superintendents do not want your boards to appoint or reward with promotion teachers whom you feel you ought not to recommend; you can very well afford to refrain from appointing those your board is unwilling to approve. Why not let this power remain joint you to nominate, they to approve? Even the president of the United States does not have absolute power of appointment.

A serious menace to good school administration is the bi-headed system proposed this morning-the schools administered by two men, one a business manager, one a superintendent of instruction. With such an arrangement the two parts of the organization will soon be found, in most cases, to be working at cross-purposes - pulling apart like two unwilling oxen under the same yoke. The school is first of all a business organization; the man who controls the business side is master; he should have charge also of the instruction; he should be the superintendent of schools-all departments of the schools; not a business manager merely or a superintendent of instruction merely. If your business manager should be, by chance, a wise and sympathetic man, he might be in fact a superintendent of schools, and encourage and assist the department of instruction to do its work well. But if he proves like most, he will be anxious chiefly to manage the schools economically; the superintendent anxious to make them as good as possible.

To do the best, school systems, like other business organizations, must have a single responsible executive head. The board will be back of him, and he will manage the schools subject to its general direction and approval. To him will report the heads of the various departments in all lines of the school administration. He will be in reality the superintendent of schools.

SUPERINTENDENT F. LOUIS SOLDAN, St. Louis, Mo.-I think it will be of interest to glance at a school system which differs from the types mentioned, both as to the number of members of the board and the manner of election. So far as I know, it cannot be said of any other plan that it has been in operation for five years without any friction to hinder its success.

The typical features are in brief: Number of members, twelve, elected on a general ticket. Election of a board on a ticket at large takes the schools out of ward politics. Ward elections frequently result in giving representation, not so much to the good citizens of each locality, but to the ward politician. A board elected at large represents the whole city, and is not likely to allow the impression to obtain that the parts of the city in which they happen to reside get more attention. In my city, if there is any discrimination at all, we give more attention to those parts of the city happening to have no local representatives on the board.

In administrative matters, it is the plan to have as many departments as there are distinct functions. One officer has charge of the administration of the schools themselves, instruction, teachers, etc.; another, of buildings, including janitors; another, of finances; another officer has charge of school supplies. If there is anything wrong, say in the janitor service, the responsibility does not lie with the board, in the first place, but with one man who has charge of the appointment and dismissing of janitors. If there is anything wrong with the instruction, if there are incompetent teachers, the responsibility lies with the superintendent, who has power to correct the evil. The principle underlying this plan of having independent heads of departments is that of localizing and fixing responsibility.

The law gives the superintendent power to nominate, not to appoint, teachers; he has not the power to adopt text-books, but he takes the initiative in recommending them; the same is true in the matter of school furniture.

The fears of my friend from Omaha are not realized. There is no tendency to make one department domineer over the rest. I believe, judging from an experience of five years, that this type deserves equal consideration with other plans described.

THE FREEDOM OF THE TEACHER

CHARLES B. Gilbert, rochester, N. Y.

In the organization of great school systems, which is the passion of the hour, there is danger that the teacher shall become the submerged fraction.

We superintendents need a baptism of the spirit of true education. It is said, justly or unjustly, that this age is materialistic. Certain it is that we are in danger of having our minds forced to dwell too continuously upon the material side of life. We schoolmen are no exception. There is grave danger that in the organization of systems, with the intrusive demands of the architect, the doctor of medicine, and the statistician, we shall, like Martha, forget the higher things.

Dr. Arnold Tompkins, whose fine definition, "The school is a spiritual union between teacher and pupils," is classic, has also said that "the school in its last analysis consists of the self-educating pupil." I cannot but think that Dr. Tompkins, usually so astute and exact, has here slipped. The self-educating pupil is not a school at all; he is simply a self-educating pupil. An aggregation of self-educating pupils does not constitute a school any more than do any other aggregations of people. The one characteristic which distinguishes the school from other collections of people is the presence of the teacher. In more senses than the popular one it is the teacher who makes the school.

