3.  The teaching of spelling should aim to give the pupils complete mastery over those words which they need to use in writing and it should instil in them the permanent habit of watching their spelling as they write.  Drill on lists of isolated words should give way to practice in spelling correctly every word in everything written.  The dictionary habit should be cultivated, and every written lesson should be a spelling lesson.

4.  The time devoted to language, composition, and grammar is about the same as in the average city.  The chief result of the work as done in Cleveland is to enable the pupil to recite well on textbook grammar and to pass examinations in the subject.  The work in technical grammar should be continued for the purpose of giving the pupils a foundation acquaintance with forms, terms, relations, and grammatical perspective, but this training need not be so extensive and intensive as at present.  The time saved should be given to oral and written expression in connection with the reading of history, geography, industrial studies, civics, sanitation, and the like.  Facility and accuracy in oral and written expression are developed through practice rather than through precept.  They are perfected through the conscious and unconscious imitation of good models rather than through the advanced study of technical grammar.  Only as knowledge is put to work is it really learned or assimilated.

5.  Cleveland gives more time to mathematics than does the average city.  The content of courses in mathematics is to be determined by human needs.  A fundamental need of our scientific age is more accurate quantitative thinking about our vocations, civic problems, taxation, income, insurance, expenditures, public improvements, and the multitude of other public and private problems involving quantities.  We need to think accurately and easily in quantities, proportions, forms, and relationships.  Arithmetic teaching, like the teaching of penmanship, is for the purpose of providing tools to be used in matters that lie beyond.  The present course of study is of superior character, providing for efficient elementary training and dispensing with most of the things of little practical use.  The greatest improvement in the work is to be found in its further carrying over into the other fields of school work and in applying it in other classes as well as in the arithmetic class.  In the advanced classes mathematics should be differentiated according to the needs of different pupils.  Algebra should be more closely related to practical matters and developed in connection with geometry and trigonometry.

6.  History receives much less attention in this city than in the average city.  The character of the work is really indicated by the last sentence of the eighth-grade history assignment:  “The text of our book should be thoroughly mastered.”  The work is too brief, abstract, and barren to help the pupils toward an understanding of the social, political, economic, and industrial problems with which we are confronted.  It should be amply supplemented by a wide range of reading on social welfare topics.  This reading should be biographical, anecdotal, thrilling dramas of human achievement, rich with human interest.  It should be at every stage on the level with the understanding and degree of maturity of the pupils so that much reading can be covered rapidly.