very excellent city systems under the su pervision of able and well paid superir. tendents, while their country schools are suffering for want of a like supervision, because they have no county superintend

ally held up before the others. The best methods, the best results, are made the standard, and popular opinion elevates its demands. That which feels itself merely tolerated is forced to struggle for selfpreservation. The “struggle for existency. ence" ends in development.

For the reason that this link of county

The links of supervision in our Amer- superintendency is the most important of ican system of schools embrace the following:

all the supervisory links, inasmuch as it concerns the education of three-fourths of all the people of the land, it deserves far more attention on the part of legislators than it has received. It is the most preIn carious link in the system. It is attacked annually by the friends of retrenchment, and the enemies of public schools seize the occasion to strike a most dangerous blow to the cause of popular education.

I. National Commissioner of Educacation at Washington, who has charge of the Bureau for the collection and dissemination of educational information. the reports of that Bureau as in a mirror, one may see reflected the actual status of education—its organization and resultsnot only in the United States, but in all parts of the world.

II. State Superintendent of Public Instruction, resident at the state capital, and having charge of the apportionment of the State School Fund, the organization of educational institutes, collection of statistics, and a general supervision over the common schools, so far as the execution of the state laws is concerned.

III. County superintendents, having supervision over all schools in their county not organized under special charter (as systems of city schools).

IV. Superintendents of City Schools. Their jurisdiction extends over systems of schools organized independently of county supervision.

In order to convince the well-wisher of public schools, that these remarks are not hasty and ill-considered, I will ask his attention to the following summary statement of the duties of the county superintendent; not mere ideal duties which he ought to perform but does not, but rea! duties, most of which he cannot "shirk," and which for the most part are discharg ed with great conscientiousness by many county superintendents with whom I am personally acquainted.

The county superintendent's functions involve—

I. His duty to confer with other school officers and directors: (1) with the State Superintendent, whose interpretation of

V. In large cities the supervision of the state school law he is obliged to prothe superintendent is supplemented by mulgate, and to whom he has to report assistant superintendents and supervising the enrollment of school population as a principals. The latter have charge of basis for the division of the school fund; large schools and smaller subordinate (2) with the county clerk as treasurer, as schools, and spend most of their time in an intervening official charged with the inspection of the work of their assistant transmission of statistics, receipt of funds, teachers, and in giving effect to general etc.; (3) with local school-boards, includ arrangements, devised for the perfection ing (a) township boards, (b) village boards of management and instruction. and (c) city boards. With each of these, With this five-fold system of supervis- if located in his county, he is brought ion, American educators may feel a degree into necessary relation, and with the first of satisfaction. In a very large number of them he has very distinct duties as reof states-such as Michigan, Illinois, Mis- gards advice and consultation. (4) With souri, the system is complete. In all the the sub-district directors he has similar states are found the second, fourth and relations, and is expected to keep posted fifth links with a greater or less degree of in their plans and arrangements, and to perfection. There are many states having communicate to them his information as

to the state laws and decisions, as well as | cises in the several topics of instruction; the practices found beneficial in other to draw out from the teachers present a places. He must give unity and purpose profitable discussion of the practical points to their proceedings. presented in the exercises and lectures.

ism, and my gray hairs a delusion. For | so far as is recorded, has ever seen what in enthusiasm, in wonder, in satisfaction, we now see, a full formed egg in the body in implicit confidence in my instructor, I was instantly reduced from forty to fourteen years of age.

Prof. Agassiz was interested in the egg, we in him, and it seemed quite worth our while to observe him as he studied it. Beaming and sparkling with delight, he Such enthusiasm could not but be consurprised us by saying, “No human eye, |tagious. The objects we examined and

studied seemed almost as novel and interesting as those we would expect to find on some other planet.

The school proposes to itself to be a normal school for teachers of Natural History where they may learn how to observe and how to communicate; and also a center of investigation for original discovery, that this field of human knowledge may be enlarged as rapidly as may be.-N. Y. Educational Journal.

COMMON SCHOOL EDUCATION.

a class of studies never pursued in after life,-except for special ends, or by reason of peculiar tastes. The higher mathematics, for instance, or chemistry, or astronomy, or geology, are by the vast majority of public school scholars as sure to be utterly dismissed from their thoughts as the rules of the school and the order of recitations. They are forced into the minds of pupils at an age when the reasoning powers are undeveloped, and the memory in its highest state of receptivity. Obviously, that is the age when elemen

when the art of using facts should begin to be taught in that careful and guarded way which takes care not to anticipate development. Take a class of the same age, and, with slight exceptions, the power of learning by rote will be about the same. But the power of reasoning and applying will be almost in abeyance with them all. Just where it is found there will probably be less capacity for accurate memory Indeed, accurate, literal memory almost always leaves the mind when the higher pow