The world is full of people who are educating themselves, consciously or unconsciously; who are utilizing all the great agents and forces of life as means of spiritual growth; but only in a figurative sense is the world itself a school. The figure consists in the personification of these various agents and forces, and even of life itself, and treating them as teachers. There is no school without a living teacher entering to some degree into the lives of the pupils, forming some sort of spiritual union with them. It is as true in a practical sense as in a philosophical that the teacher is the school.

Every school administrator knows that his one serious business is to secure good teachers. Courses of study are important, and a good school is more easily secured with a good course of study than with a poor one. Proper organization is important; good schoolhouses are important; good text-books are important-and all the appliances which may be used to further education; but none of these alone, nor all of them together, constitute a school, nor can they make a good school; but the good teacher can make a good school, if any or all of these concomitants, these aids, are lacking. Hence it becomes the chief duty. of the executive authorities of school systems everywhere first of all to secure the best possible teachers, and then to remove, in so far

as possible, all obstructions from their paths, to give them free scope, and to aid them in their work in every conceivable way. All the machinery of great school systems-local, state, and national-has for its aim, properly, this one thing: to make it easier for the teacher to teach well.

In the small private school, and in the rural school especially, the teacher is all in all. The teacher makes the school; he is expected to make the school. If the school is good, it is to his credit; if bad, it is his fault. This is not merely theoretically, but practically, true. The best type of school, depending wholly upon the teacher, is the rural school. Here the interference with his work is very slight indeed; he is compelled to employ his own initiative, make his own plans, organize his institution, and execute his plans. Young teachers, coming from training institutions, are frequently urged to teach a rural school for a while in order to develop the power of initiative, of independent action, thru their necessary exercise in the professional solitude of the country. schoolhouse; and it is good advice.

Many of the strongest and best teachers and educational leaders that the country has ever known have received their first impulse, their versatility and breadth of view, and their ability to meet new difficulties, which have made them great, in the small, unpainted schoolhouse in the remote country district where they began their discouraging work. Here they were required to study their pupils and give them work suitable for them, to devise their own methods, to meet emergencies— often serious-quickly and firmly. In the country school that is good for anything the teacher is "it." Alas, that in any system of schools he should ever cease to be "it"! But there is, unfortunately, in the development of large institutions a tendency to subordinate the individual and to destroy individuality. This is particularly true in great school systems. The tendency seems almost inevitable. The demands of the organization itself are so great, it requires so much executive power to keep the machine running, that the machine itself attracts undue attention and we are in danger of forgetting that the business of the school is to teach individual children. This worship of machines is the most debasing kind of fetish-worship; it destroys the power to judge of values, and, like all worship of inferior gods, it subordinates the higher ends to the lower.

Frequently, in our great city systems, teachers are judged by their ability to run along smoothly in a well-oiled machine rather than by their power of inspiration, their ability to uplift, encourage, strengthen, and really teach children. I have known teachers full of love of youth, possessed of extraordinary inspirational power and ability to make children think, work, and learn, driven from the school system because they did not readily untie red tape. We too often forget that the school systein is useful only in so far as it makes it easier for the teacher to teach;

that every unnecessary burden, every extraneous demand upon the teacher's energies, everything which distracts his mind or takes his time. away from the one purpose of his work — that of teaching the children — is a positive injury. When the machine grinds out the power of initiative from the teacher and makes him a mere tool, granted the privilege of imparting a little carefully prepared desiccated information, and freezes his soul out of the work, then it is time to smash the machine; and there are countless machines all over this land that need to be smashed.

There is a constant tendency to organize school systems like factories, with a boss, sub-bosses, and hands.

I repeat: The only function of the school system is to help the teacher to teach; not to do it for him, but to remove every unnecessary obstacle and to provide every possible aid, in order that he may exercise to the full his highest powers for the sole purpose of helping children.

