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The following year, 1906, Professor Johnstone said, "Perhaps our most significant move has been the establishment of the Summer Class for Public School Teachers. It is intended to better fit teachers to understand the peculiarities and capabilities of backward children, and is a preparation for those who propose to engage in teaching the special classes in the public schools. Our classes have been very successful, and our students have done us much good by extending the influence of our School. We are about to enter upon our third year with an increased enrollment. The school superintendents in New York and Philadelphia, as well as throughout our own State, heartily approve the idea, and give it their support. The School of Pedagogy of the University of New York will open a special course similar to ours during the coming winter, and possibly our Summer School will be the laboratory for the University classes.

"We really have a standing in the educational work of the world. In the past two months, twenty teachers in a body came from Trenton to study our plans. A class and individuals have come from New York. The University of Pennsylvania sent a class, and we have even had visitors from England and Australia. When we began our summer school, it, too, cost money; but that has been made up, and this year we shall have a surplus of a few dollars."

The first summer school opened with but five teacher-students. The twenty-seven years that followed were to see a total of over nine hundred public school teachers at The Training School for the six weeks course. From the very beginning it was evident that the facilities of the Village for their housing and care would be inadequate to accommodate all who would apply for the privilege. Four cottages were built for their special use. These were unable to care for all who sought to enter. The Village replaced them with three more commodious buildings with housing capacity for sixty. This was the limit finally fixed. It was the saturation point of the School and, wisely, it was not exceeded though the demand for entrance was greatly in excess of that number.

Those admitted were not novices in teaching. They had had an average of ten or more years experience as public school teachers. Their average age was thirty-three. They knew the problems of the classroom which their own incapacity and the faults of the "system" had made it impossible to solve. They came from every state in the Union, from foreign countries, from the isles of the sea. When boards of education were unable or unwilling to defray the necessary expense for travel and the nominal tuition fee fixed by the Village, they paid their own way.

They came full of purpose to learn. They brought with them a cross-section of the public school systems which displayed their excellences, their weaknesses, and their successes and failures in adjusting children, wholesale, to their systems. They saw their own problems solved and the weaknesses of the systems exposed at a school where training and education were adjusted to the individual capacities and needs of its children; a school in which understanding of the child was paramount and where every known facility of science and human experience was used to make that understanding possible; a school in which system prevailed but a system so flexible that it could meet the needs of each of its children.

The services of The Training School rendered through its summer school played and still is playing an important part in the correction of Education's intellectual astigmatism so pronounced only a few decades ago. During its nearly thirty years of service it has returned these widely scattered nine hundred and twenty-five teachers to the public schools imbued with greater zeal, a wider vision, a better understanding and a finer faith in themselves and their pupils. The Soul of The Training School, which our first story attempted to reveal, and its life and atmosphere as reflected in the lives of the children of the Village with whom those summer school students had such close contact during their six weeks of study, have been carried into hundreds of schools the world over. Through them the "Spirit of Vineland" has breathed upon and blessed thousands of children with its understanding of them, its patience and gentleness with them, and its faith in them.

The Village files are full of grateful tributes from those who have been privileged to carry its message:

"Once again my plans for the school begin to take shape and I realize how much better I can face the difficult problems with the wonderful training Vineland has given me...... My whole life will be happier."

"I want to tell you what has been in my mind now for many years. You did for me what nobody else ever did, possibly never could have done... I understood through you that the mistakes of children, of teachers, the errors that people made, their fumbling of ideas that seemed critical, the total surface of life inside or outside of school, were relatively unimportant. What counted, the only thing that counted, what caused all the brain work and footwork and other activities to function was the spirit of love. With that miracles were worked easily. Without that nothing worked. I carried that away from your School. I held onto it. It has never failed me.