Common school teaching has been al-tary facts should be laid in store, and lowed to be governed more and more by half truths and conventional ideas. The efforts of its friends and promoters have sought an end which was by no means as clearly kept in view as the importance of the matter warranted. This end was that the public school should give the best and most complete education to be obtained. Public school teaching was to supersede all other teaching, by dint of being superior to all other. To reach this end, the effort has been made to crowd into the common school course as much of every-ers come in play. Idiots and feeble-minded thing to be taught, as the limits of the system would allow. The obvious way of reaching this point, or or of appearing to reach it, rather, was to have as many studies on the list as possible, and to be seen

constantly passing from the easier to the more difficult. This sooner or later diverts the attention of the public from the question. "How do you teach ?" to that of "What are you teaching?" It is an easy way of surmounting difficulties. It serves to satisfy parents and guardians, not to say the school committee, or the "Board of Education." To nine out of every ten it is eminently satisfactory to hear that "our high school teaches as much as is taught in most colleges." To ninety-nine out of every hundred there is denied the power of knowing whether any of these things have been satisfactorily learned. Of many of the subjects which are set forth in the text-books carried by the youthful scholar in his leathern strap, or under his arm, none but an expert can judge whether any real knowledge has been attained. They belong to

2-Vol. IV, No. 2.

children are slow to receive impressions, but they hold to them with painful tenacity.

The common school system is fast drifting into that devotion to cramming, which is the very reverse of true education. Secondary facts are crowded upon the memory, to the exclusion of those elementary ones which are needed for the foundation. The plea that is offered in defence of this system, is that everybody's child has a right to the best education the State can give, and that, therefore, it ought to know whatever will be of use to it in after life. We suggest that a good many things may be left till the time shall come for them to be learned to advantage. For instance, a little boy in one corner of a bench in the public school may become a bishop, but it would be hardly worth while to instruct him now in the canons of the the church concerning the trial of bishops. The lad next him is in nowise excluded from the hope of being chief justice of the supreme court of the United States, but would hardly be advanced toward the bench by being now set to work upon

Smith's Leading Cases." There is a fallacy in the theory, somewhat akin to that under which careful country mothers, who pack the trunk of the boy departing for a week's visit to the metropolis, with specifics against all manner of diseases. If the sickness do come, the doctor in the next block, and the druggist on the corner, will furnish all that is needed, and there will be no danger of the bottles breaking and mingling their pleasing contents over the Sunday suit and the new shirt bosoms. For, to carry out our principles-as the boy may be either bishop or chief justice, not to mention all other conceivable offices -it would be proper to cram him with both canons and cases, and with whatever

SUFFRAGE WITHOUT EDUCATION.-Horace Mann expressed the danger to our government of universal suffrage without universal education, as follows:

"The human imagination can picture no semblance of the destructive potency of the ballot box in the hands of an ignorant and corrupt people. The Roman cohorts were terrible; the Turkish janizaries were incarnate fiends; but each were powerless as a child for harm compared to universal suffrage without mental illumination and moral principle. The power of casting a vote is far more formidable than that of casting a spear or javelin.

"On one of these oft-occurring days, when the state of the Union is to be de

else any possible contingency of after life cided at the polls, when over all the land might find it handy to possess.

It seems to us that the common school

system should be limited to the exact opposite of this, and allowed to teach nothing special; nothing but what, in any station of life, would be certain to be useful.

This, however, it should teach well and thoroughly; so thoroughly, in fact, that the child could pass at once to the special study appropriate to its calling, prepared to make the best use of that. It is not important, nay, it is undesirable (unless a man proposes as his destiny to edit encyclopædias), that a boy should leave school knowing a little of everything. A little knowledge of all things almost inevitably involves a vast ignorance of all things, and that, too, unhappily, without the capacity to perceive that ignorance.

the votes are falling thick as hail, and we seem to hear them rattle like the clangor of arms, is it not enough to make the lover of his country turn pale to reflect upon the motives under which they may be given and the consequences to which they may lead? By the votes of a few wicked men,

or even one wicked man, honorable men may be hurled from office and miscreants elevated to their places; useful offices abolished and sinecures created; the public wealth, which had supported industry, squandered upon mercenaries; enterprise crippled; the hammer falling from every hand; the wheel stopping in every mill; the sail drooping to the mast on every sea; and thus capital, which had been honestly and laboriously accumulated, turned into dross. In fine, the whole policy of the Under this system, the rivalry of public schools with private would be mainly government may be reversed and the social conditions of millions changed to gratify done away. The public school would be one man's grudge, or prejudice, or revenge. above rivalry, because, under its limitations, it would teach as no other could-In a word, if the votes which fall so nuexcept in those individual and isolated merously into the ballot box on our days of election emanate from wise councases where a child is best taught on a sels and a loyalty to truth, they will despecial system, adapted to its own pecu-scend like benedictions from heaven to liarities. Then private or special schools bless the land and fill it with joy and for the advanced could take up their particular branches. There would be schools gladness, such as never have been known of modern languages, schools of music, upon the earth since the days of paradise; schools of drawing--possibly, even, schools but, if on the other hand, those votes come from ignorance and crime, the fire and at which the American youth might acbrimstone that were rained on Sodom and and quire some knowledge of history geGomorrah would be more tolerable." ography-Churchman.