EDITOR'S TABLE. 



843 



tends poor teaching. " In New York 

 city," we read, "teachers are rarely dis- 

 charged even for the grossest negligence 

 and incompetency. In order that a 

 principal may be discharged, sixteen of 

 the twenty-one members of the Board 

 of Education must vote against her ; and, 

 for many reasons, it is practically im- 

 possible to secure that number of ad- 

 verse votes." 



The other conditions to which Dr. 

 Rice refers as unfavorable to the pro- 

 duction of a high type of teaching are, 

 briefly, lack of proper supervision, a gen- 

 erally chaotic system of administration, 

 and the predominance of private or po- 

 litical influence in connection with the 

 selection of teachers and principals. " In 

 selecting principals," we are told, "ex- 

 pert qualifications are not taken into 

 account. Indeed, as a rule, the newly 

 appointed teachers are better, profes- 

 sionally, than the principals. . . . Near- 

 ly all appointments are made by 'pulls,' 

 merit being a side issue." This is bad, 

 but we are not at the end yet of our dis- 

 couragements. "In regard to the public," 

 Dr. Rice observes, "the mere fact that 

 things are muddled as they are proves 

 that the citizens take no active interest in 

 the schools." Strictly speaking, is it to be 

 expected that they should ? People take 

 an active interest in things that they 

 can directly and more or less visibly 

 control ; but this is not the case with 

 the public schools. The action of the 

 individual citizen upon the schools is a 

 most indirect action, the result of which 

 can seldom if ever be distinctly traced. 

 Again, people take an active interest in 

 things that immediately affect their com- 

 fort or welfare, but either no interest or 

 a much diminished one in things that 

 affect them only indirectly and perhaps 

 remotely. Thus, if a man has a letter 

 detained to his injury in the post office, 

 he will promptly complain, because he 

 knows that his complaint will probably 

 bring home the fault and the responsi- 

 bility to some particular individual, and 

 secure, if not compensation for his loss, 



at least an increase of attention to avoid 

 similar errors. He acts because his in- 

 terests are directly affected, and because 

 his action may be expected to produce 

 some immediate effect of a beneficial 

 kind. How different all this is from the 

 case of a citizen whose children are not 

 being as well educated as they might be 

 in a public school, but, on the contrary, 

 are being made the victims of a "hard, 

 unsympathetic, mechanical" routine! 

 "What is he going to do about it? How, 

 indeed, can he establish the fact in the 

 first place ? Must he not wait until 

 somebody like Dr. Rice comes along to 

 tell him about it, and if somebody else — 

 some official of the Board of Education, 

 or some partisan of the board — confi- 

 dently pronounces Dr. Rice a crank and 

 a busybody, how is the citizen going to 

 decide? Then, supposing he does de- 

 cide that the education is bad, what is 

 next to be done? Why, canvassing and 

 electioneering, with the interminable 

 vista they open up of deals and dickers, 

 of flatulent talk and endless mystifica- 

 tion ! Dr. Rice sees all this as well as 

 we do, for what does he say? "That 

 the schools of small cities may be im- 

 proved in a comparatively short time 

 is a matter that has been repeatedly 

 demonstrated ; but how to improve the 

 schools of large cities is a 'problem that 

 has never been solved.' 1 '' 



"We have left ourselves space to say 

 but a few words of Dr. Rice's experiences 

 in Boston. There he found better admin- 

 istration, owing principally to the fact 

 that ward politics are kept at a greater 

 distance. There incompetent teachers 

 are removed as soon as their incompe- 

 tence becomes manifest. And yet we 

 read that "the Boston primary schools 

 belong, in my opinion, to the purely me- 

 chanical drudgery schools. . . . The 

 teaching is highly unscientific, and the 

 teachers, though not really severe in the 

 treatment of the pupils, are nevertheless 

 cold and unsympathetic." In " one of 

 the best" of the seven primary schools 

 that Dr. Rice visited he found the 



