Hints in School Government. 1. School discipline, like instruction, will take form from the temperament and character of the teacher. A reputation for impartial judgment is the essential requisite of the teacher who governs well. 2. Make but few rules, and do not indulge in much talking about the infringement of them. Remember that pupils as well as teachers have rights, and that both have duties. 3. Put yourself in the place of your pupils. Recall your own school experiences, your hopes and fears, your impulses, your notions, and the motives that influenced you. If you do so, you cannot become a tyrant. 4. Secure order, if possible, without corporal punishment, but secure obedience at all hazards. In school, as in army, discipline is essential to existence. 5. The best way to lead pupils to study is, not by threats and compulsion, but by showing them how to use their text books, by explaining and illustrating their hard lessons, and by appealing to their higher motives. 6. Do not tempt your pupils to become habitually deceitful and untruthful, by making use of the "self-reporting system" in scholarship and deportment. It is a device worthy of the Inquisition. “It is," says F. S. Jewell, "both stupidly ingenious and transparently vicious. 7. Regard all pupils as truthful until you have positive proof to the contrary. Children with a high sense of honor will never forgive you for doubting their word, or for making an unjust accusation. "The only teacher I ever intensely hated," said a noted instructor, "was a young woman who charged me, unjustly, before the school, with telling a lie, when I was only seven years old." Trust your pupils if you want them to put their trust in you. "The sweetest praise I ever heard," said a public man, was the remark made by my father when I was twelve years old: 'My boy never told me a lie in his life.''" 8. Encourage truthfulness by awarding full and frank confession with a remission of penalties, so far as is consistent with school discipline. Severity is one of the chief causes of lying and deceit. It excites fear, and fear seeks an easy refuge in cunning and evasion. 9. Whispering must be repressed with a firm hand. It cannot be entirely prevented, but it may be checked so as to prevent disturbance and annoyance. One good way of checking it is to allow a short whispering-recess every hour or half hour. 10. As prevention is better than punishment, children should be trained to a general habit of prompt obedience in minor matters, so that they finally will submit readily to prohibitions which curb their strong inclinations and tendencies. II. Penalties and punishments must be certain, and must seem to be the natural consequences of wrong acts. The child should know what he has to expect, and when to expect it. There must be no caprice, no variableness, no shadow of turning. The child soon learns to yield to the inevitable. 12. Do not worry, do not be discouraged; think that your agita tion, your nervousness, will extend to your pupils. Unite patience with hope, gentleness with firmness, equanimity with force of character. Have a pleasant voice and cheerful countenance, and show yourself the sincere friend to every pupil. Let your school be one that will always have agreeable associations connected with it, but if an emergency comes, be prompt and resolute to meet it, but always calm.-Intelligence. Wisconsin's Institute System. The normal schools and the institutes of Wisconsin are managed by an admirable system, and one superior to anything else we know of in the country. The following account is taken from the Danville (Ill.), News, where it appears in connection with very complimentary regrets in regard to the election of S. Y. Gillan, their High School Principal, to the Milwaukee Normal School. The account will be of interest to other States. The five State normal schools are all under the control of a Board of Regents, consisting of the Governor, the State Superintendent, the State Treasurer, and nine members appointed by the Governor. The same Board has control also of the county institutes, and all the institute work is planned and directed by the State Superintendent. To assist him in this work an institute conductor is appointed for each normal school. The State is divided into four institute districts, and during the institute season-from April to November, except Julythese conductors are in the field, passing from county to county, holding a meeting a week in a place, the whole program, including dates, being arranged by the State Superintendent. These conductors hold professorships in the State normal schools, and during the winter term when the number of students is largest, and hence, more teaching force required, these men are engaged in teaching regular classes in the schools to which they are respectively assigned. The normal schools of Wisconsin do not depend for support on appropriations by the Legislature, but are on a firm financial basis, having a permanent fund yielding an annual income of $100,000. The new State Normal School at Milwaukee is organized on a plan different from that of any other in this country. There is no preparatory department connected with it; and persons cannot obtain here the elementary training which it is assumed should be acquired before entering upon a professional course of study. It is intended to rank with the professional schools of medicine and law, and will afford to those already in the profession, but who feel the need of broader and more thorough preparation for their work, an opportunity to prepare for something better than they have attained. The Board of Regents hope thus to meet the present pressing demand for higher professional training of teachers. The terms of admission are such that the academic course in common schools must be mastered before