JUN]4 A»^' 
 
 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 
 \^<^ 
 
 Chap.}:...... Copyright No. 
 
 Shelf...B^.4 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
TEACHING 
 
 AS A BUSINESS 
 
 FOUR ADDRESSES 
 
 BY 
 
 V-- 
 
 C.W. BARDEEN 
 
 EDITOr OF THE SCHOOL BULLETIX 
 
 ,V^>( OF CO^©;i, ^ 
 yVf \Ct Of ^<^" 
 
 NOV 1^.1897 
 
 SYRACUSE, ^^^^/jr^^, ,^ CoOf ^ ' 
 
 C. W. BARDEEN, PUBLISHER" 
 
 1897 
 
 4:WA^F1ES RECEIVED 
 
 3. W. ^ardeen 
 
 Copyright, 1897, by C, 
 
 %i.^.^ 
 
 \ \:>ir\ 
 
 B^'^l'- 
 
^957 
 
Of these addresses, two were delivered before the 
 New York State Teachers' Association, one before 
 the National Educational Association, and one be- 
 fore the American Institute of Instruction. As the 
 pamphlet editions of the first three printed at the 
 time have been exhausted and there is still occa- 
 sional demand for them, I have thought it might 
 not be presumptuous to put the four together in 
 more permanent form as illustrating a phase of 
 teaching not commonly dwelt upon but of consider- 
 able importance. 
 
 Syracuse, N. Y., Aug. ^8, 1897. 
 
 (5) 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The Teacher as he Should Be - - 9 
 
 (New York State Teachers' Association, Sara- 
 toga Springs, July 8, 1891). 
 Teaching as a Business for Men - - 37 
 (National Educational Association, July 17, 
 1885). 
 
 The Teacher's Commercial Value - - 67 
 (New York State Teachers' Association, Sara- 
 toga Springs, July 9, 1885). 
 Fitting Teachers to Places - - - 101 
 (American Institute of Instruction, Montreal, 
 July 12, 1897). 
 
 Index 149 
 
 (7) 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 
 
 My earliest ideas of art are connected with a pic- 
 ture in the advertising columns of the weekly news- 
 paper. It represented two men : one lean and lank 
 and decrepit, walking about to save funeral ex- 
 penses, and labelled "Before taking"; the other 
 blooming with full vigor of manhood, and labelled 
 " After taking ". Dr. Andrews has shown you the 
 teacher " before taking " ; I am to show you the 
 other one. 
 
 A careful compilation of the characteristics as- 
 cribed to the Ideal Teacher in previous addresses 
 upon the subject shows that he must be affable, be- 
 nignant, courteous, decorous, exact, fervent, genteel, 
 humorous, immaculate, judicious, keen, lenient, 
 modest, neat, orderly, prompt, quiet, robust, schol- 
 arly, tranquil, ubiquitous, vigilant, wary, 'xem- 
 plary, youthful, and zealous. My subject, therefore, 
 naturally divides itself into twenty-seven heads : 
 the twenty-six which I have mentioned — and which 
 
 (9) 
 
10 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 I will omit ; and a twenty -seventh, which is that he 
 should be a ^h\u. 
 
 For after all, that is about all there is of it. A 
 person may have every one of these twenty-six 
 characteristics and yet be a poor stick of a teacher. 
 He may lack them all, and yet be the one great 
 force for good in the lives of his pupils. '^During 
 the war when things looked dark and Artemus 
 Ward was discouraged, he spoke a little })iece on 
 specialties. He said John Adams's specialty was 
 so-and-so, and Thomas Jefferson's was this, and Alex- 
 ander Hamilton's was that ; but George "Washing- 
 ton's specialty consisted in not having any body at 
 the present day resemble him to any alarming de- 
 gree. It is this quality of pre-eminence, — of a per- 
 sonality which dominates and compels recognition, 
 that marks the ideal teacher. He never deserves 
 the name unless his pujjils say of him reverently, 
 " He was a man, take him for all in all, 
 I shall not look upon his like again." 
 
 Suppose we appl}' the inductive method. Let us 
 select four of the recognized great teachers of recent 
 generations, and see what qualities they had in 
 common. 
 
 There will be no dispute as to whose name should 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 11 
 
 head tlio list. With Thomas Arnold let lis associ- 
 ate Edward Thring, Emma Willard, and Mark 
 Hopkins. The eminence of these teachers is estab- 
 lished. I suppose if there were a vacant position 
 on the institute corps Judge Draper would consider 
 any one of them an eligible candidate. Language 
 can go no further. 
 
