countries of Europe the completion of the fourteenth year is quite uniformly fixed upon as the age for going out of the elementary school. In regard to this matter our systems are no doubt in theory right. Fourteen is undoubtedly the true age for the girl and boy alike to take the first new departure in life, either by entering upon a high school course, a course in industrial training (either theoretical or practical), or by engaging in some manual occupation to earn a livelihood. And this limitation seems to be determined by three considerations:

(1) The mass of pupils must gain their livelihood by the work of their hands. That being the case, experience has proved that on the average fourteen is the best age for beginning the apprenticeship to manual labor. As a rule the longer pupils are kept in school after this period the less inclined will they be to submit to the inevitable drudgery of manual labor.

(2) On the other hand, fair schooling advantages up to this age will afford that degree of instruction which it is considered obligatory on the part of the state to insure to all youth.

(3) If properly instructed in the elementary course, the pupil is sufficiently equipped, both in respect to acquirements and mental development, to grapple with the more scientific course of instruction provided in the high school.

But, although right in theory, our systems fall far short of conformity to this ideal standard. On the one hand, the vast majority of pupils are withdrawn from school before reaching this age and before acquiring a competent elementary education. On the other hand, there are many pupils of both sexes still enrolled in the grammar schools who are fifteen or sixteen or even seventeen years of age.1 This ought not to be; where pupils cannot and do not finish the grammar school course at fourteen years of age, making due allowance for exceptional cases, it may be safely concluded there is something wrong in the system. I say system, meaning thereby the agencies above and beyond the control of individual teachers, primarily the administration and supervision and secondarily the programs, text books, methods of teaching, required classification, examinations, promotions, and graduations.

INSUFFICIENCY OF ACCOMMODATIONS.

The rapid growth of city population has made it very difficult for many cities to keep pace in the supply of school sittings with the increase of children waiting to be instructed in the schools. So great is this difficulty in not a few important cities that inadequacy of school accommodations has become a chronic evil. As a mitigation of this evil the makeshift has been resorted to of limiting the attendance of a portion of the pupils to one session a day. In respect to this matter

1 In Boston 2,800 boys over fourteen years of age in grammar schools.-(Superintendent's report, 1883.)

the annual report for 1883 of the president of the Chicago school board, Mr. Norman Bridge, speaks as follows:

Notwithstanding a considerable increase in school accommodations during the year, by reason of the opening of new buildings, there were 3,675 more pupils than the previous year who could gain admittance to school but half of each day, the total number thus deprived of their full school privileges being 12,919.

In referring to the same subject the president of the New York board, Hon. Stephen A. Walker, says in his report of 1881:

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At the present time the school population of this city exceeds available school accommodations by several thousands. Many of those who think New York public schools cost too much are not aware that at the present time the compulsory education act and the act which declares that "All children between the ages of five and twenty-one years" residing in this city "shall be entitled to attend any of the common schools therein" cannot be enforced in some parts of the city because the schools are not large enough or numerous enough to hold all the scholars who wish to enter them. During the year 1881 9,189 children were refused admission to the schools for want of room to hold them.

In Philadelphia the insufficiency has grown to alarming proportions. The president of the board, Hon. Edward T. Steele, states in his report for 1882:

When each of the sections was requested to furnish an estimate of the additional buildings required, it was made clear that over a million dollars were necessary to provide the buildings called for by these estimates. There remain [of chil

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dren between 5 and 15 years of age, inclusive] 60,000 children more than appear on our records of school attendance. With the most liberal estimate of children attending private schools, it is apparent that there are large numbers of children who are not attending school and for whom there are no accommodations.

The superintendent of the same city, Mr. James MacAlister, in a more recent report, says:

It is pretty certain that there are at least 20,000 young children in Philadelphia who do not attend school because there is not room enough for them in the public schools, and the number may be much greater.

