upled with another, that springs from the same
fundamental situation--ignorance of the needs and points of view of the
adolescent--tho not so chargeable to the individual class teacher as to
the school system as a whole, local, state, and national, pretty nearly
cover the ground. The other cause to which I refer is the course of
study and program of activities that are so ill-adapted to the tastes,
and needs, and capacities of adolescent boys and girls--studies and
activities that have no real meaning to them and that fit them for
nothing definite save college entrance where the same old process,
meaningless to many, often goes on for another period.

What is being done on the firing line to better such conditions? A good
deal; quite a good deal. Normal schools and schools of education here
and there, the former more than the latter, are now giving attention to
the matter, requiring in some cases and urging in others, prospective
teachers to become intelligent in regard to the lives they are to
direct. It is being done at our own institution as at others. This year
Dr. Todd has given instruction in child study to nearly one hundred
young men and women who are looking forward to teaching in the grades,
and I have had a group of some thirty-five or forty prospective high
school teachers and superintendents who have been making a careful study
of adolescence. I guarantee that these people will not make the crude
and unfeeling blunders that I have mentioned as too common among high
school teachers, as they run. These are firing-line activities. They
were nearly new a dozen years ago. My introduction of such courses in
our University was smiled at indulgently by some of my colleagues and
sharply criticised, especially the work in adolescence, by others. They
are not yet required of students preparing to teach, but have evidently
demonstrated their value since, tho in no sense snap courses, they have
become very popular.

As illustrative of this work let me refer to a notable recent action of
the legislature of Iowa. It has just passed an Act appropriating to the
State University $25,000 a year for the purpose of financing what is
called a "child-welfare" campaign. The plan is to make an exhaustive
scientific study of the child from both the physiological and
psychological points of view, to the end that it may be better known and
thus more satisfactorily guided in its educational career.

One other thing, in this same conn