THE OSWEGO STATE NORMAL SCHOOL. 75 



dence as the efficient conservators of our national happiness and 

 prosperity. In the work of the past, the Oswego Normal has 

 played an honorable part ; but her mission is not yet ended, nor 

 her powers abated. With youthful energy, both at home and 

 through her graduates,* she is grappling with the question of what 

 to teach, a question of not less importance than the how. That 

 more useful and interesting material for study may be brought 

 into schoolrooms, especially in the primary, is to be ardently de- 

 sired. The best methods applied to trite or useless subject mat- 

 ter can not make school life interesting or valuable to pupil or 

 teacher. 



After all that has been done, and well done, no one but a most 

 willful optimist can be blind to the lamentable defects of our 

 schools, f The censure for these defects usually falls upon teach- 

 ers, but does not primarily belong there. Teaching requires in- 

 sight into and sympathy with child life, a condition spontaneous 

 in but few adults, requiring in most laborious and sustained effort 

 to gain and to maintain it ; and a constant effort to advance in 

 scholastic and professional attainments to escape slipping back 

 into the abyss of slothful indifference. Teaching is, of all the 

 professions, the most useful for the public welfare, as it is one of 

 the most laborious and skilled, and should be paid according to 

 its deserts. Recitation-hearing, however, is one of the easiest, least 

 skilled, and most useless of all occupations. In this field, as in 

 others, the public gets the kind of work it pays for. The wages 

 of the rank and file of public-school teachers average less than 

 those of skilled mechanics. As long as the public continues to 

 pay for recitation-hearing, it will not get much teaching; for 

 educational missionaries to work without the ordinary induce- 

 ments are too few to supply the demand, and will probably con- 

 tinue so until the millennium. 



There is need of educational statesmen to secure legislation 

 efficient for preventing the employment of teachers without ade- 

 quate scholastic acquirements and professional training, as physi- 

 cians are forbidden to practice without such attainments. Is the 

 body of so much more value than mind or soul that it should 

 have greater safeguards ? There is need of educational agitators 

 to rouse and awaken the people from complacent day-dream- 

 ing about the schools, to show them that much of their ex- 

 penditure is wasted through poor work, and to convince them 



* See work of Mr. L. H. Jones for Indianapolis schools in the Forum for December, 

 1892 ; " An Experiment in Education," in Popular Science Monthly for January and Feb- 

 ruary, 1892 ; and the work of Prof. Barnes in Stanford University. 



f See articles by Dr. J. M. Rice in the Forum for October, November, and Decem- 

 ber, 1892. 



