The actual methods taught in the Normal Schools, and followed out in the connected Model Schools, vary so much as regards both principles and details, that it is almost impossible to report on them as a whole. It is a feature of many of the Normal Schools to cling to old methods, and lines of work of twenty, thirty or forty years ago; while, on the other hand, a few of the Normal Schools I saw--those of Connecticut, the Oswego Normal School, and Colonel Parker’s School, at Englewood, Chicago--seem to be leaders in a campaign which is beginning to revolutionize “Methods” in America. The educational principle which is effecting this reform is the connection or correlation of studies, a theory the most fully expressed and applied at the Cook County Normal School, Illinois. As a result of this theory, the hard and fast lines between the so-called subjects of study are being broken down. Reading is taught in all the grades through nature study, history and literature; _e.g._, natural objects studied by the children in different grades, or poems in the selected literature for the year, serve as subjects for reading lessons. The children are encouraged to express their ideas orally on these subjects, and the teacher writes their statements on the blackboard, and takes care that the statement is really the expression of an idea in the child’s mind. When various sentences, given by the children, have been connected and arranged, the class reads from the board, and afterwards from printed or type-written copies of what has been written. Thus the children make their own reading books, and need no ordinary reading primers. This method, as adapted to the earliest stages of reading, necessarily implies the learning of script before printed characters, also the learning of words and sentences as wholes, and their necessary association with the thought which they express. So, too, writing and drawing, as modes of expressing thought, are taught in close connection with all other subjects. At New Britain, the teacher of drawing in the Model School is present at all literature lessons, and children are encouraged to illustrate their literature by drawings or paintings. In papers on the “Spontaneous Drawings of Children,” read at the Chicago Educational Conference by Professor Earl Barnes, of Leland Stanford University, California, he showed how much of this illustrative work of children was being used by himself and others in the cause of experimental psychology.