and Germany.) The supervisor, who takes so much pride in the capacity of his pupils to sing at sight, ought to be chiefly interested in something much more important--namely, their ability to sing a beautiful piece of music and particularly their joy in doing so, for that is the only real justification for his presence there. Many supervisors seem to have almost forgotten that music is a thing of beauty and that the only way to keep it alive in a child’s heart is to teach the child to sing beautiful songs. Constant contact with inferior songs for children may, indeed, have so affected the supervisor’s taste that he himself can no longer detect the difference between good and bad. IV. GOOD OR BAD MUSIC? For eight years, then, in our public schools children are taught--as far as may be--to sing at sight. Is there a fine song which presents a certain difficulty, it is placed in the book at the point where that difficulty arises, and is treated as a sight-reading test. It is subjected to analysis as to its melodic progressions, each of which is taken up as a technical problem. This is precisely the method so often and so fatally used in connection with poetry. The Skylark’s wings are clipped; the Grecian Urn becomes an archæological specimen; the Eve of Saint Agnes a date in the almanac. This brings me to the most important part of the whole matter. If expert sight-singing is not only a false ideal, but one impossible of general attainment in public schools under the conditions at present existing, what does justify our expenditure of such large sums of money? The sole justification for it is to bring children to love the best music, and so to train their taste for it as to make them capable of discriminating between good and bad. Now a thorough test of the children in the kindergarten or the lower primary grades of any public school anywhere will surely reveal that such children start life with the makings of good taste in music. Nature is prodigal here--prodigal and faithful. In the most remote villages in this country, in purely industrial communities, among the poor and among the rich (both having forgotten), children love good songs. It is their natural inheritance. No excess of materialism in the generations affects it in the least. This is the primitive endowment; deep down in human character there lies a harmony of adjustment with nature. Overlay it as you may with custom or habit; sully it with luxury; it still persists, for without it human life cannot be. This idealistic basis of human life, which is never destroyed, appears fresh and unstained in children, and in their song it bubbles up as from a pure spring.[5]