of the institutions of higher learning. For a time there was little force available to spend on popular education. But economic instruction is now filtering down from the colleges, and the attitude of the real leaders of economic thought is fairly represented by Professor Laughlin, of the University of Chicago, when he says:

The work of research, however brilliant, is in a way of no greater importance to the good of our nation than that elementary teaching of economics to the great masses who never enter a college, but who form a majority of those who enter the polling booth.

THE TEACHER AS A SOCIAL-ECONOMIC POWER REUBEN POST HALLECK, PRINCIPAL BOYS' HIGH SCHOOL, LOUISVILLE, KY. The social forces have helped to accomplish all the greatest reforms of the centuries. The highest type of economic development never comes without healthy social growth. The genius of the twentieth century is calling to teachers to stop rainbow chasing for a few years and to learn to apply some of those great social truths which our sainted mother, the nineteenth century, left us as a legacy.

In order to have the greatest economic value the teacher must be social. In Switzerland higher wages are given to a good-natured milkmaid, who treats the cow kindly and sings to her while milking. It has been found that the cow under such treatment gives more milk. Under similar treatment pupils show increased mental and moral development.

The teacher who is anti-social commits a crime if he does not immediately follow some other vocation. Those vested with authority in the educational field, whether boards of education, superintendents, or principals, who try to rule teachers by the anti-social feeling of fear, are an abomination in this new era, as is also the teacher who tries to secure results from pupils by making them afraid. The slave-driver with his lash did not secure for the South the benefits that have come from free and willing labor.

The teacher who would be a social economic power must learn and apply certain social theorems which psychology offers. Take the law of suggestion, which is so powerful in school and society. Suggestion deals with actions as well as with ideas, and it is the great social law of psychology. The power of suggestion is merely the tendency which one person feels to carry out the action indicated in an idea implanted in his mind by another.

The teacher who does not know the power lurking in suggestion is as dangerous in a schoolroom as a boy brandishing a revolver which is loaded, altho he is unaware of the fact. Every live idea is "loaded,” and it will do either good or harm. I have known teachers to suggest to their classes more unsocial actions, more forms of disorder, more acts of doubtful morality, than the most brilliant rascals in the class could have devised.

I can remember how a temperance lecturer made my childish mouth water, the muscles of my throat contract, and an incipient arm movement develop by describing a sparkling, cool drink of champagne with its seductive fizz. His immediate "don't" was joined to no motor idea. I remember wishing that as fine a glass of champagne as he described was within reach of my arm. I have known teachers who habitually violated the most important psychological laws by suggesting vivid ideas of evil courses of action, thinking that a "don't" idea, an idea without form and therefore void, would inhibit the suggested action.

In a school where I once was, a snapping-match happened to be accidentally stepped on during chapel exercises. The principal then gave a vivid description of how wicked boys would take sharp jack-knives and cut the heads off snapping-matches and scatter them on the floor. The ideas of action thereby suggested were so clear and forcible that I thought what a nice thing it would be to have a sharp knife and a box of matches. There had at last been suggested in school one kind of action to which I felt myself equal. I wanted to do something; I didn't know what, but the kind principal had finally suggested the "what." For the next three days the school was in Fourth of July disorder. This might have broken up the school, had not a young psychologist on the teaching force asked the principal to tell the school that a long-wished-for excursion would be given the boys, if each one would get a vaulting-pole and practice with it in order to cross a stream where there was no bridge. If any more matches were brought to school, the excursion would not be given. Some of the larger boys who wanted to go threatened to thrash anyone who brought more matches to school.

As a corollary of the psychology of suggestion, we may frame the following theorem: Dislodge an idea of wrong doing, not by a "don't " idea, but by a "do" idea. If the "do" idea is a social one, it will have quadruple power.

Imitation is another social law. It is really a child of suggestion. Here the first impelling force is an action which begets in the child's mind an idea, a tendency toward a similar action. The idea of an action always tends to complete itself and to produce the action. The more social the community or the school is, the more powerfully does imitation work. In a well-directed school of large numbers, the pupils learn more from unconscious imitation than from the direct instruction of their

teachers. The folly of confining a pupil to the teaching of a private tutor is thus apparent. Such a child will tend to grow up unsocial. If at a future time he must do business with the outside world, he will be compelled to learn from associating with it at a time when there is no guiding hand to direct him. Social life should be taught both at school and at home under the direction of such a guiding hand.

Intelligent sympathy is a complex power which has never failed to

move the world. Whenever a teacher is found capable of displaying intelligent sympathy, the child-world will sit contentedly at his feet. Suggestion and imitation will work with double power. The old type of schoolmaster determined to adapt the child-world to himself. Sympathy requires the reverse step. The teacher must thru imaginative guidance reshape himself to fit that world. The teacher has been a child once; the child has never been a grown person. Psychology analyzes for us the basal elements of sympathy, and it is wise for every teacher to review them frequently. To the teacher who would unlock human minds as well as human hearts, it should be said: "With all thy getting, get sympathy." Such a teacher is not only a social power, he is an economic power as well. He can raise to the fourth power the productiveness of a school, measured by both intellectual and moral growth.

One effective way in which to develop pupils both socially and intel lectually is to make them do something for others as well as for themselves. Unless they are in some way taught to minister to the wants of others, they can become neither social nor economic powers in more than the barbaric acceptation of the terms. I protest that no single study or pursuit, whether manual training or English composition, is absolutely necessary for social growth. Either may be absolutely dwarfing; in fact, both as taught are usually dwarfing to social and imaginative growth. Young Indians learned manual training before any of our modern manual-training schools were dreamed of, but the Indian did not grow up a social being. I believe that English composition may be as productive of social development as manual training, altho in both subjects. everything depends upon the teacher and his methods.

