given next month; also a report of the Superintendents' Association. Two ideas have hitherto prevailed with reference to education. One side thinks that it should be a cramming process, or at best, a nourishing one. "Facts," said Mr. Gradgrind, "are what we want." Under this system, the pupil is made to amass particulars ad infinitum. This is merely a training of the sensuous element of the mind, for particulars are presented to us through the senses. The second form lays stress upon the word discipline. It has the notion that man is muscle generally, and hence that the mind grows by gymnastic training suited to it. Unfortunately for this side, it seizes the whole matter formally or abstractedly, and hence the mind is disciplined by studying things not valuable in themselves. It therefore degenerates to the same stage as the previous one. For, since it is considered a matter of indifference what one studies, and the manner is thought the only thing of importance, it forms the habit of studying those very particulars, amassing lumber-yards and stone-quarries of atomic facts. Thus it happens that the cultivation of attention is the good sought. But a person may confine his attention to the Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the habits of turtles and beetles, and acquire a wonderful power of attention, and thus, according to this view, have discipline of mind. Or, again, this may take the form of memor *Superintendent of the Public Schools of St. Louis. izing etymological trash from the lumber-room of antiquity, until a reaction takes place, and the other side asserts itself and says again, "We want immediate objects." Thus it is in our own time that we see the so-called " objectlesson" system arise in opposition to the discipline system in vogue. "Let us know what is." "Let us learn from the object itself, and not manipulate words." The learner should see, hear and feel for himself, say these new lights in the educational world. How plausible all this is, and how legitimate, too, in its sphere,— its narrow sphere! But how subversive of all education when it is made the whole scope. For we can see, hear and feel, only immediate objects. No object that possesses universality can be thus seized, and here all the ultimate results of science must be ignored by that system if it would be consistent. Can we present to the senses a single necessary truth? Can God, freedom and mortality be thus cognized? These require rather the profound reflection of the soul into itself. The mind must rather arise out of the senses and the external; the inward light must shine so that by its mild radiance the eternal verities may become visible. In fact, the object-lesson system, as enunciated by its advocates, completely inverts the relation of the knower to the known; instead of giving the mind tools to subdue and dissolve the external fact with, it tells us rather that the external fact is the true already, by which we must mould the mind. Thus, instead of teaching knowing to be a process by which we dissolve the external and unknown into the internal and known, we should rather be taught the opposite by such a system. Therefore, that system is perforce obliged to ignore at every step its fundamental pre-supposition, and do the opposite of what it preaches. There is no more instructive lesson in pedagogy than the history of Pestalozzi. In it we can trace the three stages of objectteaching, and see where it ends and what good it achieves. Let him who will do this, consult the writings of Carl Von Raumer, himself a pupil of Pestalozzi. Pestalozzi lived in the time when Europe was done to death with formalism, and the time was preparing slowly and surely to burn up in one vast conflagration all these worn-out costumes in which empty pretension still strutted about and seemed to direct. The French revolution and the Napoleonic thirty years' war were at hand. Rousseau had lifted up his voice and pro claimed Nature. Let us all go back to a state of nature and free ourselves from these irksome constraints that society has imposed upon us. Chateaubriand in his Atala paints for us the blessed life of nature led by the North American Indians; and Pestalozzi sets out to reform pedagogy on this plan: "Let us teach real objects," says he, "and eschew the learning of names and artificial distinctions." He took for granted that the immediately perceived existence is the true. But language is more correct; if the abiding is the true, then the name "horse" is truer than any individual horse, for it has outlasted a thousand generations of individuals, and has proved itself to stand for the genus or species and not for the mere individual. The species lives, but the individual dies. No one could defend the immortality of man except on the ground that in the thinking being the individual and the genus are identical. The immediate objects of the senses are continually changing, but the kind, the species, the genus, abides, and to this the name applies. And hence it was a matter of course that Pestalozzi went, straightway after his tirade against names, and used names to a superfluity. Such was the case. He found that he could not fix anything until he named it, and hence his whole teaching became a teaching of names right away. "See this hole in the wall," shouted Pestalozzi; and his pupils screamed, "I see this hole in the wall." "See this long hole in the wall." "I see this long hole in the wall," etc., etc. So the object got named, and its properties got joined to it one by one. Then Pestalozzi after much experience began to see that if he went on taking the real world just as it presented itself, he might fritter away all the time in a department that had not the remotest relation to man's true interests, and hence he began to select certain spheres of objects, and thus admitted a new contradiction. Attention is now confined to special objects, and of course the others are to be expressly ignored. If you give your attention to this special object, you must perforce neglect the thousand other constantly recurring objects that pass before the senses. But now Pestalozzi came upon a rock upon which his system foundered. For when one sets out to determine what objects are important for man to examine and select in preference to all others, he has got the whole problem of life before him and can not solve it by object-lessons at all. Pestalozzi, however, went bravely to work to get an exhaustive classification. He systematized and tabulated, but it was all in vain; he needed a system of philosophy to give him the comprehensive views required for classification, and hence could arrive at nothing fixed, or free from contradiction; and, what was worse than all, he found his system becoming identical with the previous educational ideas. For he had to have books to contain those long tabular lists, and they never could be used without study, and study too of names almost exclusively! And thus the experience was made, that all education drifts into the same channel, and amounts at last to the teaching of the conventionalities of intelligence-tools of thought. Pestalozzi began with the intention to elevate the natural over the spiritual, to dissolve the subject into the object rather than the contrary. He virtually inverted his theory and "builded wiser than he knew." I would not be understood as denying all positive results to Pestalozzianism. After the system of teaching grows formal for many years, and finally the school becomes a machine, producing nearly lifeless products, so that the diploma is only a label certifying to the fineness of the flour, after the extreme is reached, suddenly from the opposite side there commences a reaction which more or less resembles Pestalozzianism. It starts out with the laudable intention of arousing the mind to self-activity. The method has been named the "waking up" system. Its advocates sometimes claim that Pestalozzi revolutionized education by initiating the "method of giving the thing before the name.” This is rather a thoughtless assertion; for if a teacher were to give no names at all, he would be reduced to pantomime or dumb show; he would act charades. A little attention to the practice of such teachers will convince one that they commence, like all other teachers, with very general names at first, and gradually draw the attention to more and more specific properties (by names); they define the object more closely, and name it, thus proceeding from the vague and general to the specific, using a visible and tangible object simply to confine the attention. Thus The startling object arouses the attention only while it is new; so soon as it becomes familiar it becomes monotonous. Pestalozzi found his pupils continually falling into mere parrotlike repetition or imitation. Habit is death to free, spontaneous action, but it is also the form that all subordinate action must take. The life of spirit must be indicated by its spontaneity manifesting itself on continually higher planes, like the plant which continually transcends its last year's growth and leaves it to become mere dead wood, while the sap circulates in a new |