 But w^hen we apply to them our twenty-six adjec- 
 •' tives we are perplexed. For one thing, none of 
 them were great scholars. Edward Thring and 
 Mark Hopkins were not even bookish in their tastes, 
 but read marvellously little for men of their station. 
 As for professional reading, they never thought of 
 it. Not one of the four could pass a teachers'-class 
 examination in methods, as laid down in DeGraff's 
 "School Room Guide". 
 
 Time will not permit me to analyze at length the 
 characters of all of them ; but suppose we look for a 
 moment at one who ranks well with the rest, and 
 whose name is just now much mentioned in a 
 neighboring city. We shall find that Emma Wil- 
 lard lacked a great mau}^ things that school com- 
 missioners deem essential to a first-grade certificate. 
 
 A teacher ought to have a " professional spirit ". 
 Had Mrs. Willard ? No : when she began teaching 
 
12 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 her solo object was to assist lier husband in his 
 l)ecu]iiary affairs, and she did not do a great amount 
 of personal teaching after she got money enough 
 together to hire others to do it. 
 
 A teacher should be absorbed in her work, most 
 critics tell us. Was Mrs. Willard ? She writes from 
 Middlebury : "I go to school generally before nine 
 and stay till one ; come home, snatch my dinner, 
 go again, and stay till almost sundown ; come home 
 and dress in a great hurry to go abroad ; get home 
 about ten, fatigued enough to go to bed, and lie till 
 seven the next morning, with hardly time enough 
 to mend my stockings." 
 
 A teacher ought to be free from vanity. Was 
 Emma Willard ? No : she was one of the vainest 
 women that ever lived. She went to a museum in 
 Paris. In her own words : "I told them I was con- 
 nected with an establishment for female education, 
 or in other words was a school-mistress ; and I dare 
 say I gave them to understand, though I cannot 
 tell in exactly wliat form of words, that I thought 
 I was a pretty good one, too." 
 
 Gen. Lafayette had enjoyed his reception by her 
 young ladies, and paid her much attention in 
 France. To her he was therefore not only the great 
 
THE tea('hp:r as he should be 13 
 
 man of Europe, but iu her own words " the acknowl- 
 edged father of my country", — which shows what 
 an oversight it was on Washington's part to die 
 before he visited Troy. She made one of Gen. 
 Lafayette's party to the opera, and as they went out 
 the crowd made respectful passage for them. " I 
 can ^scarcely describe my own feelings," she writes ; 
 " I was with him wliom from my infancy 1 had ven- 
 erated as the best of men ; whom for a long period 
 of my life I had never hoped even to see in this 
 world. Now I read with him his noble history in 
 the melting eyes of his ardent nation. And I saw 
 tliat he was regarded as he is, the father of France 
 — aye, and of America too. America ! my own 
 loved land ! It was for her sake I was thus 
 honored, and it was for me to feel her share in the 
 common emotion. My spirit seemed to dilate, and 
 for a moment, self-personified as the genius of my 
 country, I enjoyed to the full his triumph, who is 
 at once her father, and her adopted son." 
 
 She used to write letters to the great men of the 
 time, — Webster, Clay, Benton, the presidents, and 
 so on, — whether she knew them or not, and whether 
 the letters were answered or not. She began a 
 letter to Abraham Lincoln thus : " Dear sir : Pre- 
 
14 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 sumiug I am known to you as a writer of my 
 countrj^'s history, and having just heard that the 
 great cares which weigh upon you begin to tell 
 upon 3^our physical health, I determined to write to 
 you my high approval of your general course and 
 leading measures." 
 
 We regret that, in tlie language of her biographer, 
 he was too preoccupied to reply. 
 
 She was equally unlimited in her choice of topics. 
 A gentleman was asked what was the specialty of a 
 certain man of scientific pretensions. " In these 
 days," was the careful reply, " a scientist's specialty 
 must be very narrow. It must be not all natural 
 history, but zoology ; not all zoology but insects ; 
 not all insects, but diptera ; not all diptera, but the 
 flea, and so on. Now Mr. Blank's specialty is 
 omniscience." 
 
 So it might be said of Mrs. Willard that her 
 specialty was omniscience. She knew a good deal 
 about female education but she was just as ready to 
 pronounce authoritative opinions upon any other 
 subject. During the war she published a pamphlet 
 on the negro, pointing out that God had made him 
 black so that his place as servant in the family 
 should be unmistakably settled, all jealous heart- 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOITLD BE 15 
 
 burnings and vain expectations spared, and a per- 
 manent order in the household established. She 
 strode into the medical field, and invented a theory 
 of circulation and respiration that was solemnly 
 endorsed in 1851 by this Association. Under this 
 doctrine a consumptive in the last .stages had only to 
 throw open a window and inhale deep draughts of 
 winter air, and all would be well — a simpler cure 
 than Dr. Koch's and perhaps no shorter-lived. 
 
