The

A SCHOOL IN ACTION. DATA ON CHILDREN, ARTISTS, AND TEACHERS: A Symposium. With Introduction by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. Published by E. P. Dutton and Company, New York. This book spreads before the teacher, in a peculiarly interesting way, the activities of the Bird School, Peterborough, founded in 1917 by Mrs. Arthur Johnson (Joanne Bird Shaw) for the summer instruction of her own children, for those of her neighbors, and for a small group of children from Peterborough village. book is not the work of any single observer, but is, as its sub-title states, a "symposium": that is to say, a book written by those immediately concerned, the teachers and pupils themselves. From the beginning of the school, Mrs. Johnson wished to have a complete record of each class, and to this end a stenographer was always in attendance, jotting down verbatim whatever teachers and pupils said to each other day by day in working out their tasks together, their questions, their answers, their unstudied observations and reactions: in short, the whole "conduct" of the education that was under way. From these typewritten stenographic reports a wholly unedited selection has been made and published, giving us a volume of some three hundred pages that are curiously real and vital. These reports are unedited in the sense that they are not "smoothed out" or revised for the sake of attaining some ideal literary standard; they are given frankly and precisely as

the stenographer jotted them down. But the book is very carefully and intelligently selected and arranged so that the reader may get without undue tedium a complete and clear cross-section of the school as a whole and observe it, as it were, in full operation. In this respect the book is a unique experiment in the literature of pedagogy, and a highly successful one.

There are three factors in such a work that are bound to impress the interested observer. First, the head of the school: for a school inevitably takes its tone from its founder or head, derives its programme from its founder's initiative, and depends for its successful conduct upon its founder's enthusiasm and intelligent guidance. The second factor is the teachers, and the third the pupils; and we shall deal with these last two in detail in

a moment.

Little or nothing is said in the book of Mrs. Johnson, the school's founder, and yet the school itself and, consequently, the whole book are a permanent memorial to her constructive imagination and executive ability; after reading "A School in Action," a discerning reader will come to the conclusion that both are of an exceptionally high order. She was led to found the school, the Foreword explains, by the conviction "that during the long summer school vacaton, often from June to October, the hiatus in the systematic mental training of young children was a very serious handicap to them and entailed much loss of effectiveness in the autumn resumption of school work when several weeks are annually spent in the painful effort to re

connect with long dropped work and to re-establish habits of attention and application."

She built the school "on a height beside the mountains, on her own estate of some six hundred acres-a charming stone building, with, in addition, open-air pavilions and class room, a laboratory, a workshop for carpentry, and a completely equipped playground. From the very beginning she secured the services of some of the most accomplished teachers of America, teachers of a rank in the academic world of higher education which would preclude their devoting their time to a school for young children did not the experiment occur in summer and did it not also offer possibilities of exceptional interest to them."

So far we have a summer school on a very sound but not altogether unusual basis. But to this Mrs. Johnson, with the bravery of her youth, presently added a touch of genius, by deciding to take on her staff of teachers a small group of creative artists of acknowledged eminence. It was her belief that no one else could give the children the same interest in Music as a composer, in Literature as a wrter, in Art as a painter or sculptor; and with the courage of this conviction she managed to give her little school of very young youngsters the high privilege of being taught modelling by Mr. Howard Coluzzi, sculptor, of acquiring some knowledge and love of English prose and verse from Mr. Padraic Colum, the Irish poet and dramatist, of studying the rudiments of music under the direction of Mr. Ernest Bloch, the eminent Swiss composer. To initiate such an experiment requires imagination, and to carry it through requires a tact and executive ability

beyond the average. The book frankly spreads the accomplishment of the problem before one, and when the end is reached and the reader gauges the measure of its success, he can see how much credit is due to the guiding spirit of the founder-whose name is so modestly suppressed throughout the book.

The first group of reports concern themselves with the classes in "Literature" under two successive teachers, Mr. John Merrill and Mr. Colum. Mr. Merrill is a very well known specialist of the Francis Parker School, Chicago, and it is extremely interesting to note his method with the children, for it is probably the perfection of modern scientific pedagogical theory. At each session of his classes he has a definite end in view and, if possible, an even more definite programme of the means to achieve that end. If the poem to be read is, say, "There was a crooked man who went a crooked mile," every possible kind of acting on the part of the class, mental and physical, is brought into play. One child at once becomes a crooked man, another becomes a crooked mouse, and, I daresay, a third becomes a crooked sixpence, and so on. Nothing is allowed to escape. And the guiding principle seems to be Iteration. The reviewer is lost in admiration of Mr. Merrill's patience and thoroughness, and the precision of his predetermined procedure. The verses are acted and discussed to a standstill. But the old-fashioned

reader who was not subjected to this form of torture in his childhood is bound to wonder if it is really worth while. It seems to one such, at least, that what happens under such a system is thisthe children come to be considered

primarily as the factors in the working out of a theory, the theory is very fine, the working out is extraordinarily skilful, and the success is a definite contribution to pedagogy. But throughout there has been a subtle and perhaps unconscious transferral of values: in the old days teaching was a means whereby we strove to develop and make happier the pupil; now it seems a bit as if the pupils are the means, the instrument by which one strives to develop and make more perfect the science of teaching. To be sure, the children. must acquire something by such a process (human nature, fortunately, is such that children will acquire something under any system). One cannot imagine a child under Mr. Merrill failing to understand well nigh exhaustively any bit of literature which Mr. Merrill has determined shall be elucidated; but an understanding of letters letters is one thing, and a love of letters is quite another. If the reviewer had been brought to an understanding of Shakespeare by such a process, he feels sure that his favorite set of that author's works would long since have come to repose in a convenient ash barrel. He would certainly love him less-and very probably know him better.