entering these schools. This may be done in other normal schools or in certain designated high schools. Credit is also given for work done in the colleges, provided the applicant is found. on examination qualified to undertake the strictly professional work of the school. A prominent educator says of this school in his last annual report: "Its establishment will go far to secure full acceptance in theory and policy of the principle that teaching is a profession, and that only those should be employed as teachers who are able and willing to prepare themselves for the work by attaining thorough scholarship and undertaking special training." Besides the professional work required a course of instruction in the higher branches, as extensive as the length of the time allows, is also provided. The three prominent features recognized as of vital importance in the preparation for teaching are: 1. Thorough scholastic training. 2. Careful study of what is known of the theory, history and philosophy of education. 3. Application of principles and practice in teaching under the supervision of expert training teachers. Every teacher in the normal school has these ends in view in the imparting of instruction. Carrying out the theory and plan upon which the school is organized, the institute work has been graded into county institutes and city institutes; the former are managed as above noted, by the four district conductors; the latter will be arranged by the State Superintendent in co-operation with the city superintendents, and will hold only short sessions of one or two days. These will be conducted by Mr. Gillan. He will occupy the Chair of Political Science and School Economy in the Milwaukee School, and will also teach classes in History, Latin, Book-keeping, and other branches. As an institute worker, he will be under the direction of the State Superintendent, and will be subject to a call from him at any time to go to any city in the State to conduct a one or two days' institute for the graded-school teachers. His travelling expenses on these trips will be paid by the State in addition to his regular salary. This system of city institutes under State management will be inaugurated at once, and during the first part of the year he will be called out for this work about twice a month.-Intelligence. Awakening Confidence. BY FRANCES C. SPARHAWK. If there exists a more sensitive audience than children make, it has yet to be found. They are often far from attentive, and in many senses still farther from appreciative. Somebody has written a poem upon childhood which every teacher can endorse, to say nothing of parents. This is one of the stanzas: "Then Wisdom stole his bat and ball, And taught him with most sage endeavor, And why no toy will last forever. She talked of all the wondrous laws Yet children have the greatest susceptibility as to the reality of people with whom they are brought into contact. They are like certain animals which are endowed in their weakness with special means of safety, as with speed or with wonderful acuteness of eye and ear. It is not only because people imagine that children are easily deceived that the real self in them touches the soul of the children with whom they have to do. In addition to this unguardedness of grown people toward them, there is what, for lack of a better name, we call the "instinct" of childhood. This does not imply that children can detect any falsity or crime in their elders, but only that they do detect falsity or truthfulness in the bearing of these toward them. A teacher's scholarly attainments are certainly of value; her ability to impart knowledge is of still more consequence. But there is something else, the foundation upon which all other usefulness must be grounded. Human nature is so made that at least nineteen people out of every twenty work simply from necessity. The Chinese idea of the mind being in the region of the stomach, is so far true as that the necessity of satisfying this organ is the great stimulant to mental and physical activity. But meeting the question fairly, that most teachers go into the profession as a means of livelihood, there is still something else-there is the element of faithfulness in work, through which it comes to be well done, and through which life, individual and collective, comes to its best. The teacher who, with fine education and great talent, yet fails to bear in mind that the little faces daily ranged before her, are some time to be set to meet the problems of American citizenship, fails to comprehend the means by which the republic tries to insure its safety. And the teacher who does not feel the responsibility which makes her look upon children, not as mental counters that are to give the number of her winnings, but as individual characters that her own character must influence, is a teacher unfitted for her place. It is this honesty of the highest kind, this consciousness of obligations that no committee can take account of, this willingness to spend and be spent for the children, which the little ones come to feel in every fibre. Energy, endurance, faithfulness, patience, unselfishness, are the forces that make the world a habitable place. It is the business of the teacher to carry on the daily labors of the school room in such a way as to give play to these qualities; for there is no education worth the name without it. It is not spasmodic preaching that is needed, but the influence of character, which, at its best, is unconscious. This arouses the children's confidence. They are ready to take it for granted that a teacher knows more than they do, and only a series of blunders could uproot their faith here. But they are constantly upon the alert to see if those who are over them do the things demanded of themselves. A teacher in whom the children |