 I could occupy all my time telling of the foolish 
 things Emma Willard did in her long and busy 
 life. So I could pick a handful of pebbles from a 
 fallow meadow, and show them to you as speci- 
 mens of the soil. Emma Willard could afford to do 
 foolish things ; for she was a great woman, and in 
 the light of her noble character and her inestimable 
 services to her sex these defects sink into insignifi- 
 cance. 
 
 I am a hero-worshiper. I want to die long before 
 I cease to believe, I do not say in goodness and in 
 greatness, but in good men and great men. It is 
 the curse of this generation that in the same 
 breath we say of a scoundrel, " well, I dare say 
 the rest of us are just as bad if we were only found 
 out ; " and of a noble champion of God's truth, 
 
16 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 " He knows on which side his bread is buttered." 
 Coleridge said his IVIephistopheles was to have made 
 all things vain and nothing worth by a perpetual col- 
 lation of the great with the little in the presence of 
 the infinite. Of all that an evil spirit denies, we 
 lose most as we are pervaded b}^ his denial of dis- 
 tinction in the motives of human action. 
 
 But ni}^ hero-worship is not panegyric. If you 
 tell me that Thomas Arnold had no faults, you do 
 not raise my opinion of him, but you show me that 
 you lack information and judgment. All men 
 have faults, and great men are sure to have marked 
 faults. It is a sign of a great man that he can 
 afford to have faults, and of a clear mind to see the 
 faults only in perspective. 
 
 Let me illustrate. 
 
 The great man in my own experience as a pupil, 
 the only teacher out of the hundred I had who left 
 in me a recognized uplifting of my whole nature 
 through his personality, knew less about mathe- 
 matics than I do about the next world ; for I know 
 that I know nothing about the next world, and he 
 never found out that he knew nothing about algebra. 
 I remember vividly a typical recitation. The class 
 had stumbled over the proof that a°=:l. So he 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 17 
 
 went to the board to help us out. Chalk in hand 
 he began bravely: "a^^r". A pause, a turn to 
 the side of his shaggy locks : '■ =a*' ". A further 
 pause, and then below : " a^^ " ; and then f[uiekly : 
 "— ao. So you see a^=l. Next." A whisk of 
 the eraser, and he slunk back to his seat and went 
 on \yith the lesson. 
 
 Now there is in combination every possible fault 
 in a recitation. As an educated man he ought to 
 have been able to demonstrate that a^=l anywhere 
 and at any time. I could do it myself, though I 
 haven't taught school in twenty years. 
 
 Then if he was going to teach algebra at all, he 
 ought to have prepared his lesson. He might at 
 least have committed the demonstration to memory. 
 
 In fact if you as a young commissioner were to 
 judge him by that recitation you would not have 
 granted him a tliird-grade certificate. You would 
 have told liim that the quicker he got out of the 
 school-room and into some legitimate business for 
 which he had reasonable adaptation, the better. 
 And yet that man w^as head and shoulders the best 
 teacher I ever had. He knew less than nothing 
 about mathematics, but ( ) what a Greek scholar he 
 was ! His boys went down to Yale fully abreast in 
 
18 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 technicalities of Uncle Sam's Andover pets, and in 
 critical appreciation way beyond them. It was an 
 inspiration to recite to him in Homer. There we 
 saw him at his best, for he loved the language and 
 all the lines. Unconsciously he lavished upon us 
 there the earnestness, the simplicity, the depth, and 
 the richness of his character. No boy ever grad- 
 uated under William Hutchison without a loftier 
 ideal of what it was to be a man. 
 
 We never thought he was without faults, but 
 what did we care for them ? His algebra recitations 
 were ridiculous ; but think what a glorious old 
 fellow he must have been that he could every day 
 go througli such fatuous performances and not a 
 boy in the room think less of him. 
 
 Now understand me, I do not mean that a man 
 is ever greater on account of his faults. Mr. Hutch- 
 ison would have been a better teacher, and 1 
 should be to-day a better scholar if he had either 
 mastered mathematics or refused to teach it. But 
 that one weakness of his stood out against such a 
 wealth of strength that it was simply funny to us 
 from its incongruity. 
 
 I want to emphasize this, for it is the underlying 
 point of this address. Teachers are judged too 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 19 
 
 much by characteristics, too little by character. 
 
 You come to me for a teacher, and I say, " Well, 
 here is a capital man in most ways, but he lacks 
 tact." Like a flash you reply, " That settles it ; 
 tact is indispensable." 
 
 Is it ? That depends on the man. Thomas 
 Arnold had no tact ; Edward Thring abounded in 
 the lack of it : so if all men had been of your mind 
 England would have missed the two greatest teach- 
 ers she ever knew. 
 
