It may be a matter of surprise that a paper devoted largely to the interests of teachers of history in secondary schools and colleges should print in one number nearly five pages of matter relating to history in elementary schools. Yet there should be no need of an apology. Were not the several parts of the American educational system so independent of one another, our secondary and college teachers of history would not pride themselves upon their ignorance of conditions in the elementary schools. Because organically or politically there is little correlation among the three parts of the system, each part attempts to ignore the others, rejecting suggestions concerning its own work, and grudgingly and condescendingly giving advice concerning the others. With a few notable exceptions, several of whom appear as contributors to this number of the MAGAZINE, college men in America have kept sedulously away from the problems of history teaching in the elementary school, or if they have turned their gaze upon the schools, it has been to seek a market for a new elementary history textbook. Yet the elementary school needs the best thought that the nation can give to it; not the thought of elementary school men alone, but the clearness and directness and thoroughness which come so frequently with college training. It is superciliousness or inertia which leads a college instructor to say that he cannot realize the problems of the elementary school, and then to send his children to a class taught by a young girl fresh from the normal school or high school. It was not thus that the schedules for history in the Prussian or French schools were made. It is not by thus leaving the determination of policy to weaker employees that great corporations succeed. And how much more valuable are our children than corporate wealth! The report of the Committee of Eight is beyond doubt the most important feature of the year in the teaching of history in America. It deserves to rank with the report of the Committee of Seven, and its influence may well be even greater. The report is remarkable for its sanity, its absence of theorizing, its understanding of the mind of the child at several ages, its clearness and general helpfulness. Not content with merely outlining the field of history for each grade, the committee has realized the weakness of the teacher, and has constructed a course of study for her, and has even gone so far as to advise the emphasis and amount of time to be given to each subject. Schedule-makers have previously had no advice from historians upon these points; they have been left severely alone to fix their days and hours and subjects as they might think best. The report changes all this by combining the scholarly knowledge of the historian with the skill of the pedagogical student and with the worldly wisdom of the schedule maker.