their homes. The country school, though small and its work often very laborious, because necessarily ungraded, gives a freer field for the application of principles than the city school.

"The majority of those persons who wish to avail themselves of the advantages of normal instruction, that they may become teachers, are of a class that can not afford to do so unless the opportunities for it are easy of access and convenient to their homes. The number of pupils that attend the schools at Farmington and Castine from the counties where they are located, and the large proportion of that number coming from the towns where the schools are located, attest to this fact."

In the report of the general agent of the Massachusetts Board of Education, for 1873-74, that officer speaks of "teachers' need of improvement," in the following convincing fashion:

"In a recent visit to one of the wealthy towns in Essex County, I asked the chairman of the school committee, who for more than 30 years has taken an active intelligent interest in its schools, wherein the present schools of his town differed from those of 30 years ago. In almost every respect,' he said, there has been an improvement and we pay our teachers better wages.' And has there been,' I asked, 'a corresponding improvement in the teachers; are they better qualified for their work now than in former years, and are the results of their teaching more satisfactory?' 'We have had,' he replied, for many years quite a number of very excellent teachers, who have come to us with all the preparation for their work which the normal and high schools and academies could give them, though in some instances even the normal graduates have utterly failed of success; but we have had many poor teachers, who just from the grammar or district school, could pass a tolerably good examination in the common branches of study, yet had no idea of any methods of teaching or of the proper work of the school room. On the whole, I do not think there has been a corresponding improvement in this respect.' "What is true of this school is equally true of numerous other towns similarly situated. Excellent and often very costly school buildings have been erected and thoroughly equipped; schools have been graded; courses of study, carefully and wisely matured, have been prepared, and not infrequently all this has been of little avail through lack of that which is more important than either, or all of them combined, thoroughly qualified teachers. And if this is so in such towns as these, presenting so many inducements to attract the best teachers, and yet finding so many not properly qualified for their work, how must it be with numerous other towns in the State which can offer only greatly inferior wages and so get greatly inferior teachers?

Quoting the Maine report for 1880, it appears that

"There are few, I think, at all familiar with the condition and wants of our schools who will not agree to the assertion that the great need of all of them, and of the primary and ungraded schools especially, is better teaching. Few, if any, will enter a demurrer to the stronger assertion, that the great majority of our teachers do not know enough of what they teach, nor know definitely enough what they do know. Fewer still will refuse to subscribe to the statement that full three-fourths of the six to seven thousand common school teachers of the State are wholly or largely without that professional knowledge, gained from systematic professional training or from professional study and experiment guided thereby, which is essential to anything like the work we have a right to expect and demand in our schools. They are, the great mass of them, blind experimenters or servile imitators of others, mechanically plodding in old and time-worn ruts."

"The majority of rural and ungraded schools are a failure when judged by a fair standard," says the com.nittee appointed by the Teachers' Association of Vermont in 1880. Teachers who are graduates from these schools of inexperience only, degrade public instruction, squander public funds, and debauch public opinion. Vermont has had too much of this already; otherwise there had been no need of this report. Nearly every argument for the existence of the common school is an argument for its improvement. How can this be better done than by improving its chief factor-its chief officer-its teacher? Can this be done efficiently in any school that does not hold such work as one of its prominent objects?" (Published by the State superintendent as a part of his annual report for 1880, p. 23.)

In the State report of New Hampshire for 1882 it is said that

"The scholarship of many of our teachers is too limited and inaccurate, and they lack the power to instruct according to the approved practice of the best educators. There is among them a fatal want of knowledge of the laws of mind growth and the natural order of studies. Not infrequently they confound silence with order, and mistake mental stagnation for mental digestion. With such drawbacks the physical, intellectual, and moral faculties of children can not be so disciplined and informed as to fit them to do their best in the industries and responsibilities of after life."

"A good school without a good teacher is an impossible thing. The most direct way, therefore, to improve the schools of the State is to improve its teachers."

