e, distinct from other grades,
and having the definite purpose of maintaining an established
social order or national type through the intellectual, manual,
and artistic training of the masses. The presentation of
elementary education as an independent unit indeed well accords
with the conditions in nearly all countries excepting our own.
Elsewhere, as a rule, elementary education forms a complete
system, having its separate administration, purposes, and
ideals. In this respect the United States presents a notable
contrast to the chief countries of the Old World, and one
strikingly illustrated in this exposition. In our own country
education is conceived as an integral process steadily
developing from the kindergarten to the university. To this
conception corresponds the sequence of elementary and high
schools united under a common administration and by close
scholastic bonds. Hence a measure of violence is done both to
elementary and secondary education as here organized by the
endeavor to view them separately. On the other hand, a portion
of the elementary education of foreign countries, notably of
France and Germany, does not enter at all into the sum total of
the impressions recorded by the jury of either group, because of
the social distinctions that underlie in those countries the
classification of schools as elementary and secondary. These
anomalous conditions affect particularly the classification and
judgment of the various agencies for the training of teachers
(that is, normal schools, teachers' training colleges, and
auxiliary agencies, such as normal classes in academies or other
secondary schools, teachers' institutes, etc). In the chief
foreign countries professional schools of this kind are easily
classified by virtue of their administrative relations, but in
our own country the different orders of pedagogical training
merge into each other almost imperceptibly because they are all
based upon the same fundamental conception of the teaching
profession.

It is interesting to note in this connection that the exhibit of
Great Britain and Ireland has avoided all confusion by the
selection of the characteristic features of particular schools
or of processes that have worked well in certain communities or
pupil and class work of special significance. This mode