this subject have urged the idea upon our people that there is money in it. The peculiar circumstances of our situation are favorable to it. We want to show that there is just as much power in the unskilled as in the skilled brain, and we want to show our people that they must combine the two to be wealthy and powerful. They are thinking about it now in a way that would surprise you if you could know it. Some of you think that our people have no mechanical skill. I think it is in them. Think of it for a moment. Who built the first ironclad that changed the whole conditions of naval warfare? She was built at Norfolk, and came out and did what she could. It was the Merrimac, a Southern invention, built by Southern people, and if we had had a chance to get her out before the Monitor was made something would have happened that did rot happen. Where did the torpedo come from? If you will look at the naval history of the war you will find that twenty-seven or twenty-eight of the Federal ships were blown up by torpedoes during the war, and that wherever we got a chance we used these torpedoes. That has produced another change in naval warfare. Do you think that a people who did that have no mechanical skill?

Another illustration. I once heard a lawyer defending his client on the ground that he was a man of mechanical skill. It was during the war, and practical prohibition had gone into effect. We did not have corn enough in those days, and a stringent law was passed against turning corn into corn-juice. They prosecuted people for it. Now, this fellow began to furnish some of the article, and the authorities began to be suspicious; so he was arrested. When he was tried his lawyer proved distinctly that he had made it out of persimmons, and defended him upon this ground. The lawyer said: "Now, we all need mechanical skill, and that is what we have not had, and what we must have. Now, my client has set a brilliant example. He takes an utterly worthless article and manufactures a good drink; but he does not stop at that, he has improved his invention by putting a little corn into it, and he has gone on and improved it until he has learned to make a very respectable whiskey without one particle of persimmons in it."

Now, I believe that we have in the South advantages that no other people ever had. The fabric of our civilization has been broken up, but we have an opportunity to develop.

Some one asked Newton why he saw so much further than other men saw, and he said it was because he stood upon the shoulders of genius. We look upon the geniuses of the present time to see what they have done and will do. We look for the skill in their schools, for the skill in their mechanical schools, in their normal schools and universities, and especially for their skilled hands. We are looking for it and finding it, and you only have to look at Birmingham, Ala., to see that we have begun to get the dollars out of it. There is nothing to stimulate a man like getting some money out of something. We have just as keen an eye for

the dollars as any Yankee in the land. We feel that the way to have this power is to wed our raw material to our mechanical skill, and we will get it. I heard a story once of a boy whose father had died, and he wanted to have him prayed out of purgatory, so he paid a small sum of money to get his head out and his arms out, and then they demanded a considerable sum of money to get the rest of his body out, but the boy said: "No; I know my dad too well; I know that if he was so near out as that all thunder couldn't hold him." Now, what I have to say is that what we in the South are looking for is this: We must get the heads of our children out of the purgatory of ignorance, and then we must get the hands of those children out of the purgatory of unskilfulness, and when we do this we have laid the foundation for greatness and power, in North and South, upon a basis that will make this country greater than it ever was before, and we of the South intend to have just as large a share in that greatness as anybody else.

Upon the conclusion of Major Bingham's remarks, at 10.15 p. m., the convention adjourned.

SEVENTH SESSION.

The Department was called to order at 10 o'clock a. m., Thursday, March 17.

The PRESIDENT: I have the pleasure of introducing Hon. J. W. Holcombe, State superintendent of public instruction of Indiana. Mr. Holcombe read the following paper:

A SYSTEM OF GRADING FOR COUNTRY SCHOOLS.

The difficulty in grading a country school, still more in grading uniformly a number of country schools, lies not in devising a plan but in applying it; or, more correctly, it is exceedingly difficult to devise any plan which can be made to operate in the almost infinitely varied conditions and surroundings of school-work in the country. We may prescribe a perfect course of studies, comprising all the essentials of a common school education, and presenting each subject at its proper time and place, a course arranged exactly in accordance with the organic relation of the branches and with the order of mind-development, the work stated in detail, duly divided and arranged in logical and psychological order, but when it comes to enforcing such a course in the average country school-well, a little reflection on what such a school is, may well call a halt to the venturesome innovator, or will at least remove the wonder that this work of grading has been so long delayed. "A few years ago," writes a county superintendent, concerning the country schools, "what a boy studied was determined by his own caprice or by family tradition and custom. The teacher, confronted by forty or fifty pupils, found as many different courses of study, and was compelled to pass day after day in giving individual lessons to individual pupils. In such a school much time and energy were wasted, the greatest amount of

labor being required to produce the smallest result. It is easy to be seen, also, that such training-if it may be called training-serves to intensify family traits; that the studying of two or three branches to the exclusion of all others produces unsymmetrically developed minds, and fosters and aggravates individual idiosyncracies." Another thoughtful and scholarly county superintendent describes the partial, imperfect, hap-hazard work of the country schools, and the incomplete results of a child's training therein, substantially as follows:

Pupils have been allowed to pass through school, giving attention to but few branches and neglecting others equally essential; pupils are advanced rapidly in some studies, while in others they make slow progress because these latter were not commenced at proper times or given due attention; pupils are required to study the same parts of the same branches year after year till all interest is dead, or are promoted not from any evidence of scholarship but at the importunity of the child, the whim of the parent, when the book is worn out, or when the teacher wishes to appear as making progress. Two wrongs are done the child by allowing these systemless ways to control his career-he does not acquire all the knowledge that is his due, and what he does acquire is without regard to symmetrical development. "Who ever finishes anything in a country school?" is a current question. A majority of the children obtain a knowledge of only four branches and an imperfect knowledge of those.

