From the study of things, the mind must be led by the teacher to a study of itself. It must be led to become conscious of its own activity, as it struggles to give an account of the world without, and of that more mysterious world within. It must be taught the method by which knowledge is acquired; and the laws of evidence, by which truth may be known to be truth. It must be trained into that philosophic spirit which will prevent a belief in that for which there is no evidence. It must be so trained that it can perform skillfully all the practical work necessary to this life, and in such a manner that a preparation will be made for the life to come. And when the work of such training is over, it will be seen that the mind which has been subjected to it has been set free from all that which can bind it to what is false in thinking or in acting.

Such teaching requires the most thoroughly-trained teachers in our primary schools, for a primary teacher can not take an intelligent step in his work unless he knows just what relation his primary teaching holds to the development of the child, and to his future scientific study. What is demanded most of all in this country, in so far as our schools are concerned, is that we look after our elementary teaching. We must have teachers that know how to use the real objects of thought in their teaching, and not simply (to their pupils) meaningless words. We need much more than this: we need teachers who can look up through all the grades of teaching above them, and know the relations the elementary ideas they are now exciting will hold to that scientific knowledge that depends upon them; and then, when the student comes to the reflective period of his work, he will find within himself that mental development and elementary knowledge he must have before scientific knowledge is possible.

After the reading of Mr. DICKINSON's paper, J. C. GREENOUGH, of the RhodeIsland Normal School, returned to the discussion of the previous question, "What should the normal school aim to accomplish in the teaching of natural science?"

Mr. Greenough. A course of study in our common schools should have for its object the development of the faculties of the pupils, rather than the specific demands of any trade or profession. In the common school, we are to secure manhood rather than the manipulations of the shop or of the office.

A sound mental philosophy affirms, every where and always, that the perceptive faculties are first in order of development. These are developed by the study of objects.

A knowledge of principles is properly gained by a knowledge of those facts which are the occasions of a knowledge of principles. The facts through which we come to a knowledge of the principles of natural science are learned by studying the objects of nature.

Hence, the conditions of mental development and preparation for the study of principles both demand that systematic courses of object lessons should be given in our common schools. If such lessons are properly given, pupils, by their own observation, will gain that knowledge of facts which will lead to a knowledge of the principles of natural science.

The study, then, of the facts which constitute the elements of mineralogy, of chemistry, of botany, and of other natural sciences, belongs to the common

school, and should not be deferred until the pupil has reached the high school or college.

But it is not so much the matter acquired in the common schools as the manner of study which is of importance. If the teacher attempts to teach the elements of natural science by means of books alone, the pupils will fail of real knowledge, and, what is worse, will fail to acquire that method of study which will insure future progress after their school-days are ended. In studying the elements of mineralogy or of any other natural science, pupils must see and handle that of which they are to learn. Under the guidance of a skillful teacher, pupils should find out by their own observation the facts to be learned. Thus, pupils will be trained to habits of accurate observation. They will be fitted for a life-long observation of the phenomena of nature.

To prepare teachers to teach the elements of natural science should be one of the objects of every normal school. A large majority of the pupils admitted to our normal schools enter without any knowledge of the facts of natural science, and consequently need elementary courses in the different departments of natural science.

Normal-school pupils should, then, be taught by means of objects that which they are afterwards to teach by means of objects. But in order that, as teachers, their work may not be often a mere repetition of facts they have learned at the common school, in order to prevent aimless teaching, the pupils in our normal schools must master the outlines of those sciences to which they would introduce their pupils by means of object lessons. Every teacher must know something of the end, before he can make a good beginning. Before a teacher can select the facts which are to be learned by a class, he must understand clearly the principle to be reached through the study of the facts. Before a teacher can teach the facts he has selected, he must understand the ways in which the pupil will be led to gain knowledge for himself.