 In fact specification of non-essentials is the rock 
 upon which many a school-board splits. A com- 
 mittee come to me and say : " We want a principal, 
 both normal and college graduate ; not less than 25 
 or more than 30 years old ; rather tall, and weigh- 
 ing from 150 to 175 pounds ; married, with an 
 agreeable wife and two or three children ; who has 
 had experience in a school under the Regents, holds 
 a State certificate by examination, and can show 
 that in every school where he has taught he has 
 increased the foreign attendance." 
 
 " And what will you pay ? " I ask. 
 
 '' AVell if he just suits us, we will give him seven 
 hundred and fifty dollars." 
 
 One is reminded of the dignified but seedy in- 
 
20 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 dividual who entered a cheap restaurant, took off 
 his gloves, hung his hat and overcoat upon the 
 hooks, dusted the chair, brushed the crumbs from 
 the table-cloth, and then addressed the waiter as 
 follows : 
 
 " If you have just the right kind of oysters in just 
 the right condition, please take half a pint of small 
 ones (not too small you know), and strain the juice 
 off of them carefully, leaving just a little juice on 
 them ; put them in a pan which has been scoured 
 and dried, and then add a little butter (good, pure 
 butter), and a little milk (not New York milk, but 
 real cow's milk), and then place the pan over a 
 coal-fire, being careful to keep the pan in motion so 
 as not to let the oysters or milk burn ; add a little 
 juice if you choose, and then watch the pan closely 
 so that the exact moment it comes to boil you can 
 whip it off. At the same time have a deep dish 
 warming near at hand, and when you see the firs^j 
 sign of boiling empty the pan into the dish. Dc 
 you think you can remember that ? " 
 
 And the waiter, who had listened respectfully, 
 called wearily down into the kitchen, " One stew ! " 
 
 So the school board that goes so much into detail 
 in prescribing qualifications will find in the end that 
 it has secured one stick, 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 21 
 
 The worst of it is, trustees are often the most 
 strenuous about the least important. X committee 
 says : 
 
 " We want an intermediate teacher : normal grad- 
 uate ; between 22 and 26 years old ; rather impos- 
 ing in height ; dressing neatly but not showily, with 
 preference for dark colors ; at least four years' 
 experience, the last half in graded schools ; who 
 can play the organ for marching, has read oc- 
 casional papers at county associations, and attends 
 the Free- Will Baptist church. Salary seven dollars 
 a week." 
 
 "And if you can't get (juitc all these things?" 
 "Well she must be a Free- Will Baptist." 
 You remember the "perplexity of the boy who as 
 he grew up was astonished to learn that our Saviour 
 was born a Jew. He said he had alwaj^s supposed 
 God was a Presbyterian. 
 
 It is most exasperating when these narrow critics 
 pride themselves on rejecting a teacher for some 
 trivial defect. They have found that he is a noble 
 christian man, of long and successful experience, 
 and they cast him aside because in wanting of pun- 
 ishment he spells corporal with an e. Now it is a 
 fault not to spell well ; so far as it goes it counts 
 
22 TEACHIXG AS A BUSINESS 
 
 against a teacher, decidedl>\ But the woods are 
 full of teachers 
 
 Who never wrote a misspelled word 
 Nor ever said a wise one. 
 
 It makes a difference whether the word is spelled 
 correctly, but it makes more difference what the 
 word is and what it means. Suppose I am on the 
 point of purchasing Judge Hilton's park at Sara- 
 toga. By a reversal of conditions I have become 
 wealthy and he — an editor. The place seems to 
 suit me ; he wants to sell and I want to buy. I 
 drive out there and as I pass through the gate I see 
 a cobble-stone lying in the middle of the roadway. 
 " That's enough for me," I say ; " turn around and 
 drive back to the hotel. I don't want any country- 
 place so poorly taken care of that the roadways are 
 sprinkled with cobble-stones." 
 
 Ridiculous, isn't it? AVcll is it not just as ridicu- 
 lous to reject a man finally and solely because 
 he spells separate with three e's ? The road ought 
 not to have cobble-stones in it, Init will it not be 
 better to drive around the rest of the place and 
 see whether the cobble-stone is typical or excep- 
 tional ? The teacher ouglit not to misspell separate, 
 but will it not be better to look further and see 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 23 
 
 whether this bhinder is characteristic, or whether it 
 is an exception that proves the rule ? 
 
 A few weeks ago I recommended to one of the 
 best superintendents I know, a lady whom I pro- 
 nounced exceptionally fitted to fill a responsible 
 position. He liked what I said of her and what 
 she said of herself in a letter of application ; but 
 in an accompanying page giving an outline of her 
 experience, she had written : 
 
 ''Born , June 21, 1862. 
 
 Graduated from , 1883. 
 
 Taught , 1883-1886," etc. 
 
