expression. [Footnote: In the United States there is less sense of
urgency about modern languages, but sooner or later the American may
wake up to the need of Spanish in his educational schemes.] It is an
extension and a very doubtful improvement. It is a modern necessity, a
rather irksome necessity, of little or no essential educational value,
an unavoidable duty the school will have to perform. [Footnote: In one
way the foreign language may be made educationally very useful, and
that is as an exercise in writing translations into good English.]

There are two subjects in the modern English school that stand by
themselves and in contrast with anything one finds in the records of
ancient and oriental schools, as a very integral part of what is
regarded as our elementary general education. They are of very doubtful
value in training the mind, and most of the matter taught is totally
forgotten in adult life. These are history and geography. These two
subjects constitute, with English grammar and arithmetic, the four
obligatory subjects for the very lowest grade of the London College of
Preceptors' examinations, for example. The examination papers of this
body reveal the history as an affair of dated events, a record of
certain wars and battles, and legislative and social matters quite
beyond the scope of a child's experience and imagination. Scholastic
history ends at 1700 or 1800, always long before it throws the faintest
light upon modern political or social conditions. The geography is, for
the most part, topography, with a smattering of quantitative facts,
heights of mountains, for example, populations of countries, and lists
of obsolete manufactures and obsolete trade conditions. Any one who
will take the trouble to run through the text-books of these subjects
gathered together in the library of the London Teachers' Guild, will
find that the history is generally taught without maps, pictures,
descriptive passages, or anything to raise it above the level of an