It is evident that both the normal school and the common school should be furnished with cabinets for teaching the elements of natural science. We have in many sections large buildings, and buildings that are well adapted to the work of instruction, but very few are adequately furnished. Year after year, in our educational meetings, the truths of mental philosophy are repeated, while in too many of our schools the laws of mental growth are sadly disregarded. The lack of the objects of study in our schools is one great cause of the practice of teachers falling so far behind their philosophy.

Mr. J. C. GREENOUGH was followed by Mr. DwIGHT, and Mr. Z. RICHARDS, of Washington, D.C.

Miss DELIA A. LATHROP, of Cincinnati, read a paper on

TRAINING SCHOOLS: THEIR PLACE IN NORMAL-SCHOOL WORK.

The term "normal-school work," as here used, I understand to mean all the special educational appliances employed for the preparation of teachers, as a class, for the discharge of their professional duties. These are, in the main, state normal schools, county institutes, and, recently, city training schools.

In order that the especial work of the last may be clearly defined, it will be necessary to consider what the former are adapted to, and what they must necessarily leave undone.

STATE NORMAL SCHOOLS.-These schools originated in a lack of facilities for obtaining the kind of knowledge demanded by the teacher of the common school. Energetic boys could work their way into the village academies and, by dint of extra study, into the colleges; but the poor country girl, however ambitious, was not able so easily nor so completely to conquer her difficulties. If she by perseverance forced herself into the academy with her brother, she did not find its course of study adapted to her needs. She demanded, both for discipline and knowledge, a thorough treatment of the elementary branches, and could not afford any time for the merely ornamental in education. So the state did well to open a way by which ambitious, book-loving young people might get the coveted knowledge with least embarrassment and in the shortest time, on condition of their rendering a return to the state in public service, for a reasonable length of time, as teachers in its schools. In the adaptation of means to ends, it wisely made these schools practical and thorough. It left out of its curriculum the accomplishments, and aimed to give only that which would be of immediate application in common-school work. And so the state normal schools have been excellent free seminaries. Beyond this there has been little especially distinctive in them, save, perhaps, the reading some where in the course of an author upon school management, and the occasional conduct by the pupils of some of the recitations of the school. You will agree with me that the leading idea in them has generally been to give their pupils the necessary education, i.e., the necessary complement of facts, to become efficient teachers; and when it has been supposed that this was accomplished, they have been graduated with state honors.

The inducements to young men in other directions are so great, and the intellectual pursuits for women so few, that these institutions have always had a large proportion of young women—indeed, they are now coming to be practically schools for young women. From the beginning they have gathered many of the brightest and the most capable of these from the surrounding country. But when they are graduated from them they do not go back to the country. Every young woman who, after months- perhaps years-of anxious financial planning, finds herself actually within the walls she has longed so to enter, is thoroughly filled with the most complete and satisfactory consciousness that she is for ever done with the perplexities and hardships of the district school-she expects professional preferment as the reward of effort. Then, again, the intellectual awakening they receive gives them a taste for and a desire to avail themselves of the refinement and opportunities of the cities and large villages-so the little bands of graduates, who have been sent out year after year, have been turned aside into the private schools, or gathered into subordinate positions in the great graded schools of the larger places.

It would be interesting to know how many graduates of any of the state normal schools of the land are actually teaching in the country district schools. Very few who by their success merit any professional consideration. These

state normal schools have never been able to take direct and commanding hold of the country schools.

THE COUNTY INSTITUTE.-As the state normal schools have found themselves unable to reach directly the great mass of teachers, this other agency has been introduced for normal instruction. The teachers of a county or section of a county have been annually called together, to avail themselves of this means of preparation for their work. But comparatively little purely professional work is done at these gatherings. Their management is left to local committees, who are largely without experience in or knowledge of the work intrusted to them. The committees are always changing, and the work consequently is always an experiment. The teachers employed in them are not chosen on account of any especial talent for training teachers in professional work. There are no examinations for admission; there is no classification of the pupils, no study required or expected. There is no consecution of plan from year to year. There is no handle by which a board of institute instructors can take hold of the work in these temporary schools. And yet, the idea of these institutes has been almost entirely an academic idea. They have been held before the general examination of teachers, to strengthen them for these annual tortures. Every one sees that as a means of securing scholarship these schools must fail, for, with the ablest instruction in the world, with no plan, no classification, no study, and the limited time allowed, but only a little superficial work can possibly be done. The main value of them has been of a social nature, together with the inspiration to study they have given to their members.