Passing now to the Pacific coast, we find that in San Francisco, a city noted in former years for liberality in public school matters, the situation is no better than in the cities already referred to. In his last annual report (for the year ending June 30, 1883), Superintendent A. J. Moulder discusses at length the great evils suffered by the schools in consequence of the lack of accommodations. The drift of his remarks may be gathered from the following quotations:

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Nearly all our schools are full to their utmost capacity. Most of them are overcrowded; and in many cases principals, in their anxiety to gratify parents, have admitted pupils far beyond either the legal or the reasonable limit; and still they come! There are many classes in the department containing sixty-five, seventy, seventy-five, and even eighty pupils, many of whom have to be packed into the spaces around the walls and on the teachers' platforms. We need the support of all our citizens, but if we alienate any considerable portion by refusing them accommodations for their children, we not only do them great injustice, but we excite an antagonism against the more fortunate who have secured admission for their children. Where are the means to come from to build the new school-houses

shown to be imperatively needed?

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To this vital question the superintendent is able to give no satisfactory answer, as he finds that the funds at the disposal of the board are only sufficient to defray the current expenses of the schools; and he strongly deprecates the proposition to save money for buildings by reducing the salaries of teachers. Many other cities might be cited where the schools are suffering from insufficiency of accommodations; but insufficiency is believed to be the exception and not the rule. The city of Denver deserves to be mentioned as an example of a very young city of marvellously rapid growth of population, which has courageously and successfully met the demand for school accommodations sufficient for all its schoolable children, and in quality these accommodations, as has been stated elsewhere, are of the first order. Among the cities of the first order St. Louis may be mentioned as one which has successfully grappled with the problem of school accommodations. In a recent report the president of the board states that the funds of the board "are ample for all necessary school accommodations required now or in the near future. * There is now, happily, no question of the financial ability of the board to provide all necessary school facilities." The school law of Massachusetts, as already stated under another head, empowers school boards to provide needed temporary accommodations if their request for the same is not complied with by the municipal authorities. This provision of the statutes has proved a sure guarantee against the evil of insufficiency of accommodations. Where the school board is invested with such authority, it is never necessary to limit attendance to the capacity of the school-houses erected or to submit to the evil of chronic overcrowding.

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In Boston it appears by the last annual school report that the whole number of seats in all the school-houses was 56,730, while the average membership that is, the average whole number of pupils belonging to all the day schools-was 54,451, showing a surplus of 2,279 seats.

The rapid growth of urban population in all parts of the country has of course rendered necessary a correspondingly rapid increase of school accommodations, and although there are not a few cities where this necessity has been only partially met, on the other hand, in general, cities of all classes and in all sections of the country have made liberal sacrifices to provide the requisite school accommodations.

SCHOOL-HOUSES.

Our city school-houses are at once our glory and our shame. Considering the vast aggregate expenditure for the edifices derived from the voluntary taxation of the people, considering how large a number of them are fairly well adapted to the purposes for which they were designed, and considering the still greater number of them as possessing certain peculiar features of excellence, we may justly claim credit for our cities on the score of what they have done in this direction. And we may point with especial pride to the marvellous enterprise of the

new towns throughout the West, especially the far West, in providing commodious and costly school buildings. Witness the grand high and grammar school houses of Omaha and Denver. Even at Cheyenne the visitor will find the children well accommodated in a spacious, well ventilated, well lighted, and well furnished brick school-house. In 1882, I found in the city of Durango, Colo., whose oldest dwelling was only eighteen months old, a noble two-story brick school-house, designed with good architectural taste and spacious enough for the accommodation of from three hundred to four hundred pupils.

But on the other hand there are in our school edifices, as they stand to-day, numerous mistakes, defects, and faults in matters relating to convenience, health, safety, and taste, which might have been avoided and ought to have been avoided. The same money might have given us much better school-houses, both in respect to beauty and utility. Much less money might have given us buildings just as good, not only for all practical purposes, but also in respect to architectural effects. These facts are far from creditable to us as an educated people.