Perhaps the worst form of machine domination is that which places undue stress upon statistics and makes of the teacher a mere compiler of figures. Great marking schemes have been devised by school boards, school superintendents, and the devil to prevent teachers from teaching with their whole souls-schemes for marking children upon all conceivable points, which require brain-racking study, burning of the midnight oil, and, it must be confessed, even imagination, to an awful

extent.

As such systems lead children to study for marks, to behave for marks, to cheat and lie for marks, as well as to be hateful and narrowly exacting, so they lead teachers to teach for marks, control for marks, to put the whole stress of their work upon the getting of marks; and they, too, sometimes are led to cheat for marks and to lie for marks.

The evil of this thing is easy to see. Any method of organization or of work which distracts the attention from the real end and forces it upon a secondary end is immoral. Many great evils in life result from placing undue stress upon secondary ends; upon the accumulation of wealth instead of upon the proper expenditure of wealth; upon acquiring power instead of upon the proper use of power; upon getting rather than giving.

To force teachers continually to drill along narrow lines in order that marks may be secured is to take away their spiritual freedom and to degrade them. The teacher who is forever harassed lest her pupils shall not pass naturally is unable to give her whole attention to the needs of the children and to supplying them.

The rural school-teacher, if of the right sort, studies John and William and Susan, and decides that for John's good he should do this; William, for his good, should do that; and Susan, for her good, should do that; but the machine-made, machine-driven teacher, in a system having no such freedom of action, treats John and William and Susan all alike (they must all take the same brimstone and treacle because it is

good for somebody), and is not allowed to exercise his own natural judgment and his natural interest in their spiritual well-being. This is not only bad for the children, but it is, if possible, worse for the teacher. The children may recover, because their school days fortunately end sometime; the teacher's fate becomes fixed, as his school days never end.

Another evil which is finding its way into our larger cities is the formal and frequent marking of the teachers themselves after a brief and valueless visitation. A superintendent and a body of supervisors or a body of superintendents are employed, not to instruct, inspire, and help the teachers, but to mark them. I know of cities in which supervisors go about from schoolroom to schoolroom, notebook and pencil in hand, sitting for a while in each room like malignant sphinxes, eying the terrified teacher, who in her terror does everything wrong, and then marking her in that little doomsday book. I have known many teachers fairly. to shrivel when the supervisor with his instrument of torture enters, and, besides doing their very worst during his presence, to be thoroly unfit for work during the remainder of the day, and to be sick for days afterward. Who will venture to say that such a system of torture, depriving children of the teachers' best work for at least a time and breaking the teachers' hearts for all time, is justifiable? Such supervisor's paths, like those of reckless automobilists, are strewn with the dead bodies of hopes and ambitions and nerves. The reasons given are that some teachers will do wrong, and hence a system of espionage and terrorism is extended, like the clouds of heaven, over all alike. This, of course, instead of correcting the evil, extends it and creates new ones undreamed of before.

The most precious possession of a school system, rightly viewed, is the teacher's devotion to his work. Any plan of organization, any method. of administration or supervision, which lessens that, which diverts the teacher's energy into any foreign channel, is an evil.

The teacher in the schoolroom should always feel that his first duty, and almost the sum of his duties, is to ascertain and to meet the needs of the individual children under his care. In the machine system the tendency is always to center the thought of the teacher upon, not the children, but the higher authorities, so that, instead of feeling responsible to them and being anxious to serve them, he becomes over-anxious to "stand in with" the administration, and to sacrifice his own obligation to the higher law, to the demands of his superior officers for uniformity. This shifting of conscience is not only encouraged, but is almost necessitated, by some prevalent systems of administration.

When a teacher ceases to feel that he is there primarily and wholly to serve the children, and begins to feel that he is there to serve somebody else school superintendent, school board, local politician-he ceases then and there to be as good a teacher as he might be.