TRAINING SCHOOLS.-This term as it is here used was first, in this country, applied to a city normal school in Oswego, in this state. This school was exclusively devoted to the study of the philosophy of education, and to the consideration of methods of teaching and the practical application of these methods with classes of children. This I believe to have been the first purely professional school for teachers in the land. Its first pupils were all teachers, most of them men and women of ripe experience and acknowledged success. They came together day after day for a year, after the duties of the day in their respective school-rooms were done, and discussed their work, tried to look at the educational questions which presented themselves at every angle, endeavored by reasoning and experiment to settle educational difficulties and to leave the way smoother behind them than they found it. With that first class of pains-taking, self-sacrificing teachers, a new era of professional instruction was introduced, which has been slowly modifying all our normal work. The idea upon which this school was based you perceive to be entirely different from that of the others we have been considering. The academic preparation was assumed, and the teachers addressed themselves entirely to professional instruction. A school of this character is what I understand by a training school. It may teach what are some times termed "Oswego methods" or any other educational methods. It does teach a philosophy of education and a method and its application. It admits persons who have attained to the required standard of scholastic training and introduces them to the

peculiarities of their profession. It tries to give them some comprehension of the character of the human mind, to impress them that education is a growth and that it is the business of the teacher to furnish stimuli for mental exertion and then to possess his soul in patience while the work goes on.

It discusses the pros and cons of school management. It considers the subjects ordinarily taught in the schools and attempts to decide the proper order for presenting them, and the plans to be resorted to for doing it most successfully. It takes its pupils into a school-room of children and lets them see skillful teachers do the work upon which they have theorized, and then sets them about the application of their theories in actual work with classes of children. In short, its office is to take bright energetic school-girls, and to lift them up to the dignity of thoughtful, judicious, self-reliant young women, capable of assuming the responsibility of the care of the souls and bodies of the children which the people will commit to them.

Office of the TRAINING SCHOOL.-I am asked to say to-day What can be done with this training school-in our educational system. A satisfactory answer to the utilitarian -"What is it good for?"-is the shibboleth which all candidates for favor must satisfactorily pronounce for us before they are entitled to our consideration. The day is past when the state should put upon its normal schools the burden of ordinary academic instruction. The facilities for education are every where so abundant, the public schools are or may be so well conducted and so thoroughly taught, that every ambitious young person can procure a good education, in the ordinary acceptation of that term, in almost any community. The state is unwise to use its money to furnish a set of appliances to do a work whose accomplishment it has already provided for in another way.

Again, if the teacher's profession, as expressed in the system of normal instruction in the country, would make itself felt, it must capture the high places in the profession. While the state normal schools are industriously devoting themselves to elementary instruction, men who have no sympathy with them step directly from the colleges into the most elevated places in the teacher's vocation, and from their hight look with quiet scorn upon the normal graduate occupying a subordinate position. These men have been in the past and are to-day the great barriers to educational progress. Normal instruction is to them but milk for babes. They look upon these professional schools as apologies for lack of scholarship, and know by their own experience that scholarly attainments alone are a sufficient passport to good salaries in the most eminently respectable positions in the schools. Not having been obliged to serve the apprenticeship that you have served in arriving at your eminence, they have never so much as thought whether there be a philosophy of education, have never carefully considered educational plans and methods. Have they not devoted four years of their vigorous young manhood to climbing from basement to attic through some college course, and who shall question their superior fitness for any educational position? So it happens that in many instances the keen-sighted, professionally-educated women in subordinate positions are thwarted in all their superior plans by the stupid conservatism or conservative