No doubt great progress. has been made in respect to city schoolhouses during the last thirty or forty years. To appreciate this it is only necessary to refer to some of the old landmarks. Horace Mann's memorable report on school-houses, of the date of 1838, contains a plan of the Wells grammar school-house in Boston. It is given as the best known type of a city grammar school-house. The accommodations consisted of two long halls, one above the other, each containing seatings for two hundred pupils, facing the windows of one of the longer sides. The platform extended the whole length of this side, upon the middle of which was placed the stove. There was no recitation room, no clothes room, and no appendage whatever to the large room, except a contracted entry and stairway and a small lobby for the principal's use. The building was three stories high, the ground story containing a ward room and a primary school room. Mr. Mann called attention to the fact that the pupils were seated facing the strong light and that the seats had no backs. The desks were double. This was the model school-house of forty-five years ago.1

Place by the side of this picture the best grammar school-house of the present day, with its spacious corridors, its broad and easy stairs, its well proportioned and well lighted class rooms, its convenient clothes rooms, its teachers' rooms and wardrobes, its grand assembly hall, its single desks and chairs, its effective heating and ventilating apparatus, and we see how great has been the advancement.

What is the present character of the average city school-house, the building that we most commonly find in visiting the schools of any city? It is but just to say that this average building is, on the whole, quite comfortable and commodious, and may be called a fairly good school

1This building was replaced by a modern structure in 1868.

house. The origin of its type may be traced to the Quincy school-house in Boston, which was dedicated thirty-six years ago. The erection of this building was a veritable new departure in school architecture in this country, being designed to accommodate a new type of organization; up to this time the large hall plan typified by the Wells building had been modified only by the addition of one or more recitation rooms. The ground plan of this building, which was designed for boys only, was a rectangle, with small wings on the longer sides for entries and staircases. These wings were connected by a corridor crossing the main floor, with doors on either side opening into two school rooms and two clothes rooms, the school rooms being located in the corners of the building, each being lighted by four windows on adjacent sides, two on a side. Three stories contained twelve of these school rooms, the fourth story was finished as a hall, 80 feet long, 60 feet wide, and 16 feet high, with settee sittings for 700 pupils. With the exception of some of the largest Atlantic cities, the grammar school houses in the cities of the Northern States, from Maine to California, are of this type, with various modifications. The essential features consisted, first, in giving a separate room to each teacher; second, in grouping a sufficient number of these rooms in the same building to accommodate pupils enough for a good classification; third, in the provision of an assembly hall spacious enough to seat all the pupils accommodated in the building. Perhaps the most common modification of this plan is that which dispenses with the fourth story and its assembly hall. This modification, with some minor improvements, was closely adhered to in St. Louis during the superintendency of Dr. Harris, who, in his final report of 1878-'79, thus sums up his views of the matter:

(1) It is the policy of the board to build twelve-room buildings, three stories in height, having four rooms to the floor, and each one placed in a corner so as to get light from four large windows placed two in the rear of the pupils and two on the left side. Of late it has become the practice to group schools near each other on the same block, if possible, and place the whole group under one principal, thus giving him charge of twenty or more rooms. The school yards usually contain about 22,000 square feet, of which about 6,000 feet are covered with the buildings.

(2) These buildings are furnished with "combination furniture," each seat adapted to two pupils. Each room seats about sixty pupils, if in the primary grades; fifty if in the higher grades of the district schools.

(3) The two rooms on either side of the hall which runs through the house, dividing it into two parts, are separated by movable partitions, so that they may be united for general exercises, such as singing, &c.

The Peabody school-house is the representative building of this class in St. Louis.

This plan has important merits. It is very economical, but it can hardly be regarded as the best yet devised. The Jefferson school-house in St. Louis is a duplication of the twelve-room building, the two being connected by a gallery or narrow structure containing an entry and

Plan and description in Barnard's School Architecture, 1854, page 202.