 He showed me this sheet and said it astonished 
 him to find a teacher generally well-educated who 
 would end these statements with periods. They 
 were parts of one sentence, and should have been 
 separated by semicolons. In fact this seemed to 
 him so unpardonable a blunder that though in his 
 search for a teacher he passed through the village 
 where she was employed, he would not stop to see 
 her. Think of it ! One of the noblest women that 
 man ever left unmarried, with a record of un- 
 broken and progressive success as a teacher : and he 
 would not stop to see her because it was her judg- 
 ment to use periods where it was his to use semi- 
 colons ! 
 
24 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 1 rcmeinber years ago a story tlie principal told 
 us of a c'lassmato since risen to eminence ; a teacher 
 who in his early days was on the point of engage- 
 ment where he lost the i)lace in this way. The 
 trustees liad met to elect him, and were waiting 
 for a ninth meml)er to come that the vote might be 
 unanimous. Tlie clerk happened to remember that 
 he had received a letter asking some trifling ques- 
 tion of detail as to the household arrangements, 
 in which tlie teacher explained in a bashful way 
 that this interested liim as he was about " se mw- 
 bere'\ That finished him. The chairman smiled 
 a suj)erior smile as iie remarked that a man who 
 did not know enougli of Latin customs and the 
 Latin language to be aware that it was the bride 
 who veiled herself and not the bridegroom, would 
 
 not be needed as principal of Academy, 
 
 The superior smile spread, and a nincompooj) who 
 had sense enough to write in English was selected 
 instead. 
 
 Now it was a bad blunder for this man to say he 
 was about se nubere ; it was a worse one to use a 
 Latin expression, even bashfully, where Anglo- 
 Saxon would have expressed the meaning better. 
 But was this little slip sufficient reason for rejecting 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 25 
 
 a man whose general scholarship and teaching skill 
 and executive ability were attested by ten years of 
 marked success in like work ? I am glad to say in 
 this case the rejected candidate was employed by a 
 less finical board of trustees in a neighboring 
 academy, hitherto a feeble rival, but since then of 
 such rapid growth that it has long overshadowed 
 the other. 
 
 These men would not have rejected a 2:20 horse 
 because one of his ears had been clipped a trifle, or 
 a Holstein cow of big milking-record because her 
 white belt was a little wider on the near side. But 
 this pedantic chairman chuckled so conceitedly over 
 this one little blunder lie had chanced to detect, 
 that he forgot all the evidence of exceptional ability, 
 and in rejecting this man permitted his academy so 
 effectually to veil itself that it has been wedded to 
 obscurity ever since. 
 
 When Robert Bonner wanted a mate for Dexter, 
 he offered a hundred thousand dollars for any 
 horse that could equal Dexter's record. He cared 
 nothing for details. The horse might have four 
 white feet and a white nose (as indeed Dexter 
 had), a docked tail, knock-knees, the blind-stag- 
 gers if you will — still the money was ready. All 
 
26 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 he asked for was a horse that could trot in 2:18. 
 
 School committees might well partake something 
 of this spirit. See everything if you will : length 
 of the hair, color of the neck-tie, quality of the 
 cuffs, — I agree with you, it all counts. I respect 
 the judgment of the Irishman who declined to vote 
 for a candidate with a No. 6 hat and No. 12 shoes, 
 if that was all the Irishman knew about him. But 
 remember that sometimes a man's a man for a' that ; 
 and that when he has a record behind him there 
 are other things to consider than whether he patron- 
 izes your tailor and attends your church, 
 
 my friends, why not say, " Give me the most 
 of a Man you can for the money." If he can turn 
 your boys and girls into honest, earnest, scholarly, 
 self-respecting, high-minded men and women, be 
 he tall or short, young or old, graduate or no grad- 
 uate. Baptist or Unitarian, Tammany Democrat or 
 Prohibitionist, he is the man you want. 
 
 Here is the difficulty in apjjlying to the selection 
 of teachers the rules of the Civil Service. Those 
 who heard the persuasive voice of George William 
 Curtis at Philadelphia, last winter, might well have 
 been allured for the moment into believing that it 
 was the great need of our scliools to be brought 
 
THE TEACHKR AS HE SHOtILD BE 2) 
 
 under the operation of the Civil Service. But 
 reflection shows that character, personality, indi- 
 vidual influence can never he determined l>y ques- 
 tion papers. It is legitmate to establish a minimum 
 standard of qualification, as by our uniform exam- 
 inations ; but when you go further and say this 
 man must be taken because he passed 98 per cent, 
 and that man must be rejected because he passed 
 97|- i:)er cent, you go too ftir. As Superintendent 
 Draper puts it, " Tlie State has every right to say 
 who shall not teach, l)ut she has no right to say 
 who shall teach." 
 
