248 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF ED UCATION. 
he more need of accuracy of aim and method. But in education there 
s error at every step, error by nature, error in the home, community, 
school. Every grade of teaching is taxed with correction. 
However defective nature may be in substantially normal constitutions 
shat survive the age of six, the errors acquired are too numerous and 
serious for description. Every higher grade of work is charging fault 
npon its predecessor. So imperfect are methods, that the very process 
of correction adds defects. Unfortunately, addition of mistakes does not 
Jiminish as the youth advances. Sometimes the highest instruction is 
shained to the worst methods. 
Not the power to educate, but the mastery of a subject, has been the 
prime test of the qualification of the teacher. The abstraction admis- 
sible for adult minds has been imposed upon the child when his mental 
action is most dependent upon the senses and sensibilities, and all things 
must be brought to him in the most concrete forms. Methods most fit 
in professional or superior instruction may be fatal in elementary stages. 
Here we meet, in a special form, the interdependence of all educational 
work. We are not only forced to see how difficult it is to set each division 
off by itself, but what care there must be in selection and adaptation. 
What subjects are universal ? What are special ? - What subjects and 
conditions belong to this age of the pupil ? How must they be modified 
to his nature, or race, or order of development, or environment, physical, 
social, political, or religious ? 
Every other grade is interested that elementary education should be 
aniversal ; that its principles and methods should be free from error. 
Every grade must share in promoting social, religious, and political 
opinions and actions to assure this result. All, in all grades, must unite 
against pernicious laws and customs which destroy or pervert childhood, 
that period of life so dependent upon maturity, and assigned by the 
Creator to preparation for responsibility, self-direction, and the assump- 
Hon of the duties of life. More than this, all grades must have intimate 
acquaintance and sympathy with each other. Often they can aid each 
other in discovering and making improvements, and thus promote their 
own and each other’s efficiency. Often the resistance to some essential 
change in one grade may be founded in another. There must be clear 
and comprehensive vision and wise action. Elementaryeducation, we say, 
must share in all that is general ; must sympathize and must charge itself 
with the responsibility of enlarging attendance ; of promoting its pupils 
to advanced work as free as may be from defects in ideas, habits. and 
character. 
Again, however powerful in their effects other grades of instruction may 
be, none save this deals with the nature of man when it is as susceptible 
so impression as it is during the ages of six to fourteen. 
All educational literature accentuates the influence of the impressions