Since English composition is ordinarily called the most unsocial of subjects, let me suggest one of the ways in which it may be humanized and made palatable to the young. Less than two years ago there came to my school a letter bearing an English stamp and addressed "To the head boy." The writer, a brown-eyed English schoolboy, not quite fourteen, evidently tried to interest the "head boy" in his English school, sports, and home; and he succeeded. He then wanted to know something about Kentucky — its Indians, for instance. The letter had mistakes enough in it to make it seem human, but it was written for the love of it. That little Columbus had sent the letter out on a voyage of discovery to far-off Kentucky, and it proved a social stimulus to me and all my pupils. I read the missive to fifteen hundred people, and I noticed that they were sufficiently interested to lean forward to listen. The "head boy" needed no prompting to answer that letter.

I have made experiments enough in this interchange of letters between pupils to prove that the social stimulus thereby developed gives life and vigor and interest to English composition and improves it more than a I See HALLECK's Psychology and Psychic Culture, pp. 257,258,

hundred per cent. This coming year I intend to have an organized exchange of letters between one class of the pupils of my school and of an English school, and each one of my pupils will be taught to consider his English correspondent as a guest for whom the best is none too good. The exchange list may also embrace a distant school in the United States and in Canada. I hope to see an organized exchange of letters between schools, for this will result in a more stimulating and a more human form of English composition. If any teacher is unsocial or mean enough to ridicule the mistakes in letters received, then let him or his school be put on an official black list. This way of teaching composition gives eyes and ears to pupils, fires their imagination, and makes them appreciate the common things of life.

Those of you who have appealed to the social instinct of your pupils by having them read a book in order to tell its most salient points to their own class, or to write out for reading to another class a statement of why it would be profitable or not for the members to read the book, have found that the assigned task is performed in a far less perfunctory

way.

A teacher who is a social or economic power will teach pupils how to set problems for themselves and others, as well as to solve problems that are already set. Social as well as economic growth demands this. The friends of a German engineer complained to an official of a large railway system that he was receiving but $100 a month, while a young American employed at the same time had been advanced to $250 a month. “This injustice is the more flagrant," said they, "because the German can solve problems that the American cannot touch!" "Yes, it is known to me,” replied the official, "that the German can solve tougher problems than the American can, but your German friend sits as inactive as a toad and never makes any effort until a problem is brought ready-made to him to solve. The American has suggested problems that have resulted in changing the management of certain departments of the road. I once put your friend in an emergency position where he had to act rapidly on his own initiative. He was bewildered and returned to me for orders. I substituted the American. He plunged into things immediately and soon had them outlined. I remember that he turned over one tough problem to your friend to be solved. It takes a higher grade of mind to set problems than to solve ready-made ones. We shall still further advance the American's wages, but we can get all the ready-made problem-solvers we want at $100 a month."

It is time to halt those pedagogical theorists who teach that education consists in knowing where to look for things. Where does an inventor look for a machine that is to improve the condition of the world? Where did Shakespeare look for his poetry? In this twentieth century social progress will render necessary new problems and new

solutions. What will become of the youths who have been taught that education consists in knowing where to look for facts? The world is today filled with those who want to know where to look for readymade opportunities. There are a few who are making the opportunities, and the rest of the world is their debtor.

Arithmetic is, perhaps, next to English composition, the most unsocial of subjects. Make a child set problems for himself in arithmetic, and you will find that the social element will soon appear. A girl of eleven was asked how much a factory hand in a woolen mill would spend in the course of a year if he had a wife and two small girls. She folded her hands helplessly and said: "I can't get any answer to a problem like that." She was told that the answer was not so important as the statement of the problem in all its details. She lived not far from a woolen mill, and after a few suggestions she began to work to find the elements of the problem. She visited a grocery near the mill and learned what eatables were commonly purchased. She met and talked with some little girls, daughters of the operatives. She noticed what they wore, and, finding that they were really human, became very much interested in them. Again and again she submitted the details of the problem to find that they were incomplete. She persevered until her estimates were reasonably complete, but she was surprised to find that her problem, like the most of life's problems, from the cost of building a house to the profits per acre in market-gardening, had more than one answer. But in setting that problem she had grown in intellectual power and in sympathy with humanity.

A boy was at the same time asked how many horseshoe nails a blacksmith would need in the course of a year. The only details furnished were that this blacksmith was the only one in a little town of three hundred, and that he drew his custom from that and from an agricultural community of four square miles. The boy took an imaginary town and determined the probable occupation of every one of the inhabitants. Next he plotted on paper the four square miles, fixing the woods, hills, and streams, the farm acreage, the kinds of crops raised, the number of horses needed. Then he talked with blacksmiths and found that they were human. He blew the bellows, listened to the merry anvil chorus, stroked the noses of the horses, and found that they liked sympathy. He was a surprised boy to learn that if he worked up his own arithmetical problems, they had something to do with real practical human life.

If a teacher would be both a social and an economic power, he must teach his pupils, not to lop off their wants, but to want more and more things of the right kind. Dean Swift rightly said that to satisfy our desires by lopping off our wants is like cutting off our feet when we need shoes. Some English traders went into central Africa, thinking to find a ready market for their wares. But the Africans wanted nothing; they