boys and girls in New York City that we may exact from country children of the same age.

The city boy may be needed in emergency office and factory work. Instead of contributing service as a farm cadet, he may become a "coöperator," giving part-time service to industry and to commerce and part time to school, as many of our city boys are now doing.

In dealing with the institution of higher grade we find as many distinctions in service. In the college of the cultural type—the college of individualism—it is the individual who serves the State, how nobly may be seen in the English universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In the public schools and socialized institutions with vocational work, however, it is the institution which serves. This service of the institution may be classified under two heads. In the case of the elementary schools to some extent, and of the high schools to a greater extent, our war work should be brought into them. In the technical, vocational, and trade schools the institution should reach out towards the war. In the first instance the function of the elementary and secondary school should be to adhere to the purposes for which they were created. The function of the higher technical, vocational, and trade schools should be to prepare the skilled students to take the places of those who are called to military service; to give scientific training, indispensable in war; to assist, through courses for the blind and crippled, in the reëducation of those disabled in war service,—that is, our technical schools may be schools of special preparation and industrial readjustment.

We shall observe, in working out the problem, that we have offered to us by the war an opportunity to make our schools better by bringing education closer to life, not only materially but spiritually. If we have failed to train our youth in coöperation and service to the State in the past, the war gives us a new motive. For to impart skill in use of hand or brain without teaching collective responsibility is to fail in our national duty. To our schools we must look as the agencies which are to carry on the great work of education in service, a noble and purposeful objective for which to work, directing the growth of our children into an efficient and devoted citizenship.

Someone will urge: "The war will soon be over and we shall hardly get started in war service before there will be no need for such service."

Of course those who believe, or at least seem to practice the belief, that the schools are to lag far behind every economic, industrial, and social movement and are to be mere looking-glasses for the workaday world,—such people would not be expected to bring the war into the schools until some historian had written a text setting forth the dates, drawing the battle lines, naming the commanding generals, and picturing the final boundaries determined by some Hague conference. It is such professional obstructionists who make no provision for the millions of our foreign born to learn the English language and American customs through the establishment of up-to-date methods in teaching the adult illiterate. It is such laissez-faire persons who allow children to slide out of school unprepared physically, mentally, or vocationally for the life ahead. It is such who insist upon the disciplinary-value idea of subject-worth in the face of modern psychological thought. It is such conservatives who say that agriculture can be taught only on the farm; that it is the business of the factory to teach the trades; that girls may learn to cook from their mothers; that elementary courses in woodworking and freehand drawing constitute vocational training; that algebra, Latin, ancient history, and trigonometry are essential features of the curriculum for training capable stenographers. It is these people who say that "the public schools of America are bulwarks of the nation," and consistently erect bulwarks against every agency which actually reflects the social and economic needs of the day.

But those who believe that the school should study the past and live in the present and strive for a better future will find that the war brings out for the schools not only the lessons of a day, but the needs and opportunities of a decade.

It has been stated that movements or men unresponsive to the present world crisis and failing to meet present needs and opportunities do not deserve to exist. Whether the statement be exactly true or not, it is evident that the up-to-the-minute man or the live school or the progressive industrial establishment or the efficient department of government is responding to the national need in exact proportion to the response made to the needs and opportunities existing before war was declared.

It is this responding power which is testing our men and women, our institutions of government, our industries, and our schools. Nothing makes this clearer than the daily news. We read that since the Railroads War Board has been established, the railroads have increased their operating efficiency 26 per cent, with the result that they are now handling twice the freight and have 75 per cent fewer idle cars; that aëroplane motors are soon to be built as rapidly as a certain well-known automobile can be; that standardized destroyers and merchant ships are to be turned out by the scores; that dyes equal to those formerly imported have been evolved; that prominent men of means have contributed their services to men in authority in Washington; that well-known social workers are on their way to France and Belgium.

All these things and countless others show us how a military necessity has brought out the best that is within us. And the best of it all is that there is nothing which we are doing in the way of making standardized products or in extending the services of useful men that cannot be permanently useful after the war is over. Our military necessity is teaching us new and permanently effective standards of making things. Meanwhile, are the schools of America to fail by not rendering service to a nation in time of need, by not establishing permanently effective standards in the making of useful boys and girls,—"boys and girls," as Roosevelt puts it, "who realize that they are a part of Uncle Sam's team"?

The schools and colleges that were alive before the war began are breathing the breath of life more deeply now. Those which were asleep are waking up and not only learning to serve, but through this service learning to live. A little school in Vermont in a report on what it has in the way of war equipment states that it has only ten benches, but adds that these have been used by sixty boys who take manual training. A school system which can be as efficient as that in time of peace may naturally be expected to state, as it does in response to a recent inquiry: "Our instructor has been on the job all summer, helping especially where the boys and girls are working on the farms or have gardens. He has also organized canning and drying clubs and is giving instruction to different groups of boys."

The university which has extension courses in time of peace naturally has war extension courses. The prominent business man of Massachusetts who for years interested himself in state Y.M.C.A. work would naturally be expected to enlist, as he has, for Y.M.C.A. work in France. Now if the college or institution or individual serves in time of need because of a habit of serving, might it not be equally true that a somnolent individual or school, if once stirred to service, might through such service learn always to serve?

At this time the government of the United States is going to learn how to become efficient. The state colleges of agriculture