But the most distressing condition in the Boston schools--and this would be more or less true everywhere in our country--was that all the children in the kindergarten and primary grades were learning such songs as would eventually destroy their natural taste for fine music. This is the one great indictment against public school music in the United States--that it has been made to order for schoolbooks, and to fit technical problems, and that it consequently fails to keep the allegiance of children. Nothing but the best will ever do that, and until we supply the best our school music is bound to fail. Our committee, as a preliminary step toward reform, recommended that all instruction in reading music should be postponed until the last half of the third grade. This allowed us to institute singing by ear and at the same time to teach rhythm by beating time, clapping hands, marching, etc. A book of folk-songs was compiled by Dr. Davison and myself and was adopted and published[7] by the School Committee. The greatest difficulty here has been to get suitable verses for the simpler songs. We have spent much time over this one matter and have not, even then, always been successful. Good verses for very young children are difficult to secure, and--to instance how painstaking the process of making a book of such songs is--we have sometimes received half a dozen sets of verses for a simple melody without finding one that we thought suitable. It is perhaps too soon to draw very definite conclusions from the results of these reforms in the Boston schools. One thing is certain: a very large number of children five, six, and seven years of age are now singing really beautiful songs without seeing any music at all and without being told anything whatever about the notes, rests, intervals, etc., which occur in them. Upon the experience of these two and one half years of singing by ear we shall build up skill in singing by note and this skill will be acquired with much greater ease than would be otherwise possible. It is also worth noting that the expense of music books in these grades (and the same will be true of later grades) is more than cut in half. In the kindergarten and the first primary grades the children sing without a book; in the second and third grades they use a simple and inexpensive book of words, while the teachers in these grades use the small collection of folk-songs already referred to. In the Boston schools ninety minutes a week is given to drawing, and sixty minutes a week to music. It is obvious that a daily lesson in music twelve minutes long is entirely inadequate for proper instruction. An increase to twenty minutes a day, or to three half-hours a week is highly desirable. In many schools entirely too much time is devoted to preparing music for the graduation exercises. Failing an examination, what is there left but an exhibition?