No small part of the value of an educational exhibit lies in its esthetic quality, since this reveals not less clearly than the methods and results of school training the inherent genius of a people.  This International Exposition has been rich in this quality, on account both of the number of different nations participating and the care taken by each to give distinctive character to its display.  This is marked in the exhibits of elementary education, which in nearly all European countries forms a complete whole, distinct from other grades, and having the definite purpose of maintaining an established social order or national type through the intellectual, manual, and artistic training of the masses.  The presentation of elementary education as an independent unit indeed well accords with the conditions in nearly all countries excepting our own.  Elsewhere, as a rule, elementary education forms a complete system, having its separate administration, purposes, and ideals.  In this respect the United States presents a notable contrast to the chief countries of the Old World, and one strikingly illustrated in this exposition.  In our own country education is conceived as an integral process steadily developing from the kindergarten to the university.  To this conception corresponds the sequence of elementary and high schools united under a common administration and by close scholastic bonds.  Hence a measure of violence is done both to elementary and secondary education as here organized by the endeavor to view them separately.  On the other hand, a portion of the elementary education of foreign countries, notably of France and Germany, does not enter at all into the sum total of the impressions recorded by the jury of either group, because of the social distinctions that underlie in those countries the classification of schools as elementary and secondary.  These anomalous conditions affect particularly the classification and judgment of the various agencies for the training of teachers (that is, normal schools, teachers’ training colleges, and auxiliary agencies, such as normal classes in academies or other secondary schools, teachers’ institutes, etc).  In the chief foreign countries professional schools of this kind are easily classified by virtue of their administrative relations, but in our own country the different orders of pedagogical training merge into each other almost imperceptibly because they are all based upon the same fundamental conception of the teaching profession.

It is interesting to note in this connection that the exhibit of Great Britain and Ireland has avoided all confusion by the selection of the characteristic features of particular schools or of processes that have worked well in certain communities or pupil and class work of special significance.  This mode of exhibition accords perfectly with the private character of a large proportion of the schools of all orders in England and with the local independence throughout the