private life. And with all due reverence for the educating power of the Home, the Church, and the Ministry of public life, we affirm that neither of them, nor all of them together can achieve the task of training the 8,000,000 children and youth of our new America into the citizenship the nation demands. Only one agency is competent to this, and that is an institution unlike any other that ever was or now is in the world;—the American Common School. In the great future that opens before us the New Teacher is the "coming. man.'

But here, on the threshold, we are met by the spirit of the new time which replies:-" Yes, but the new "coming man." The "old man who still thinks, plots, and ravages the world with his armies across the sea, is our venerable friend, the "first Adam"; the masculine man, who began his career in the green age of the world with the verdant notion that, in the intervals of cultivating Eden and naming the animals, he could "mould" the lovely creature at his side. He, as we have heard, came out like so many an American boy with his first moustache, who tries to "mould" his girl cousin, a prisoner in her toils and a "fallen man." The United States of America is just waking up to the mighty deliverance of St. Paul,-" The second man is the Lord from Heaven; "—the new man constructed in the image of him who, whatever else he may have been, was certainly all the divinest of man this world has known; the prophecy of the man that was to come. The coming man who is to be the teacher of our American youth will be our blended man and woman, inspired, and trained into the teaching, living soul that will lift the little ones out of the private home, up into the common American manhood and womanhood, and the citizenship of the Republic that is to be.

No first-rate educator now wastes time discussing the question of the right of American girls to the highest of the higher education, and the equality of work and wages in the American common school. All questioning of this cardinal principle now goes on aside the main current of the national life; in clubs and coteries, among scholars, priests, and littérateurs, somewhat out of sympathy with the logic of republican affairs. The little island of Nantucket, on the south shore of Massachusetts, learned a generation ago, that the men could "sail off into the west” in search of great whales, and the women could make such a paradise of intelligence and energy of their island-home, in their absence, as the world had never seen. The late war taught the people of North and South the same lesson; and no people gives up an idea ground into it in the fire and blood of a revolution, at the call, even, of a club of college presidents.

Henceforth we are bound to have for our teacher the "New Man," masculine or feminine as may be. The only question now is in the proper adjustment of the varied elements of teaching capacity in any given system of schools;-just where, best, to place the fit woman and the valuable man; also, how to utilize that not infrequent phenomenon, the gray. y-haired master whose heart is softer and more gifted with Christian tact than any schoolmistress that works under him; or the gentle lady principal who threshes every big boy so completely "in his inner

most" that he is never called to the unpleasant duty of taking off his coat and being threshed "in the outermost."

Up to the last twenty years it was a great advantage to be a man before an American School Committee; and the people meanwhile suffered all things, through their children, at the hands of a multitude of ignorant, rough, and foolish teachers, who wrought upon the muscle of their masculinity. Now it is a prodigious advantage, in all things save the pay, to be a woman in the eyes of the Board of Education; and the dear people groan again over the fussing of myriads of green girls, who, but for the fascination of their sex, would be politely invited to step upward into matrimony or downward into service; at least to step out of the school-room at the double quick. In the days that are coming, as fast as our girls step up to the whole feast of knowledge in the work of prepara tion and take on the full responsibility of instruction and supervision in school life, they will lose this advantage of the sentimental and sexual sort. The coming school-committee man (who will be, as well, a woman) will neither be bullied by mannish assumption nor wheedled by womanish arts, in the examination of the teachers for the common school. With all wise and loving allowance for the native gifts and graces of either sex, the laws of school selection, like the awful silent statutes of Divine Providence, will execute themselves with a single eye to the fitness of the applicant, "and to him or her-who hath, shall be given more abundantly"; but "to him or her who hath not, shall be taken away, even what he hath." And never till our American Teacher is thus reconstructed, after the image of the Great Teacher, the divine Man, shall we know what wondrous things can be done with a generation of children standing on the threshold of the boundless enchantments that American life is, to-day, to every generous American youth.

This new Teacher, the coming man, compact of our man and woman, is now the corner-stone of the American Common School, the real endowment of the American University. We are, to-day, just at that parting of the ways where we cannot move a step further, in safety, in the education of the people, till the new Teacher shows us the way in which we should go.

