A tribute to Franklin T. Baker, who taught in Teachers College for forty-one years.

The author traces through personal experience the changes that have taken place in the field of the teaching of English.

The author shows that English teaching today demands very wide scholarship and very broad contact with life; and that its diversity and range are such that no one formula, no one simple plan of training, could cover it, unless we had a dictatorship. And this very diversity, the despair of mechanically minded teachers, is a constant challenge to those whose minds are still growing.

For a generation or more, we have been living on the accumulated capital of our spiritual inheritance, taking for granted those concepts of right and wrong, of individual worth and individual responsibility, of the rights of man and of honor among the nations, toward which the race has been struggling for countless years; doing little to fortify and extend, much to disparage, these concepts. What we need is a reaffirmation of a positive philosophy of life, of those values that are central, that give meaning and importance to everything else.

It is the purpose of this article to show how poetry deals with intellectual concepts, and in what sense a poem may embody a fuller, a more organic truth than its translation into the more explicit prose.

A poem, The Night Before the Fourth.

So long as literature deals with men and women, with words and ideas, it deals with them in some sort of relation and meaning; and that meaning is related to the values of life as it is lived. Increasingly, in the past hundred years especially, those specific values and meanings and relationships that depend on a particular social order, and that are affected by social or economic change, have been made the subject of important literature. Yet the subject is not in and of itself the literature—otherwise our most important literature would be a literature of pamphleteering.

A fable, The Fable of the Integrated Zoo.

THE rhythmic element in poetry is sometimes approached, in schools, as if it were on the one hand a form of algebra, not to be dealt with except through symbols and formulae;

IMAGINATION, the fundamental and in its highest reaches the supreme element of poetry, as of all creative literature, is more teachable, less a matter of individual caprice or native endowment, than ordinary schoolroom practice would indicate.

The place of the arts, including the art of poetry, in the curriculum has tended of recent years to be justified by educational theorists in terms of the training of critical appreciation.

The festivals of the past three years at Teachers College, widely varied as they have been in structure and mood, have had the common purpose of uniting the extremely varied elements of our institution in the celebration of themes to which all could respond,—the contrast between drudgery and true joy in work, the growth of romantic sentiment into constructive idealism, the honor due to Shakespeare and the traditions of Merry England.

The center of organization was the Dramatic Arts Association, acting through its Executive Committee of five members, one of whom was a member of the faculty, two graduate students giving part-time instruction, and two undergraduates.

The following bibliography, which incorporates suggestions from a number of instructors and students in Teachers College, was prepared with the special needs of schools in view.

The Festival is intended to symbolize the Play Spirit, and its development, under the influence of imagination and art, from the informal games of childhood and the rougher sports of youth through dance, music, and organized pastimes to drama, culminating in Shakespeare. All who attend are urged to consider themselves not as spectators, but as participants; to wear Elizabethan costume, to mingle freely with the crowd, and to take part in the country-dances.

The course of study which follows was planned and in its main features carried out in the Horace Mann High School during the winters from 1912 to 1914. At that time, the school was co-educational, with about five hundred members in five classes, corresponding to grades eight to twelve.

A BIBLIOGRAPHY OF CHILDREN’S READING PART II Continued from the January number in which were included special lists of:—Old Fairy Tales, Modern Fairy Tales, Myths, Stories of Child Life, Stories of Girl Life, Stories of Boy Life, Stories of Indian Life, Travel and Adventure, Stories of the Sea, Historical Tales, Stories of New England Life, Stories of Southern Life, and Stories of Western Life.

An important problem for the English teacher is how to bridge the gap between books studied in the class-room and books read for fun; to make pupils realize that the English classics were once books of the day, written for people's enjoyment, and, on the other hand, that books of the day may be read in the same spirit and held to the same standards that we apply to the classics. This problem has been attacked, during the last five years, in the third year of the English course of the Horace Mann High School; it is the purpose of this article to sum up present results.

The general aim of the English work in the Horace Mann High School is to extend widely and pleasurably the pupil's acquaintance with good books, and to give him a fair degree of accuracy, fluency, and enjoyment in the expression of his own ideas in speech and in writing.