 Hence it is not altogether to be regretted that an 
 application of Chancellor Curtis's principle should 
 have occurred so soon and in his own university. 
 The New York commission held that the two in- 
 spectors of academies, — officers in whom the require- 
 ment of scholarship was as nothing compared with 
 those of experience, judgment, the respect and con- 
 fidence of the academy principals, — should be ap- 
 pointed by competitive examination. You might 
 as well pick out a wife by competitive examination. 
 The action of the commission in this matter has 
 put back civil service reform ten years, if indeed 
 among thinking men it has not dealt it an irrepar- 
 able blow. 
 
28 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 " I say, Mac," asked a customer of an Ann street 
 bookseller, " what is this edition de luxy I see pub- 
 lishers advertising of so many books?" 
 
 "An edition de luxef" replied the bookseller 
 cheerfully ; " why you've seen a rabbit? " 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 " And you've seen a jackass ? " 
 
 " Yes." 
 
 " Well, a jackass is an edition de luxe of a rabbit." 
 
 If the New York (*ivil Service Commission were 
 to be judged by its action upon academy inspectors, 
 it might well l)e (-illod an edition de luxe — in con- 
 tinuous proportion. 
 
 All these small measures that you apply to ordin- 
 ary men fail when you come to such a teacher as I 
 am considering. 
 
 Take tact for instance. The youngest committee- 
 man knows that tact is indispensable, and he does 
 not draw a very definite distinction between tact 
 and policy. The teacher must know how to get 
 along smoothly. Boards of education like a teacher 
 of whom they hear nothing. A princi|)al like a 
 stomach is perfect only when you are unconscious 
 of him. He reports at the annual meeting that 
 the teachers are excellent, the text-books are giving 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 29 
 
 entire satisfaction, there is no need of any appara- 
 tus, and the commissioner told him tliis was the 
 best school in the country. So he is re-elected year 
 after year : and if you ask any one in the village 
 whether there is a school there, the reply will be, 
 " Why, I suppose so ; the bell rings every morn- 
 ing." To some people it is with the school as with 
 the Indian — the only good school is a dead school. 
 
 You know this type of teacher : there is a great 
 many of him. He is the man who is continually 
 making his calling sure by making sure of his 
 election — his next one. He is satisfied to have, 
 like a geometrical point, position without magni- 
 tude. 
 
 Now what is tact, but yielding to the whims of 
 others ? The average teacher must have it, because 
 without it he cannot get along at all. But the mas- 
 terful teacher does not steer himself sinuously about 
 the edges of other people's whims so as not to graze 
 them : he teaches other people to keep their whims 
 out of his way. The man of tact adapts himself 
 to circumstances ; the masterful man controls them. 
 It is better to yield than to quarrel, but it is better 
 yet to control. 
 
 It is a great blessing to come under the influence 
 
30 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 of a masterful man. This age loses something of 
 the mental fibre that characterizes pioneers, because 
 it is less accustomed to grapple with difficulties. It 
 has been calculated to the fraction of a per cent, what 
 the average boy can do. His life gets set in a 
 groove, and he anticipates only disaster if he should 
 jump the rails and strike out into the fields. 
 
 But the masterful teacher shows him that the 
 possibilities have not yet been surmised, and leads 
 him to substitute for the confident " It can't be 
 done," the hopeful "Let's give it a try." This is 
 no age to sit by the side of the brook and wait for 
 the water to run by. " Young man," Martin An- 
 derson used to say, ^^ make things come to pass." 
 The power of the human will has too little recogni- 
 tion in education. It does remove mountains ; 
 mountains vanish before it. 
 
 Can you not sacrifice something in non-essentials 
 to secure a man like this? The ideal is of course 
 the iron hand in the velvet glove ; but suppose you 
 can't have both, which will you dispense with, the 
 hand or the glove ? The glove is smoother ; but in 
 this modern current of indolence, indifference, and 
 conscious helplessness it takes a strong grip on the 
 oar to turn your school up-stream and give your 
 scholars a purpose to live for. 
 
THE teachp:r as he should be 31 
 
 The teacher's morality, for instance, must be of 
 the stalwart type. It is not enough that he be 
 inoffensive ; he must be aggressively honest and 
 pure. No didactic lessons have such effect upon 
 watchful pupils as the instinctive gesture of con- 
 tempt in a pure-minded teacher when there is any 
 manifestation of baseness ; nor can they atone for 
 the weakening of the pupil's moral fibre when the 
 teacher makes light of dishonesty in examination, 
 or shows enjoyment of a libidinous jest. Says the 
 latest biographer of Thomas Arnold : 
 
 " The great peculiarity and charm of his nature 
 seemed to lie in the regal supremacy of the moral 
 and the spiritual element over his whole being and 
 powers. His intellectual faculties were not such as 
 to surpass those of many who were his contempo- 
 raries ; in scholarship he occupied a subordinate 
 place to several who filled situations like his ; and 
 he had not much of what is usually called tact in 
 his dealings with either the juvenile or the adult 
 mind. What gave him his power, and secured for 
 him so deeply the respect and veneration of his 
 pupils and acquaintances, was the intensely religious 
 character of his whole life." 
 