The discontent with our public schools always drives at one point;that the school fumbies with, but does not teach the child. It is asserted by multitudes of people whose opinion is worth taking into account, that the mass of American children come out of the public school, of all grades, poorly fitted for practical life. And by practical life the most intelligent of these objectors do not mean the art of money-getting alone, but the capacity for a round-about American citizenship of the sort demanded by the exigencies of the coming generation. I do not believe a great deal in this assertion as it applies to our best schools in cities, villages, and occasional superior rural districts, over the country. I believe this class of public schools, primary, high, and collegiate, is adjusting itself to the call of the age and the country about as rapidly as possible; considering the difficulty of experimenting with childhood, the most conservative thing on earth, and the constitutional obstinacy of the pedagogic character. But concerning a majority of the country district

schools, even of Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio, of the whole country, this assertion is too often dangerously and disgracefully true.

Let any man of common sense leave the railroad at any point, East or West; push a dozen miles out into the open country; examine the average district school, and say if the education of the people has kept pace with its facilities for transportation. Compare the country store, church, farm of Western New York with its improved machinery for saving labor; even the new country tavern with the school of the average country district. Can you honestly say the latter is abreast with any of the former? The only real cause of this outcry against the common schools is, that within the past twenty-five years, the American people has adopted improved methods in almost every sphere of human life, that have wrought a revolution in our whole style of existence; while the average country district, and sometimes the average village and city free school is too often left behind, floundering in the Serbonian bog of the old, slow, shiftless methods; bad enough in by-gone days, but as ineffective for modern uses as the attempt of a small boy with the aid of a pair of new boots to board the flying express train. We are not about to go off into a tirade against anybody for this state of things. The people, of course, are responsible, at the last. But no less is it true that the country now looks to the Teacher to lead American childhood out of this puzzle of an old-time school, trying to make new-time citizens. And it is plainly seen that our school cannot move a step further, indeed must steadily lose ground, unless the teacher I have already outlined comes to the front and leads the army out of Egypt, across the desert, to the promised land. The secret of our public-school muddle seems to be that the people have done a great deal more for it during the past twenty-five years than the average teacher. While our communities, East and West, have poured forth money for public instruction in a way never heard of before in this world, the outcome of the investment has often not been up to the result of the average venture in a Chicago corner lot,

It cannot be denied that during the past twenty years the improvement in school-house architecture, and the furnishings of these " temples of science" have been remarkable. The country is filled with comfortable, often superior school buildings. One of the chief delights of an American tour is the hourly glimpse of the noble buildings erected by the people for the instruction of the children. But how often this palace is occupied by the same teachers that plodded away in the old shanty school-house; with the exception that an inexperienced girl is substituted for an inexperienced man as the head of the winter school. In thousands of villages and scores of cities between Boston and San Francisco, the new school-house is half a century ahead of the principal, to say nothing of the "assistants" who carry into the new building the old fumbling methods or no methods of instruction that would make even the Sorbonne a temple of nescience. Now, a first truth in pedagogics is that a good teacher with a shingle and a piece of chalk, under an apple tree, is a greater power than the most pompous professor of incompetency enthroned in the chair of instruction under the loftiest roof of a new university."

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2d. Our new methods of instruction, admirable as many of them are, destined as they are to become the commonplace of the next generation, have too often been "pitched into," even our city graded schools, in the way a farmer unloads a wagon of hay into a capacious hay mow; sometimes pitched in at the imminent risk of the helpless teacher who stands sweating under the falling load to "mow away." The practiced school man is exasperated in going from city to city, to see these beautiful methods of instruction in the hands, often, of old teachers, too indolent or conceited or stupid even to master their superficial forms, or of green normal graduates who set up their little card house of improved methods. only to be knocked down in the first school week by any sharp boy who has a fancy to quiz the new "school-maam.' We have not reflected that what we call the new methods of instruction are only the old, everlasting, simple ways by which Divine Providence, and every wise parent and teacher, since the first man, have led childhood up to the life of wisdom, beauty, and love; that only he who is in sympathy with Divine Providence and the upper side of humanity can even know what these methods really are; that nothing so completely unfits anybody to work them as a course of school-keeping in the time-honored, mechanical way. It is utterly vain to suppose you can catch a romp of a girl, in city or country, and by a year's or two years' drill in the superficial forms of Pestalozzi or Froebel, make a school teacher of her "after the pattern shown in the mount." Unless you wake up her womanhood, at first, and set all her sweet and noble womanly aspirations and faculties streaming out like a lakeshore sunrise towards the children, you will only succeed in tattooing the surface of her mind with a set of queer images, ridiculous to the roguish boy and incomprehensible to his mamma.

