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ordinary observer as clearly inferior to the United States texts, and all the experts to whom they have been submitted, with one exception, agree that this is true with regard to the workmanship and material used.

SUMMARY

Summarizing for your convenience, therefore, our answers to the questions which we were asked by you to secure are as follows:

FIRST. Compared with the prices paid for similar books in other States in this country, the cost in Georgia is not only reasonable but actually considerably less than the average paid in the other forty-seven commonwealths of this Union.

SECOND. The California plan, which involves the purchase and equipment of a printing plant, managed by State officials, for the purpose of printing State school books, does not appear to be desirable for Georgia.

Six members agree to the foregoing:

M. L. BRITTAIN,

J. T. PEYTON,

H. C. SHUPTRINE,
W. J. NUNNALLY,
G. R. GLENN,

T. J. WOOFTER.

Five members of the Committee namely, Messrs. J. T. Peyton, H. C. Shuptrine, W. J. Nunnally, G. R. Glenn, and T. J. Woofter sign the following as the third and closing recommendation:

THIRD. We would not recommend the publication of our school texts by the Ontario plan. (Chairman M. L. Brittain believes that the Ontario plan is worth a trial.)

One member of the Committee, due to illness, did not participate in its findings, and one member dissented from the entire report.

DIVISION VI

THE STATE AND THE TEACHER

CHAPTERS XXII-XXV

CHAPTER XXII

THE TRAINING OF TEACHERS

THE selections for this chapter relate to the work of the normal schools, and the efforts being made by certain states to secure a supply of trained teachers by utilizing the high schools.

I. TRANSFORMING NORMAL SCHOOLS INTO COLLEGES [Pritchett, Henry S., in the 7th An. Rept. of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 1912, pp. 149– 152.]

How great a part personal and institutional ambition has played in the development of educational politics it would be difficult to say, but the results of it can be seen in every state where the divided institution exists. These appear usually in two forms: first, the endeavor of each institution to cover the whole field of education and the consequent duplications which ensue; secondly, the widespread tendency to drop the legitimate work for which the institution was founded in order to take up some other work, which appeals to the ambitions of its president, or of its board of trustees, or of its faculty or alumni.

Examples of the first sort have just been alluded to. Other examples in the educational history of Iowa, Colorado, Michigan, and various other states will readily occur to the reader.

Where three or four state institutions exist, this rivalry has inevitably led to much commerce with the legislature, to overlapping institutions, and in nearly all cases to a strenuous struggle for students. The three-cornered rivalry between the university, the agricultural and mechanical college, and the normal school in the states like Iowa and Kansas are typical instances of the results of such a régime.

A singular outcome of this situation in recent years has been the effort of the normal school in many states to transform itself into an arts college. The normal school is at best a singular institu

tion, seldom related logically to the educational system of its state. Its weakness from the educational point of view lies in the fact that it undertakes to make a teacher of a man or woman whose education is so limited as to afford slender basis for a teacher's training. From the time of Horace Mann, however, it has been the agency upon which our states have come more and more to depend for the training of teachers for the elementary schools, and particularly for the rural elementary schools, since the larger cities have in many cases provided agencies to train teachers for their own schools. Notwithstanding its educational isolation, some such agency as the normal school seems necessary at the present stage of our educational organization, and probably will be necessary for many years to come. When one considers that in many of the middle western states not more than ten per cent of all the public school teachers have had the equivalent of a high school education, one realizes that in order to obtain the necessary teachers for the common schools of the country, some agency must for a long time prepare a large number as best it may. One may well hope that the low standards of training for rural teachers now in use in many states may be raised, and that the necessary number of teachers may be forthcoming at a continually higher level, and that school teachers may soon be themselves fairly educated men and women. In any case the function of the normal school in our present situation is definite, clear, and of immense importance. It is therefore little less than astounding to find normal schools in so many states ready to turn aside from this definite and important work, in the effort to transform themselves into weak colleges, and this, too, in states where the number of such colleges is already larger than the ability of the population to sustain. This movement has arisen in some cases out of the ambitions of the heads of these institutions and of their faculties, who somehow have the mistaken feeling that the work of the college is more honorable and more desirable. In some cases it has been undertaken with the honest belief that the two institutions, college and normal school, would grow side by side, a result which would be against all our educational experience; but from whatever motive undertaken, it has inevitably involved these schools in politics.

An illustration of such legislation is found in the measure passed by the last session of the Wisconsin legislature to the following effect: "The Board of Normal School regents may extend the course of instruction in any normal school so that any course, the admission to which is based upon graduation from an accredited high school or its equivalent, may include the substantial equiv

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