 It is this positive element that is indispensable in 
 
32 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 the ideal teacher. We want more of the Robert 
 Browning estimate of men, not by what they refrain 
 from, but by what they do. It is the Bible judg- 
 ment. The man with the one talent whimpered 
 that he didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't 
 swear, he didn't play billards, he never sat down to 
 the table with his coat off or ate with his knife ; 
 but the great judge interrupted him: " What are 
 the things you have done to make this world bet- 
 ter?" And the man who hadn't done anything 
 was done for. 
 
 I have said that Dr. Andrews's picture was of the 
 teacher "before taking" ; I might add that mine is 
 of the teacher before being taken, and not jalto- 
 gether likely to be taken. 
 
 A while ago a man was praising his preceptress 
 to me interminably, and to get to a period I sum- 
 med it U}:) for him. " In short," I said, " she is a 
 royal woman." 
 
 " Royal ! " he exclaimed, starting on a fresh tack, 
 " royal ! She is more than royal : she is empirical ! " 
 
 He hadn't had the Regents' syllabus in etymol- 
 ogy, but there are boards of education that, honest 
 
THE TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 33 
 
 Indian, would rather have for principal a quack 
 than a king. 
 
 For what is a quack 2 Why, a quack is a man 
 who makes up for ignorance of his subject by 
 knowledge of his victim. He can't cure a man, 
 but he can flatter him. The educational quack 
 knows little about pedagogy, but he knows a good 
 deal about making every member of the board in 
 turn believe that he is the member who is running 
 the school. And that member likes it. 
 
 For it is an unhappy fact that independence of 
 thought and action is about the last thing a board 
 of education looks for in a teacher. You know the 
 cities of this State pretty well : tell me how many 
 of them would employ a masterful man for super- 
 intendent — if they knew it. I doubt if the Repub- 
 lican caucus would have united on Judge Draper 
 five years ago, if they had foreseen where he was 
 going to land them. Educational officials want a 
 man to carry out their ideas, not to originate ideas 
 of his own. 
 
 Suppose we tried that in other professions. I go 
 to a physician and say : "I want you to doctor my 
 family, but you must come to me first to find out 
 what is the ing,tter with them and how to cure it. 
 
34 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 You can mix and administer the doses, but 1 will 
 prescribe them." He would be very likely to leave 
 me to the tender mercies of Tutt's Pills. 
 
 Or suppose, again, I go to a lawyer and say : "I 
 have a complicated case here that I want taken 
 care of, but you must do it in my way. 1 will 
 explain what the law is and how to api)ly it, but 
 you can make out the papers and address the jury." 
 He would be apt to remind me that the man who 
 was his own lawyer had a fool for a client. 
 
 Or again, suppose I say to a clergyman : " We 
 have decided to hire you as pastor, but you will 
 understand that you must follow our dictation. We 
 have here an elaborate printed course, giving you 
 the subject of each sermon and pra3'^er throughout 
 the year, and the length of them, and should like 
 to have the manuscripts submitted to us for revision 
 on the Saturday before." He won't tell us he 
 would see us in Gehenna first, but he will think our 
 chances are good to get there. 
 
 Edw^ard Thring wrote to a friend who asked 
 advice : 
 
 " My view is simple. The skilled workman 
 ought to be allowed uncontrolled management of 
 the work. Governors ought to sanction his plan uf 
 
THPJ TEACHER AS HE SHOULD BE 85 
 
 work origiDally, and see that the work up to a fair 
 average is honestly done. But no work can flour- 
 ish over a series of years which is exposed to inter- 
 ference from local amateurs in authority." 
 
 When the teacher is as he should be, that view 
 of his office will be recognized and maintained. 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 
 
 To the subject as assigned to me, I have takeu 
 the liberty to add the words " for Men " : partly 
 because as thus hmited the subject is quite broad 
 enough for a half-hour's discussion ; and partly 
 because, to make my point of view distinct, I desire 
 to approach the question in the attitude of the 
 young man just graduated, who has a natural 
 inclination toward the work of a teacher, and is 
 looking the field over to decide whether it will pay. 
 