A great deal of this failure is due to the incompetency of the average college graduate, installed as master, even to comprehend the ability that really exists in his normal girl-graduate. How often has my soul ached with regret that I was not born a JOHN MORRISSY to "settle" some conceited young graduate of Harvard or Ann Arbor, at his occupation of "bull-dozing" half a dozen admirable young women, from his high chair on the master's platform; too ignorant of children, methods of instruction and fine young women to do anything but try to impose on his school the absurd style of teaching under which he groaned in his college classroom. A course of pedagogics in every American college, with opportunity for practice, and occasional class-room experience with superior young women, would be a marvellous lift to the higher grade of our city schools all over the land. Until this comes to pass our normal and collegiate systems of education will be perpetually at odds with each other. The failure of the best schools to handle effectively the best methods, and the utter oblivion to their existence through whole regions of country, in the district school-house, is one of the most fruitful causes of the popular state of educational unrest.

3d. The reasonable demand for the industrial and technical education of young people who are to live by the labor of the hands, cannot be met until the teachers of our common schools better comprehend two things; first, economy of time in school work, and, second, the art of awakening

the observing, reflecting and executive faculty of children through better general methods of instruction. The proposition of certain enthusiastic specialists and energetic manufacturers to take half the time of the average school child, from 6 to 12, for instruction in mechanics, shows a lamentable ignorance of the condition of the average school child in the average common school. The fact is, that, under the present modes of instruction, there is not half time enough to teach this child the small allowance of common knowledge without which every young mechanic will be an incipient communist. We want no addition to the mob of ignorant, godless workmen, with one little talent, without the brains to turn a hand to a new emergency, or to see that the way to encourage men to work for property is not to turn to and ruin all who have already succeeded in gaining it. The wisest authorities in this matter seem inclined to the idea that until the age of 12 years, the best thing to do for an incipient American workman is to give him a thorough common-school education, by the best methods. This will generally expand his mind, wake up his higher powers of observation, reflection and execution, and place him before the specialist, ready to run the race, with untold advantage over the child distracted by the effort to go to school and study a profession before he is out of his mother's lap. As soon as the average teacher is able so to instruct the child, up to the age of 12, he shall have the foundation for a splendid system of Industrial training. For six years of real instruction by a real teacher, will do more to qualify a boy to be President of the United States than the fifteen years of primary, grammar, high, collegiate and professional training through which half the superior youth of America wade in search of the millennium of success in life.

ers.

4th. The complaint against "cramming" and the "multiplicity of studies" in our schools would be robbed of its force by a race of competent teachCol. PARKER, of Quincy, Mass., trains his schoolmistresses to teach an Irish, freckled-faced boy or a slow Welsh girl, more in two years, without weariness or confusion of mind, than the schoolmaster of my youth was able to impart in six years, with only the "three R's" for a course of study, and a daily threshing thrown in. Whenever you find the people grumbling because the children are crammed and confused by study you may pretty safely infer that their teacher is competent to teach nothing well, and has not learned the a, b, c, of the pedagogic art;—the ability to correlate the studies and call forth the powers of the child in the school

room.

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5th. If the American High School, in cities, persists in building itself on the corner-stone of the Latin Grammar, and whips its pupils through the old-time regulation course; all the while aping the airs of the university of the past; it will be more and more discussed whether the people shall be justly taxed to support it. If it builds on the corner-stone of a thorough knowledge of our glorious English tongue and its marvellous literature, with a generous superstructure of science, history, social and political economy, that philosophy which is the knowledge of man, and the use of the languages of the great modern nations; the people cannot be beaten out of its support, and will gladly build the wing to the free High School' to fit the boy and girl for college. The sooner our High Schools are offi