Such testimony might be accumulated indefinitely, for innumerable have been the comments on this state of things, in which " a pupil might have finished the Fifth Reader and never have studied geography or might be quite proficient in arithmetic without any knowledge of grammar." Indeed, the picture of the old-time country school, preserved to us in song and story, is interesting and not uninstructive. The teacher was there and the birch or hickory also, and on benches of some kind the boys and girls, miscalled "scholars." Classification was carried to the last point of subdivision possible without dividing a pupil; that is, each pupil was a class to himself in every subject he studied. The teacher's time was occupied with hearing lessons, giving from two to ten minutes to each class (as defined above), and in whipping the unfortunates whom the tedious hours, vacant of occupation in well-directed studies, inevitably drove into mischief and disorder. The text-books were as varied as the generations from which they had been handed down. It is clear that in such schools a great deal depended on the genius of the pupils, on their having " a natural aptitude or affinity for knowledge."

If anything further is needed to show that the country schools had to be reformed, the consideration of two points will be sufficient: (1) Approximately three-fourths of the educational work of this nation is done in and for the country schools, as shown by the statistics of a State that may be taken as fairly representative, where 72 per cent. of the chil dren were enumerated in the country, 82 per cent. of the teachers were employed in the country, and 68 per cent. of the revenues were expended in the country. (2) The statutes of the States prescribe certain branches for instruction in the school, whence it is fair to infer that the

people will that every child should have an opportunity to acquire all of these branches as the constituents of his common school education. The country schools, then, the sole dependence of so large a proportion of the people, having failed of their purpose-to lead the children toward the possession of all their faculties, or, in Herbert Spencer's phrase, "to prepare for complete living "-it became manifest that something must be done to make them fulfil this purpose, that the law of the land might be complied with, and that the revenues of the people might yield a return. Grading was the expedient resorted to. It was conceived that an authoritative course of studies which should be generally enforced in the country schools was what was needed; and in spite of the numberless difficulties in the way, many townships, not a few counties, and several States have made efforts to secure uniformity of classification, as a rule, with steady progress towards success and most beneficial effects upon their schools. Though producing an unfortunate confusion, through the use of an old term in a new application, the process is generally called gradation, a graded course of studies being applied to each school though contained within but a single room.

This grading is analogous to the grading of schools in a city, but modified to suit the very different conditions. In the city a large number of children are to be provided for. About four hundred are assigned to an eight-room building. They are then parted into eight divisions, according to age and advancement (which will in the main correspond); each division is assigned to a separate room, in charge of a single teacher, and with a little transferring between neighboring buildings it can generally be brought about that the rooms will average fifty pupils each, and that all the pupils in a room will be of nearly the same age and will study the same subjects. The work thenceforward is simple enough. The teacher divides the pupils into two sections, hears each section recite twice in the forenoon and twice in the afternoon, with time to spare for general and special exercises, and thus within the school year carries all together over the subjects assigned to the grade. Next year these pupils are promoted to the next higher grade, and so are carried forward from year to year to the completion of the course. The conditions that surround the country school are very different from these, and the problem is far more difficult. To a modest house of one room, to be taught by a single teacher, come thirty to sixty pupils 6 to 21 years of age, and representing in their advancement all the eight lower grades of the city schools, with perhaps several of the four grades of the city high school added, and the law permits them to demand instruction in from six to ten different subjects. Certainly the gradation of such a school so that so many pupils may be taught so many branches by one person is no easy task. It involves three steps: First, arranging a course of study; second, placing or classifying the pupils under the appropriate divisions of the course; third, providing for the promotion of pupils from one division to another.

Of these the first is the least difficult, for the general principles upon which a course of studies should be constructed are commonplace in pedagogical literature. The law prescribes the subject-matter, usually reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, history, and physiology-called often "the common branches." Under certain circumstances one or more additional branches may be required, as algebra, Latin or German, or a science study. Let these subjects be outlined in a table which shall "state clearly and definitely the work intended," shall divide the work into parts "arranged in their logical and psychological orders-considering the parts themselves in the order of dependence and the relation of the parts to the child in the order of mindgrowth (I quote the terms of this recipe from a logical and psychological writer), and allot approximately the time for completing each part"and you have your course of study.

The work of classifying the pupils is the teacher's difficulty, requiring nice discrimination, perseverance and firmness, and much tact in dealing with children and parents. This subject may be dismissed with the passing remark that, the readers being the basis of the course of study, the pupil's proficiency in reading, somewhat modified by his knowledge of arithmetic, will determine his grade; and that even grading is not to be expected or insisted upon, but every pupil must at first be placed in each branch just where his advancement in that branch entitles him to go. Time and circumstances will bring about an even grading, as far as such is necessary.

The third-mentioned consideration-promotion-is, in connection with the element of time, one of the serious obstacles to a course of study. The city schools give eight years to the common branches which we are dealing with. With a separate teacher for each grade, there is no difficulty in adapting the grades to the school years, promoting at the end of each year. Indeed, through the necessary alternation of study and recitation the teacher can manage two grades as easily as one, and the so called half grades, with semi-annual promotions, result, in fact, though not in name, in sixteen grades.

In the country school it is not practicable to promote from grade to grade more than once each year, and even annual promotion is anything but a simple matter. The problem is this: If we allow eight years for the course, and promote each year, and give each grade four recitations a day, how many classes must our single teacher hear daily? Answer, thirty-two. Manifestly too many! So we must contrive to reduce the number of grades. Examining, then, the composition of the school, we find that a large proportion, approaching 30 percent., are the new pupils, near 6 years of age, who must be taught from the very beginning. Their number and the kind of instruction they require justify and necessitate forming them into a class by themselves. This will be the first grade, and the aim of the teacher will be to teach them to read in the First Reader, and to give them a start in numbers within the year.