ooms with a new seriousness and a devotion which disregard
all petty inconveniences and obstacles.

And the fire has kindled a flame of friendliness between faculty
and students; it has burned away the artificial pedagogic barriers
and quickened human relations. The flames were not quenched
before the students had begun to plan to help in the crippled
courses of study. They put themselves at the disposal of the
faculty for all sorts of work; they offered their notes, their own
books; they drew maps; they mounted specimens on slides for the
Department of Zoology. In that crowded, noisy, one-story building
there are not merely the teachers and the taught, but a body of
tried friends, moving shoulder to shoulder on pilgrimage to truth.

CHAPTER VI

THE LOYAL ALUMNAE

I.

Ever since we became a nation, it has been our habit to congratulate
ourselves upon the democratic character of our American system of
education. In the early days, neither poverty nor social position
was a bar to the child who loved his books. The daughter of the
hired man "spelled down" the farmer's son in the district school;
the poor country boy and girl earned their board and tuition at
the academy by doing chores; American colleges made no distinctions
between "gentlemen commoners" and common folk; and as our public
school system developed its kindergartens, its primary, grammar, and
high schools, free to any child living in the United States,
irrespective of his father's health, social status, or citizenship,
we might well be excused for thinking that the last word in
democratic education had been spoken.

But since the beginning of the twentieth century, two new voices
have begun to be heard; at first sotto voce, they have risen
through a murmurous pianissimo to a decorous non troppo forte,
and they continue crescendo,--the voice of the teacher and the
voice of the graduate. And the burden of their message is that
no educational system is genuinely democratic which may ignore
with impunity the criticisms and suggestions of the teacher who is
expected to carry out the system and the graduate who is asked to
finance it.

The teachers' point of view is finding expression in the various
organizations of public school teachers in Chicago, New York,
and elsewhere, looking towards reform, both local and general;
and in the movement towards the formation of a National Association
of College Professors, started in the spring of 1913 b