4. Write neatly and legibly, and punctuate as you write. Separate your answers by a space, so that the examiner may distinguish each without confusion.

5. After you have completed a paper, go over it carefully with reference to accuracy, expression, spelling, punctu ation, and capitals.

CHAPTER VII.

THE MANAGEMENT OF UNGRADED COUNTRY SCHOOLS.

I. GENERAL REMARKS.

Ir requires tact, skill, originality, and common-sense to manage successfully an ungraded country school. In the graded schools of town and city, the course of instruction is definitely laid down in printed manuals; the work of each successive grade is directed by principal and superintendent; the results are tested by written examinations; and each class-teacher is only a cog in a complicated system of wheels. But in the country school the teacher combines the functions of assistant, principal, examiner, and superintendent. He is an autocrat, limited only by custom, precedent, and text-books.

When we consider that about one half of all the school children in our country receive their elementary education in the district schools, their importance as a part of our school system is obvious. Many of these schools in the sparsely settled districts are kept open only from three to six months in the year, and even then the attendance is irregular. The whole schooling of many children, from the age of five to fifteen, hardly amounts to four years of unbroken school attendance. In such schools and for such pupils, what instruction will best fit the children for their life-duties? What knowledge is of most worth to them? What things are essential?

Now a man or woman gifted with sound common-sense will look at the work somewhat in this way: These boys are the sons of farmers, mechanics, miners, and workingmen; most of them will follow the occupations of their fathers. The girls-most of them—will become the wives of farmers, mechanics, miners, and workingmen, and will "keep house." What are the essential things that these boys and girls need to learn in order to aid them to become industrious and intelligent men and women, fitted for their sphere in life? The prodigies and geniuses and exceptional cases are not to be taken into account at all.

It requires decisive firmness to clear away the rubbish of a superficial education and get down to a solid basis. There is no mistaking the fact that a great deal of our current school education, like the ornamental tattooing of the South Sea Islanders, is only skin-deep, and is valuable only as fashionable ornamental work. To a certain extent, every teacher must perhaps yield to the prevailing customs, and decorate his pupils with educational paints and feathers; but there is still some room left for the exercise of sound judgment. As an axiom, we may safely take this statement of John Stuart Mill: The aim of

ALL INTELLECTUAL TRAINING FOR THE MASS OF THE PEOPLE SHOULD BE TO CULTIVATE COMMON-SENSE.

In the country school leave untouched the things you have not time to teach nor your pupils the talents to learn. Leave out a smattering of non-essentials, in order that your scholars may be thorough in essentials.

"There can be no other curricular arrangement," says Bain, "even for the laboring population, than to give them as much methodized knowledge of the physical and the moral world, and as much literary training, as their

time will allow. About two thirds of the day, as a rule, might be given to knowledge, and one third to literature -music, drill, and gymnastics being counted apart from both."

II. THINGS ESSENTIAL.

1. Pupils must be trained to read and write their mothertongue correctly.

Teach them to do this so that every scholar, at fifteen years of age, shall be able to read a newspaper readily; shall be able to spell common words correctly; shall be able to converse free from provincialisms in pronunciation; shall be able to write a legible letter in correct English. In reading, teach them not merely to pronounce words, but to get at the meaning of what they read. There must be no sham scholarship here. Good spelling is a conventional test of education, and even a spellinglesson may be made the means of valuable mental training.

2. They must be trained, in arithmetic, to work, accurately and readily, examples in the "four rules;" to work business examples in common and decimal fractions; to reckon simple interest; and to write bills, receipts, and promissory

notes.

In most country schools the pupils throw away a great deal of time in "going through," term after term, bulky text-books on arithmetic, filled to repletion with schoolmasters' puzzles about things unknown in real life, and crammed with technical "rules," which are learned only to be forgotten. Concentrate your drill upon the four rules, fractions, the tables, and interest, and thus give your pupils the mental training which will enable them to do a few essential things skilfully, accurately, and readily.

None of your pupils need to study such schoolmasterisms as "allegation," "duodecimals," "circulating decimals," "permutation," "single and double position ;" and few except the big boys who have nothing else to do need waste time upon "compound proportion,' "compound proportion," "reduction ascending and descending," "true discount," "bonds," "exchange," "insurance," "equation of payments," "partnership," "arithmetical progression," "geometrical progression," "custom-house business," "annuities," etc. Omit these, and you may find time to give short lessons in the elements of natural science, and to open the eyes of your pupils to the wonders of the world around them.

It is true that many country schoolmasters still contend that the reasoning faculties of a pupil cannot be properly disciplined unless he devotes half his school-days to abstruse logical analysis, as they choose to call it, of useless problems, worse than Chinese puzzles, involving only blind adherence to rule, or still blinder imitation; but the real truth is that mental discipline in the study of arithmetic is not one whit more valuable than is hard thinking upon other school studies.

No mental work of any kind, rightly done, is utterly useless; but the real question is, not what is good, but what, under the circumstances, is best, and how much, and when. "Get your discipline," says Chadbourne, "by doing a greater amount of work, and doing it in better style." A wealthy merchant once set his son to wheeling stones from one corner of his garden to the other, in order to train him to work. He was wiser than the man who never makes his boy work at all; but he would have been wiser still had he kept his son at work sawing wood or laying out a garden, or weeding the onion-bed or hoeing potatoes.