IMPRESSION'S OF AMERICA. 



545 



12,724 male students, and 14,454 female stu- 

 dents ; ' only 78 have model schools. Of the 

 2,196 students who graduated in 1875, 1,495 have 

 become teachers. Of these 137 schools, 70 are 

 maintained by States, 3 by counties, 8 by cities, 

 and 56 by "all other agencies." 



The strength and, as some critics would allege, 

 some of the elements of weakness in the Ameri- 

 can system of education as compared with our 

 own are derived from the training received by 

 American teachers in high and normal schools. 

 With us, a child of thirteen or fourteen is ap- 

 prenticed as a pupil-teacher for five years, and 

 is employed in teaching for five hours and a half 

 five days in the week. Out of school the child 

 receives instruction — or ought to receive instruc- 

 tion — for a short time every day from the master 

 or mistress of the school, In many cases there 

 is strong reason to believe that the instruction is 

 not given very regularly ; in many cases it is not 

 very efficient; in all cases, the hours which the 

 pupil-teacher is required to spend in teaching 

 greatly interfere with the vigor and earnestness 

 with which he pursues his own studies. 2 At the 

 end of his pupil-teachership he may obtain em- 

 ployment as a qualified teacher under Article 79 

 of the New Code ; or else he may go for two years 

 to a training-college. In America a child who 

 is to become a teacher remains in the grammar- 

 school till he is fourteen or fifteen years of age, 

 then passes into the high-school, and then per- 

 haps into a normal college. Instead of exhaust- 

 ing his strength in teaching, he has nearly all his 

 time for his own work. He begins to teach five 

 or six years later than our own masters and mis- 

 tresses, and receives a really " liberal " education 

 before his professional training begins. He is 

 brought into contact for several houi's every day 

 with professors of large and varied knowledge, 

 and generally distinguished for their intellectual 

 vigor and activity. He has libraries at his com- 

 mand, and carries on his scientific studies with 

 the aid of excellent apparatus and laboratories. 

 He has the stimulus afforded by association and 



1 Several of the schools did not report the sex of 

 6tudents ; and the total number of students was 29,105. 



a Take a case— a fair specimen of thousands. A 

 few days ago I asked a girl of fourteen, who is a pupil- 

 teacher in her first year, how long she worked. She 

 told me that on five days a week she was at school at 

 8.15, to receive the hour's instruction required by the 

 code. At 9.15 she began to prepare the schoolroom 

 for the children. She taught from 9.30 to 12.30, with 

 half an hour's interval; also, from 2 to 4.30. She 

 began her own lessons at C.30 in the evening, and 

 worked till 9.30. 



| rivalry with a considerable number of fellow-stu- 

 dents. All this holds true of girls as well as of 

 boys. The average American teacher has, there- 

 fore, an intellectual freedom, refinement, and elas- 

 ticity, which are rarely found in the ex-pupil- 

 teacher, and which are not very common even 

 among masters and mistresses who have spent 

 two years at a training-college, although there 

 are some masters and mistresses in English public 

 elementary schools who are quite equal, in every 

 respect, to the best masters and mistresses in the 

 primary and grammar schools in America. 



On the other hand, a pupil-teacher begins to 

 teach when he is thirteen or fourteen, and, if he 

 is at all clever, is sure to learn the "trick" of 

 teaching as much as is necessary to get his class 

 through the inspector's examination. He ac- 

 quires a certain mechanical dexterity which pro- 

 duces surprising results. He learns how to 

 "grind" his scholars, and in very many cases 

 will do as much to secure a high percentage of 

 "passes" as a more thoroughly-trained teacher. 



As far as I could judge — and I speak with 

 considerable distrust of my own competency to 

 form a very trustworthy opinion on the question 

 — the actual knowledge of an elementary kind 

 possessed by the children in American schools, 

 knowledge that can be definitely tested by ex- 

 amination, is not much greater than that of chil- 

 dren of the same age in our own schools. They 

 seemed to me to write rather better, and to read 

 considerably better, though with some conspic- 

 uous faults which are due to the American theory 

 of what reading ought to be ; and I thought that 

 they were rather more advanced in their arith- 

 metic, and knew more geography. In mere 

 " grind," the American teachers are not much 

 more successful than our pupil-teachers who are 

 in the third or fourth year of their apprentice- 

 ship ; but their higher and more liberal " culture " 

 — to use a word of which I became rather tired 

 while I was in New England — has a very obvious 

 effect on the children. Children of thirteen in 

 an American grammar-school may not know very 

 much more than children of the same age in our 

 own public elementary schools, but they seemed 

 to me to be superior in general intelligence, and 

 in what the Americans call "brightness." 



In justice to our own teachers, it should be 

 remembered that a large proportion of the chil- 

 dren in the American common schools belong to 

 a much more educated class of the population 

 than the children attending similar schools in 

 our own country. Even in Philadelphia a con- 

 siderable number of the children of wealthy par- 



