each other’s hair, pinch the arms of schoolmates who were reciting, and behave themselves in general as if they were savages.  The pupils lolled in their seats, passed notes, kept up an undertone of conversation, arose from their seats at the first tap of the bell, and piled in disorder out of the classroom while the instructor was still talking.  If the lessons had been tedious, one might perhaps at least have palliated such conduct, but the instruction was very far from tedious.  It was bright, lively, animated, beautifully clear, and admirably illustrated.  It is simply the theory of this school never to interfere with the spontaneous activity of the pupils.  And I may add that the school draws its enrollment very largely from wealthy families who believe that their children are being given the best that modern education has developed, that they are not being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school, and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants.  And yet soon afterward, I visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts of a large city.  I saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to their instructors, and to visitors.  The instruction was much below that given in the first school in point of quality, and yet the pupils were getting from it, even under these conditions, vastly more than were the pupils of the other school from their masterly instructors.

The two schools that I first described represent one type of the attempt that education has made to pioneer a new path through the wilderness.  I have said that many of these attempts have ended by bringing the adventurers back to their starting point.  I cannot say so much for these schools.  The movement that they represent is still floundering about in the tamarack swamps, getting farther and farther into the morass, with little hope of ever emerging.

May I tax your patience with one more concrete illustration:  this time, of a school that seems to me to have reached the starting point, but on that new and higher plane of which I have spoken?

This school is in a small Massachusetts town, and is the model department of the state normal school located at that place.  The first point that impressed me was typified by a boy of about twelve who was passing through the corridor as I entered the building.  Instead of slouching along, wasting every possible moment before he should return to his room, he was walking briskly as if eager to get back to his work.  Instead of staring at the stranger within his gates with the impudent curiosity so often noticed in children of this age, he greeted me pleasantly and wished to know if I were looking for the principal.  When I told him that I was, he informed me that the principal was on the upper floor, but that he would go for him at once.  He did, and returned a moment later saying that the head of the school would be down directly, and asked me to wait in the office, into which he ushered me with all the courtesy of a private secretary.  Then he excused himself and went directly to his room.