center.  We have been striving to reform our educational training, hoping for a reflex that would be sufficient to modify the entire school regime.  We have added domestic science, hoping thereby to reconstruct the school by inoculation.  We have looked to agriculture and other vocational studies as the magnetic influences of our dreams.  Something has been accomplished, to be sure, but we are still far distant from the goal.  The best that writers can do in their books or educational conferences can do in their meetings, is to report progress.

=The obstacle of conservatism.=—­One of the greatest obstacles we have to surmount in this whole matter of vitalizing school work is the habitual conservatism of the school people themselves.  The methods of teaching that obtained in the school when we were pupils have grooved themselves into habits of thinking that smile defiance at the theories that we have more recently acquired.  When we venture out from the shore we want to feel a rope in our hands.  The superintendent speaks fervently to patrons or teachers on the subject of modern methods in teaching, then retires to his office and takes intimate and friendly counsel with tradition.  In sailing the educational seas he must needs keep in sight the buoys of tradition.  This matter of conservatism is cited merely to show that our progress, in the very nature of the case, will be slow.

=Schools of education.=—­Another obstacle in the way of progress toward the vitalized school is the attitude and teaching of many who are connected with colleges of education and normal schools.  We have a right to look to them for leadership, but we find, instead, that their practices lag far in the rear of their theories.  They teach according to such devitalized methods and in such an unvitalized way as to discredit the subjects they teach.  It is only from such of their students as are proof against their style of teaching that we may hope for aid.  One such teacher in a college of education in a course of eight weeks on the subject of School Administration had his students copy figures from statistical reports for several days in succession and for four and five hours each day.  The students confessed that their only objective was the gaining of credits, and had no intimation that the work they were doing was to function anywhere.

=The machine teacher.=—­Such work is deadening and disheartening.  It has in it no inspiration, no life, nothing, in short, that connects with real life.  Such a teacher could not maintain himself in a wide-awake high school for a half year.  The boys and girls would desert him even if they had to desert the school.  And yet teachers and prospective teachers must endure and not complain.  Those who submit supinely will attempt to repeat in their schools the sort of teaching that obtains in his classes, and their schools will suffer accordingly.  His sort of teaching proclaims him either more or less than a human being in the estimation of normal people.  Such a teacher drones forth weary platitudes as if his utterances were oracular.  The only prerequisite for a position in some schools of education seems to be a degree of a certain altitude without any reference to real teaching ability.