That compliance of ours to which I have referred is nowhere more evident than in the large sums we spend on the teaching of music, and in our ignorance of the results. School boards and school superintendents usually possess little knowledge of the subject and have no means of knowing the quality and the effect of music teaching save by such evidences as are supplied by the singing of the children at the end of the school year. No one asks what the one thousand or the fifty thousand dollars spent by the school board earns. The money is appropriated and expended on salaries, music books, etc., and there the matter is left hanging, as it were, in the air, and not to be heard from again until the end of the school year. No committee supervises the selection of the books or the methods of teaching. The supervisor is in autocratic control. The system is like an inverted pyramid propped up by an occasional show of singing, by the fallacious excuse that singing is a relaxation after burdensome tasks (fallacious because such relaxation by singing could be carried on without the expensive paraphernalia of a school music system), but most of all supported and fostered by the equally fallacious belief that reading music “at sight,” so called, is an end in itself. So completely divorced is it from such control as is exercised over other subjects that it has become the prey of theorists who have accumulated around it a mass of pedagogical paraphernalia quite unknown in any other form of music teaching, and essentially artificial and encumbering. I have attended conventions of teachers where all the interest centered in pedagogical methods, and in the discussions of artificial terms and theories. I have met teachers who say they discourage the children from singing--because it ruins their voices! and who confine their instruction to the theory of music. The fetish of sight-singing has cast its blight over the teaching of little children so that instead of letting them sing by ear simple and beautiful songs,--which nearly every child loves to do,--they are taught at the age of five or six years the mysteries of intervals, etc. And since the time divisions of music present difficulties too great for their young minds, the vertical measure lines are discarded, thus obliterating the accents and taking away from music one of its most fundamental elements. This makes necessary the substitution of purely empirical terms to describe the time values of quarter notes, eighth notes, and so forth, such as “type one,” “type two”; or artificial syllabic terms are piled up one upon another until such a monstrosity as _tafate-fetifi_ results.