The ability to sing through--words and music--the national anthem. The ability courteously and effectively to receive orders from a superior. The avoidance of vulgarity and profanity in one’s public speaking. The ability to read silently without lip movements. The habit of placing the page one is reading so that there will not be shadows upon it. The ability to refrain from conversation under conditions where it is annoying or disagreeable to others. The ability to converse intelligently about municipal and district civic matters. The ability to comprehend accurately the meaning of all common abbreviations and signs one meets with in reading. The ability, during one’s reading, to distinguish between an author’s central theme and his incidental remarks. I refrain from any more: all these got enough votes to put them among the first 200 objectives--200 out of 1581. Nor do I choose them unfairly; most of those that I have not listed were quite as bad as those I have. But, you may protest, the good professor handed his cards to a jury of little girls of eight or nine years, or to the inmates of a home for the feeble-minded! He did, in fact, nothing of the kind. His jury was very carefully selected. It consisted of eighty teachers of such professional keenness that they were assembled at the University of Chicago for post-graduate study. Every one of them had been through either a college or a normal school; forty-seven of them held learned degrees; all of them had been engaged professionally in teaching English, some for years. They came from Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Toronto, Leland Stanford, Chicago and Northwestern Universities; from Oberlin, De Pauw, Goucher, Beloit and Drake Colleges; from a dozen lesser seminaries of the higher learning. They represented, not the lowest level of teachers of English in the Republic, but the highest level. And yet it was their verdict by a solemn referendum that the principal objective in teaching English was to make good spellers, and that after that came the breeding of good capitalizers!