It is obvious, then, that our public school music labors under great difficulties. The classes are too large,--sometimes forty-five children in a room,--the music lesson period is too short; the music teacher visits each room at too great intervals; the grade teacher is perhaps not properly qualified to teach music and the head master’s interest in it may be perfunctory. The study itself is, therefore, irregular, as must be the case when such conditions as these exist. Yet we are trying to produce _expert_ results. Why not say to ourselves that since our population as a whole is not yet actively interested in the best music, and since the children are unlikely to hear much of it outside the school, and since by nature and habit and association there is really nothing in our musical life to justify spending our money on teaching expert sight-singing to children--the undertaking being in a sense anomalous and detached; why not say to ourselves: “We must first of all teach our children to love the best music, and then we must train them to read it, not necessarily ‘at sight,’ but to read it well enough to satisfy all the demands likely to be made in that direction in after life.”[6] I would sweep away half the pedagogical paraphernalia of our public school music teaching. I believe much more valuable results could be secured by constant contact with the best music, and continued observation of it, with a minimum of technical exercises. I believe the processes of music to have no significance whatever except as they appear in great compositions, and that constant contact with and observation of fine music is more valuable than the study of the rules by which it is made, or the technique by which it is produced. In music as in poetry we deduce the rules and laws from the artistic objects themselves. The composer and the poet are to us what nature is to them. V. ATTEMPTS AT REFORM