In their annual report for 1885-'86 the Connecticut Board of Education make the following observations regarding the system supervised by them:

"We make our statement with a full sense of its gravity and of the concern which it will excite in all thoughtful minds, but we find the fact to be, and we must state it as we find it, that the common-school system of this State is in a most unsatisfactory condition.

III. There is too little really first-rate teaching in our schools, and too much that is very, very poor.

"1. The teachers do not know enough.-It is a great mistake to suppose that a common-school teacher does not need to know much. It is impossible for any teacher to have too large a reserve fund of general information and of well ordered knowledge. But many teachers have no general information at all. They are not familiar even with the common-school branches they are undertaking to teach. This is manifested by an inspection of schools, and also by the results of the State examinations of teachers. The answers given to questions about common-school studies by some persons who are at present teaching in the schools of Connecticut reveal an ignorance which in a teacher is appalling to contemplate. Of the 406, who have so far undertaken the examination, only 70 have passed well enough to receive a certificate.

2. These teachers have not sufficiently well-trained and disciplined minds.-There is much education of faculty which can only come to scholars throngh daily contact with a clear orderly mind. The loss to the children of the State in missing the influences, which fairly lucid and logical ways of thought and expression in the teachers would exert upon the scholars, is greater than most people realize. Not a few teachers are too young and unmature. Some are not over sixteen years old. Many others are not well educated. The trouble with many teachers is that they never had any education at all, except what they have picked up in their own poor district school, where bad methods are perpetuated from generation to generation.

*

"S. The teachers do not know how to teach, nor (4) what to teach, nor (5) how to organize and manage a school."

Secretary Hine, of Connecticut, in his report on the results obtained by the examination of the schools of New London County, 1889, speaks of the condition of the teaching force in the following terms:

"Many of the teachers are very young. Presumably boys and girls at sixteen are not old enough to be intrusted with the training and discipline of children. Their education is often entirely inadequate. They advance from the highest class of the district school to the teachers' desk. They may have attended an academy for a term or two in the winter, but the astonishing ignorance which can exist after attendance upon a high school does not make such attendance satisfactory evidence of education sufficient for a teacher."

Observe how these gentlemen emphasize the fact that the great majority of the teachers of the schools come immediately from the very schools whose elevation is the purpose of the State normal school. It is frequently affirmed that to have been well taught is the best way of learning to teach others. Assuming that there is a certain force in this claim still it rests wholly on the ground that the teacher who has completed his education in the public schools has been well taught, a proposition that is belied by the experience of the normal schools, as has been shown in the preceding chapter. For even in Massachusetts, where every township of 500 inhabitants must maintain a high school, and many with fewer inhabitants do maintain one, and where population is denser than in any other State of the Union, with the exception of Rhode Island, only about 50 per cent. of the pupils admitted to the normal schools have graduated from a high school. In States less favorable to secondary education the percentage must be much lower. Twenty-eight State schools that reported to the committee of the National Educational Association put the per cent, at 124, the city schools replying 100 per cent., as might be expected. Even in Massachusetts and Rhode Island about one-fourth of the pupils are the children of farmers; in agricultural States the per cent. is much larger. But this has been touched on in the preceding chapter.

However the difficulty noted in that chapter is not one that has been peculiar to America. "The problem which has had to be solved in modern times," says Mr. C. C. Perry, in a recent report on German training colleges, "is how to graft the specific training of schoolmasters, such as is provided by training colleges (normal schools) on the general elementary school course so as to form one connected whole. The question as to the best means of effecting this particular object has been discussed in Germany during the last fifty or sixty years.

At first, continues Mr. Perry in substance, intending normal pupils-a considerable portion of whom come from the elementary country schools-received private instruction from schoolmasters to whom they were assistants. This, of course, not an

German Training Schools and Colleges in the work bearing the title "German Elementary Educa tion," by C. C. Perry.

