sure, but he is dealing with more—with social conditions. The life and work of the community he must study quite as much as he must study the child. Indeed, child and man are largely products of social conditions. The educated teacher, by friendly visits to homes and by cheerful work in churches and societies, will seek to elevate community opinion and the standard of life and work. A crowded unclean home in an undrained street, is almost as much an object of concern to the educated teacher as is a hopeless little dunce who can’t spell “rabbit!” Let us ground child-study in community study.

This knowledge of the life and work of the community will react upon the program of study. The educated teacher, I have said, aims at raising somewhat the level of life in the community. The program of study is an instrument for that end. A school unresponsive to the needs of actual life is a school preparing for Utopia. The universities and the public schools of the Western States illustrate what I mean: for example, the University of California has recently introduced a course in irrigation. And here in the East, Cornell teaches poultry raising. For an unscrubbed population the school should emphasize cleanliness; for a propertyless population, foresight and thrift. Let me speak even more definitely. In this city of Washington, as in other urban communities, the death rate of the Negro population is exceedingly high. This excessive death rate[8] is due to a variety of causes; relatively low economic position is a powerful cause. Thus, one of the largest industrial insurance companies in the United States finds, I learn, that the death rate of Negroes is practically the same as that of whites, in approximately the same industrial occupations; and there is much more evidence to the same effect. In addition to the teaching of hygiene, the school may aim to remedy the conditions expressed in the high death rate, in two ways,—first, through imparting productive capacity by the training of hands; and second, through developing wants by the touching of hearts and arousing of minds.

[8]

Already you have a manual training high school and through the grades certain work in carpentry and sewing and cooking. The increasing efficiency of all such work should be welcomed and actively aided by every educated teacher. After a while, let us hope, the schools here will offer from one end to the other, such teaching of the industrial arts as will prepare students worthily to maintain themselves under severe economic stress. Do you realize that, despite the enlargement of educational opportunities in Washington and the growth of the Negro 

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