With the reports of Mr. Colum's classes we come into a region of more spontaneity: both teacher and pupils seem seem constantly to take refuge in improvisation, very obviously to their mutual profit and satisfaction. It would be unfair to say that Mr. Colum has no daily "plan" in the sense that Mr. Merrill certainly has. But Mr. Colum's plan is more subtle-and probably less well considered. It leaves room for inspiration, and achieves an im

mediate rapport between himself and his little flock with a minimum of apparent apparatus. "I am not at all in favour," he writes, "of children being taught poetry by acting it." And an illuminating foot note here adds: "It is interestng to note here the differing opinions of Mr. Merrill, a professional teacher, and Mr. Colum, a professional poet." Mr. Colum gives his reasons: "In the first place it is often putting to a wrong end poetry that should have the child quiet and reflective. Again, the action, the pitch of the voice tends to formalize the poem in their minds, taking away from it the movement that it might have for them, besides associating it with too much agitation."

The stenographic records of Mr. Colum's classs are full of charm, and contain very quaint specimens of the children's essays in verse and prose. One little poem still haunts the reviewer.

"There was a King

Who had a chariot,
And also a daughter

Whose name was Harriet." Mr. Colum carries his pupils with a wide catholic sweep from Homer to Vachel Lindsay. He is always the poet and story-teller teaching others to love his art, with a delicacy of insight into the temperaments of his young hearers that is as rare as it is delightful. As for the reactions of the children themselves, so spontaneous, so quaintly frank, so humanly delightful, one would like to quote at length did space permit. But the book itself may be bought, and the reviewer urges its purchase by anyone who loves to study children.

After the reports on Literature, follow the reports on the Music classes. Those of Mr. Bloch abound

in wit and wisdom, and are a revelation of what a great musician, through sympathetic understanding, can do with even very young children. Then come the reports of the Psychological Laboratory, in which Dr. Florence Mateer, among other matters, gives in detail the psychological and the StanfordBinet examination of a typical pupil. One begins reading this section with reluctance, and ends with enthusiasm, for out of the wealth of detail, skilfully and unerringly marshalled there emerges the personality of the boy in his examination in a rounded portait of such an authenticity and such engaging appeal that one is grateful for such a complete and human document.

And this is the most of the book as a whole, that while giving to the professional student of education the detailed record of a really valuable experiment, it gives to the unprofessional reader a bit of real life, and vivid self-portrayal of a group of children, as well as of a group of teachers, in a way that is at once fresh, ingenuous, and engaging. If one had such a detailed document as this from any past age, it would be considered priceless. And this itself must have a permanent value because of its sincerity and fundamental soundness.

PIERRE La ROSE.

ROADS OF ADVENTURE, by Ralph D. Paine. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin. $5. Here is a book! A book to stir the blood of youth and to revitalize the circulation of middle age. A book to charm by its style as well as by its stories.

The adventures set forth are those of the author. All of them are interesting; most of them are entrancing. Some of them have such a

"bite" that one would guess them tainted with fiction did not Ralph Paine vouch for their truth on his honor as a New Hampshire gentleman farmer, law-maker and guardian of juvenile morals.

Autobiography is the most charming of arts when the author can maintain the right balance between himself and the rest of the world. Most autobiographers who succeed do so by stressing their reaction to others rather than the reaction of the world to them. Mr. Paine, in these sketches, has done something of this, but has succeeded even more by the delightful humor with which he treats himself and not a few of his "busted" schemes. He is unsparing in the detection of himself in frequent spasms of what he terms damfoolitis.

The book may be divided roughly into four parts. First come a half dozen chapters covering rowing days at Yale in the nineties. Nobody can do this better than Paine. The sketches are equally good reading for the youngster and the oldster. Both will enjoy the spice of excitement. The youngster, at least, may profit by the red-blooded philosophy that underlies them; the oldster, at least, will appreciate the manner in which Paine matches this philosophy against the postures of the Young Intellectuals.

There follow a dozen sketches of filibustering days during the Cuban insurrection, full of swing and color of the most fascinating sort. Then come ten equally stirring chapters on the Spanish War, catching the adventurous atmosphere of the days when war gave comparatively free vent to individual action. These are done with an admirable dash. There are incidental appreciations of some of

add the flavor of literary reminis

cence.

The scene then shifts, for a half dozen chapters, to the other side of the world, with vivid pictures of the aftermath of the Boxer uprisings. Then follow random incidents in a newspaperman's career, and finally some of Paine's experiences with the American and British British fleets during the World War.

and fifty pages hardly gives the reader a feeling of satiety. One wonders if the advice of the author's eleven-year-old son to write "The End" was well taken. The titles of the possible additional chapters appeal to the imagination. Perhaps there is more like this splendid book to follow. The reviewer will live in hope.

E. L. P.