=Statistics versus children.=—­Such teaching palliates educational situations without affording a solution.  It is so steeped in tradition that it resorts to statistics as it would consult an oracle.  We look to see it establishing precedents only to find it following precedents.  When we would find in it a leader we find merely a follower.  To such teaching statistical numbers mean far more than living children.  Indeed, children are but objects that become useful as a means of proving theories.  It lacks vitality, and that is sad; but, worst of all, it strives unceasingly to perpetuate itself in the schools.  Real teaching power receives looks askance in some of these colleges as if it bore the mark of Cain in not being up to standard on the academic side.  And yet these colleges are teaching the teachers of our schools.

=Teaching power.=—­Hence, the work of vitalizing the school must begin in our colleges of education and normal schools, and this beginning will be made only when we place the emphasis upon teaching power.  The human qualities of the teachers must be so pronounced that they become their most distinguished characteristics.  It is a sad commentary upon our educational processes if a man must point to the letters of his degree to prove that he is a teacher.  His teaching should be of such a nature as to justify and glorify his degree.  As the preacher receives his degree because he can preach, so the teacher should receive his degree because he can teach, even if we must create a new degree by which to designate the real teacher.

=Degrees and human qualities.=—­There is no disparagement of the academic degree in the statement that it proves absolutely nothing touching the ability to teach.  It proclaims its possessor a student but not a teacher.  Yet, in our practices, we proceed upon the assumption that teacher and student are synonymous.  We hold examinations for teachers in our schools, but not for teachers in our colleges of education.  His degree is the magic talisman that causes the doors to swing wide open for him.  Besides, his very presence inside seems to be prima facie evidence that he is a success, and all his students are supposed to join in the general chorus of praise.

=Life the great human interest.=—­The books are eloquent and persistent in their admonitions that we should attach all school work to the native interests of the child.  To this dictum there seems to be universal and hearty assent.  But we do not seem to realize fully, as yet, that the big native interest of the child is life itself.  We have not, as yet, found the way to enmesh the activities of the school in the life processes of the child so that these school activities are as much a part of his life as his food, his games, his breathing, and his sleep.  We have been interpreting some of the manifestations of life as his native interests but have failed thus to interpret his life as a whole.  The child is but the aggregate of all his inherent interests, and we must know these interests if we would find the child so as to attach school work to the child himself.