504 FARMERS' INSTITUTES. 



bad hours. Give them habits of industry, give them something to do, and 

 don't let them have all play and no work, for it will make rascals of them. 



Then ventilate your schools. Give windows chiefly on one side and well 

 up toward the ceiling, equal to one-fifth the ceiling, and bunch them toward 

 the back part of the room, and have the blackboards forward where the 

 light will shine on them instead of in the children's eyes, and have the 

 blackboards low enough for the scholars to reach. For apparatus, get a 

 moderate globe, a few good maps, a good dictionary, and, above all, a mod- 

 erate stock of good books — a school library for reference. 



Now once more, don't side with your children against the teacher, but 

 have it out with the teacher by herself . Don't disparage her to or before 

 the pupil. Stand by the teacher. 



Much of your money is wasted by frequent changes of teachers. You 

 have a time of it to run two or three children at home, and just think of a 

 teacher getting running with twenty to fifty, and making them little angels 

 in one term. 



Now, teachers, you may have the best of pupils and patrons, and if you 

 are a mere school keeper the product will be zero. No matter what your 

 salary. If you have contracted to teach for $10 you must not undertake to 

 teach a ten-dollar school, but to teach the very best school you are capable 

 of. And what is that? To teach the scholars to think. And what is the 

 most practical study to that end? Eeading ! Arithmetic, algebra, gram- 

 mar will make them think, but reading is the fountain of thought. Teach 

 them to be clevourers of good books. Now do you doubt the value of gram- 

 mar? It is not the facts or the rules or the "learning how to talk good," 

 but it is the analysis, the thinking, the training of the mental powers in 

 which consists the highest value of grammar, or, indeed, of any study. If 

 you have got this idea you won't teach geography by long lists of meaning- 

 less names and figures, but you will teach the reasons for and the meanings 

 of things. 



Lincoln, when keeping grocery in southern Illinois, dug out his grammar 

 by himself. What for? He wanted to master it; and so when he came to 

 write his inaugural and Gettysburg speech, when he came to face problems 

 of state, he was prepared to master them. 



Don't teach numbers to the littlest ones ; give reading first, and teach that 

 by words first and not by letters, and don't let them say "I! see! a\ dog! " 

 but "I see a dog!" Don't point at the words when he is to read a sen- 

 tence, unless it is words you want, and then skip forward and back. In 

 teaching fractions take a two-foot pocket rule to illustrate with and skip 

 from boy to boy. How to keep order — know enough to interest, and then 

 have "a hand of steel in a velvet glove" — use kind firmness. 



THE TOWNSHIP DISTRICT SYSTEM. 



I am converted to it from being an opponent. We now employ twice as 

 many teachers as we need because we change so often. Local quarrels and 

 nepotism flourish under our present system, while by putting all the dis- 

 tricts of the town under one township board they would be avoided. Four- 

 teen states have tried and like it. New Hampshire has found it far more 

 economical. Our State has 87,000 children who have less than the average 

 schooling. I know of a district where there was but one pupil, and of many 



