The training-school, the most original and practical outcome of our American experimenting in public education, has done a great work, especially in the cities of the West, which have received their impulse and character from Oswego, N. Y. In the outfit of their students they have enjoyed a decided advantage over any of the normal schools, insisting, as they have, on a highschool diploma as the condition of entering upon their course of instruction. Their facilities for practice have been far superior to that of the State schools of New England, as they have access to real schools of average children, instead of playing with an artificial arrangement called the model-school. There is no doubt that this is an agency destined to great usefulness. But these schools have been far too lenient in their treatment of their pupils, admitting without discrimination, and failing to purge their classes of incompetents. Hence, the cities where they have been several years at work are flooded with their graduates, often no improvement upon the vigorous teachers that have beat their way up to success by the old-fashioned method of spoiling a thousand children to polish off a rough diamond of a young woman into a successful school-mistress.

Lastly, the great expensiveness of the trainingschool, and its demand that the high-school graduate should give an additional year to her training, has raised up an active crowd of economical opponents, while many of our grammar and high-school masters, and their "lady assistants," who have come up in the hand-tomouth way, have not been anxious for the success of their graduates. This reaction will extinguish many of these schools, and greatly modify those which remain. Still, in the larger cities, that can afford their expense,

they will become a prominent feature in the system of public education.

It cannot be denied, also, that there has been a fearful waste of time and ability in many of our conventions, institutes, and local teachers' associations. It is a chronic misery to see a crowded hall of bright and eager young women victimized during the one vital day and evening of their gathering, by the puerile and illnatured wrangles of the squad of pedagogic old fogies that always lies in wait to ventilate its grievances on such occasions. The persistent firing off of blank cartridges in the shape of essays, often little better than school-boy or school-girl compositions; the trotting out of local readers to offer up "Hamlet, Prince of Denmark" and "Maud Muller," before the evening crowd; the waste of time in irrelevant lectures, of no conceivable use to teachers, these, and numerous evils that affect such gatherings, are too well known to be enlarged upon.

But the most serious defect of these methods of normal instruction is that they are so often organized in a way to work at cross-purposes with the peoples' and collegiate systems of education. So far the average Amercan college has obstinately refused to recognize the existence of such a science as Pedagogy. Its young men are sent forth to occupy the commanding positions of high, grammar, and academical schoolmasters, often with no valuable experience even in the lower grades of instruction, and not even a course of college lectures or intelligent reference to the literature of their great profession. Coming into these difficult positions, for which their scholastic attainments are often amply sufficient, they find themselves in contact with subordinate ladyassistants who have received the best drill accessible in

normal and training schools, backed by a considerable experience in all grades of the common-schoolroom. It is inevitable that two forces so charged with positive and negative elements should strike fire. In hundreds of schoolrooms the success of the instruction is marred by this open or smothered conflict; the learned young man, contemptuous of the academical inferiority of his girl assistant; the bright girl-graduate of the normal school, electric with tact, and on edge with the new methods, poking fun at the pompous, pedagogic incapacity of her principal. I am convinced, from long observation, that much of the power generated in the best normal and training-schools and institutes, is swamped. by the obstinate indifference, or hostility, of the average male college graduate in the master's chair to anything that has not entered his college curriculum. The result is all the worse, that the average college method of instruction is probably the most hopeless style of teaching now on the ground; often a bigoted holding on to the mechanical habit of cramming a boy with the contents of a small library of books, and calling that a "liberal education."

Here are defects enough, unavoidable though they may be, to excuse a good deal of the criticism and popular distrust everywhere aroused against our present temporary and sprawling methods of training teachers for public schools. They demand the immediate attention of the wise friends of education.

All reforms in human affairs proceed from the superior class, downward among the average and inferior workers. The absolute need of the public school, to-day, is a great increase of the superior class of teachers in all its grades. Especially, since the new methods of education have so often been cast into the schools, like

a load of new hay pitched into a mow with a great fork, do we need teachers who can handle them, and save us from a confusion as mischievous as the old-fashioned mechanical habits of thirty years ago. For these teachers we must look to the State normal schools. They should be raised to the rank of true normal colleges as fast as the most strenuous efforts of the authorities will permit; or, if this cannot be done with all of them, a few of the best should resolutely strike for the front; purge their classes without mercy, and graduate only such as give a fair promise of excellence. Our college and higher academies should be summoned to the same work. If no new college were established in the United States for fifty years, and all available funds were concentrated upon the establishment of a thoroughly-organized department of pedagogics in the superior institutions now existing, the effect on the public education would be prodigious. One thoroughly superior teacher as superintendent, or at the head of a high, grammar, or primary school, at home in the literature and practice of the new education, will often reconstruct the entire system of instruction in a community. It is hopeless to expect great progress any where till this can be secured. Indeed, unless our State normal schools make haste to appreciate the demand for superiority, and set their houses in order to attain unto it, their days are numbered as influential centers of educational thought and power. Far better concentrate on such as now exist, and place them on a permanent foundation, as the normal universities of the country, than labor with legislative committees to establish more of the same temporary and unsatisfactory sort.

The training.school must be reorganized to meet the wants of cities and villages of moderate size. And we

are convinced that it must finally become one of the vital departments of the public high school. It would be a great improvement, as already shown in the great normal colleges of the cities of New York and Philadelphia, if the majority of our best high schools were to take into their vitals a department on the theory and practice of teaching, presided over by a competent graduate of a normal school, or the teacher otherwise best fitted for the work; placed in connection with the public schools, of all grades, for such observation and practice as can be obtained in the afternoons of the closing year of the course. If some of the old-time highschool studies were jostled out of place by the new course, it would be no serious detriment. Indeed, it is not certain that it would be a mistake to compel every pupil of a high school to take a course of instruction in the art of teaching. The habit of receiving continuous instruction in languages and sciences, from the age of five to twenty, often deadens the most genial mind, as the perpetual pounding of the softest mud-bank by a heavy maul packs a wall like a rock. Any thing that will “reverse the machine" and reveal to the student the world of knowledge and humanity, as seen from the teacher's standpoint, would wonderfully vitalize these schools. This arrangement would also avoid the large expense in time and money now involved in the extra year in a separate training-school; would abolish the conflict of authorities, that always worries a training-school planted in another man's preserve; and, best of all, would bring the high school, at last, into vital sympathy with the lower grades of instruction. Of course, this implies that the high-school master, and especially the professor of pedagogics in the school, shall be alive and up with the times in this matter; else the department