The course outlined is not an artificial affair based upon pure theory. It has been successfully carried on in one high school for half a decade, winning the enthusiastic interest of first-year pupils as well as of the teachers charged with its conduct. It can be adapted to the high school of any community, and will fail of its purpose only if it is managed in a perfunctory fashion by instructors who have not a professional interest in their work, or a high sense of their great responsibility and their great opportunity. It would be a splendid thing if we could require of all teachers in the public schools a knowledge of the governmental activities of the municipality they are called upon to serve, for surely they of all citizens, ought to be familiar with the purpose and practice of government. FOOTNOTE: [3] Report at the Cincinnati Meeting (November 16, 1909) of the National Municipal League by J. J. Sheppard, Principal New York High School of Commerce, Chairman of the Committee on Instruction in Municipal Government in Elementary and High Schools. Has History a Practical Value?[4] BY PROFESSOR J. N. BOWMAN, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY. This question of the practical value of history rises not out of a theory but out of existing social and educational conditions. In a practical age where “doing things” receives such generous applause, and “ends” are held in high estimation; when “results,” and very frequently material “results,” are the norms of success, and “efficiency” widens its meaning beyond the physical world,--then history, as well as other subjects is called into question to render an account of itself before the judgment bar of the present. Life looms up great beyond all the parts of the school system. The eighth grade has its graduation into life as well as the high school and college. The grades feel their responsibility to the great majority of their pupils who go directly into life. In the East the high schools are breaking from the “preparatory status” to the college, and are looking to the good they can do for their pupils who get no more schooling. Trade schools are growing up within and beside the high schools, as the professional schools grew up within and beside the colleges. The college itself is in question by labor union committees and inaugural addresses. The university is becoming professional; even Arts and Letters in preparing teachers and general practitioners of arts and letters. The industrial movement has now the economic interpretation of history. The “Market Reports”[5] of the university have brought the “ticker” within the college walls. Students and parents are asking more and more insistently, “What is the use?” and “What is the practical value?”