swering, preparatory schools (Präparenden-Schulen) were instituted in Prussia and other states. Though they were private schools they were usually connected with the normal school. In Bavaria in 1857, however, the Government divided each administrative district into eight or twelve school districts in each of which a schoolmaster or clergyman was especially commissioned to prepare pupils for the normal schools. Prussia, on the other hand, placed the preparatory training of such pupils in the hands of private instructors especially appointed by the Government, the number of pupils for each being limited to three. This very much resembles the pupilteacher system that obtains in England to-day. But the folly of permitting inexperienced boys fourteen or fifteen years old to teach and of supposing that after having done his own day's work the master would devote himself with "geistiger Energie to the instruction of his assistants for two hours more was soon recognized, and in 1872 the systematic organization of preparatory training schools in Prussia began. But "the question whether the instruction which intervenes between the elementary school and a normal school ought to be more of a special or general nature is one of those about which there has been most doubt." The programme of the Prussian course has been given on p. 304 and that of Bavaria on p. 305. Mr. Perry gives the statistics-which it appears are somewhat difficult to obtain for Prussia-of nine schools, as follows:

MISCELLANEOUS STATISTICS GOING TO SHOW THE PROFESSIONAL CHARACTER OF THE NEW ENGLAND TEACHING FORCE.

We hear a good deal about the difficulties that heredity places in the way of edu cating the child as furnished by its parents to the educator; the same fatality accompanies educational reports; the type once fixed is handed down from superintendent to superintendent modified, but scarcely to the extent of being called a change. In the New England States several items of interest in connection with the service or professional character of the teaching force appear which it is proposed to give by States:

a Computed by this office from (probably) incomplete returns.

In 1875 this number represented those who had attended a normal school; 236 is given as those "from a normal school" and in another as those who school.

school.

The language to which these answers were made runs

[Massachusetts?] normal schools.

Year.

Number of teach

ers who

have graduated

from normal

schools.

Number

of teachers who

have attended

a normal school.

2,037

2,416

2, 155

2, 581

2, 240

2,744

2,392

2,866

2.420

3,003

2,533

3, 134

In "a preliminary note" to the work from which we have taken the matter here given as to the pay of teachers in foreign parts, Mr. Ernest Pelletier, assistant chief of the bureau immediately attached to the French ministry of public instruction and fine arts, speaks as follows of the sources from which his information had been obtained:

"The present compilation has been formed by the courtesy of the representatives of France abroad and her diplomatic and consular agents, through whom the original documents have been obtained. Many heads of departments, notably Monsieur Germain, director of primary instruction in Belgium; Signor Rivera, chief of primary instruction in Italy, and others, have had the courtesy to lend their assistance in consummating the work."

GERMANY.

In Germany the condition of affairs is very similar to that in the United States; each state of the Empire, as each of our States, fixes the pay of its teachers and the manner of appointing them. The order given in the work from which we have obtained our information is that followed here in presenting it in the form of an abstract.

PRUSSIA.

The average salary of a position held by a man or woman teacher (high schools for boys and girls excepted) is 874 marks ($213.50) in the country and 1,365 marks ($341.25) in the city, giving an average for the whole country of 1,032 ($258). If to this average salary the average appropriation allowed by the state, according to length of service, rank, etc., be added, the total average amount received by the school master or mistress will be found to be 954 marks ($238.50) for a position in a country school and 1,398 marks ($349.50) in the cities; an average of 1,093 marks ($294.50) for the kingdom. There is a pension system.

BAVARIA.

The minimum salary of the teacher is as follows:

In communes of more than 10,000 inhabitants 500 florins ($215); of 2,500 to 10,000, 450 florins ($130); below 2,500, 350 florins ($150.50). In 1874 the poor pay of the teachers of the smaller communes was bettered. In the communes having fewer than 2,500 inhabitants the minimum salary was fixed at 450 florins ($193.50), and, in communes having 2,500 to 10,000 inhabitants, 500 florins ($215). This increase is to be made at the expense of the State. After ten years of service the teacher becomes entitled to an increase of $22.50, which is doubled for every additional five years he teaches. It is the rule that the teacher in communes of fewer than 2,500 inhabitants has the use of a house adapted to the needs of a family, in addition to his salary.

These minimum figures are always exceeded, either through grants by the commune or by the district fund (Kreisfond) or by grants by the State. In the greater number of the cities the actual pay of the teachers is double that given above. There is a pension system.