 Let us suppose a case. Here is John Doe, freshly 
 B. A., a young man of good health, high character, 
 accurate scholarship, social culture, and tact, — 
 shrewd, determined, persistent, enthusiastic, — in 
 short, a man bound to stand in the higher ranks of 
 any employment he may select. He comes to me for 
 advice as to choosing a profession. He has been 
 fortunate enough to recognize his indebtedness to 
 one or two superior teachers, and he thinks he 
 would like to send out a few young men every year 
 
 (37) 
 
38 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 who would feel that way toward him. 80 without 
 looking upon it as a, matter of duty he is inclined 
 to become a teacher ; anci he asks my advice as to 
 whether it is from the woi'ldly-wise point of view a 
 desirable choice. The real question in my mind 
 and in his is this : Ought teaching under j^resent 
 conditions to command the services of first-class 
 young men ? 
 
 " Well, John," I say, " tell me some of the advan- 
 tages you think it holds out." 
 
 " Why, in the first place," he replies, " I suppose 
 one is tolerably sure of a living." 
 
 " Ahem ! possibly," I say. " That depends upon 
 what one means by a living. If you mean exist- 
 ence, Yes. If you mean the leisure and the money 
 to develop your possibilities on all sides ; to sur- 
 round yourself with the comforts and conveniences 
 of modern civilization ; to command the resources 
 of literature, and the companionship of great men ; 
 to see and hear at will all that is noblest in nature 
 and in art, that your standards may be the highest 
 — decidedly No." 
 
 " But teachers get good salaries," he urges. 
 
 " Poor teachers do. Third-and fourth-rate men 
 are overpaid in this business as nowhere else. But 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESB FOR MEN 39 
 
 first-rate men have no opportunities. Dr. Wicker- 
 sham, of Pensylvauia, has been looking up this 
 matter, and he says there are only ten teachers and 
 superintendents in that State who get $2,000 a year ; 
 that in Lancaster the superintendent of schools gets 
 $1,'")00, and the overseer of the cotton-mill, $8,000 ; 
 that lie has known a lawyer to exact a fee greater 
 than any teacher's earnings for five years, while a 
 doctor may obtain in an hour a sum that most 
 teachers cannot gather in a life-time." 
 
 The young man sighs. " I suppose that I shall 
 have to be economical," he says, "but at least the 
 teacher is a man of influence and social position." 
 
 " Indeed ? " I reply. " That is not the usual 
 opinion entertained even by teachers themselves. 
 Here is part of an editorial from the Neiv England 
 Journal of Education* : 
 
 " A teacher is respectable; but when you have 
 said that you have stated all that the mass of people 
 will allow concerning him. He is respectable in 
 the same way that a good book is respectable ; valu- 
 able for what it contains, but still an inanimate 
 object, something that cannot enter into the active 
 struggles of life, something to be taken down at 
 
 *xi.395. 
 
40 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 })leasurc, and at pleasure shelved ; valuable chiefly 
 ill the focttliat, though learned and wise, and, per- 
 haps, witty, it must yet, on all occasions, keep per- 
 fectly still. * * * The world looks upon the 
 school as the grown man would regard his swaddling 
 clothes, and upon the teaching profession as a sort 
 of colored mammy, a thing deserving affectionate 
 treatment, and yet a silly old institution after all. 
 ' How's school ? ' is the constant greeting to the 
 teacher, and he is vain enough to imagine that there 
 is some interest or sympatliy in the question, and 
 usually garrulous enough to run on with tlie tale of 
 his petty troubles and triumphs, imagining that the 
 smile of amusement or contempt worn by his 
 auditors is one of sympatliy and appreciation." 
 
 John looks gloomy. " At any rate," he says, "I 
 shall be regarded as a professional man." 
 
 " You may be by district-school teachers who sign 
 their letters ' Prof Richard Roe '. But the leaders 
 of the profession do not think so. The first point 
 made by C. O. Thompson before the American 
 Institute of Instruction in 1867, was this : 'There 
 is no recognized profession of teaching ; ' G. Stanley 
 Hall, in 1882, began his paper before the Depart- 
 ment of Superintend<^nce on chairs of pedagogy by 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 41 
 
 a reference to the brief chapter on snakes in Ire- 
 land ; and in 1872 James H. Hoose, in a paper 
 before the New York State Teachers' Association on 
 the term Profession as apphed to teaching, said that 
 the science of teaching had no maxims, no customs 
 and estabhshed usages, no positive subject-matter 
 codified, no common theory of nature, no examin- 
 ations or removals by the fraternity solely, no estab- 
 lished rules of practice, no systematic code of prin- 
 ciples, no bodies to supervise rules — in short, none 
 of the bases upon which a profession is founded. 
 
 " Make a single application. Nothing is more 
 distinctive of a profession than that its right is 
 recognized to determine its own membership. Yet, 
 who ever heard of a board of examiners composed 
 of teachers? A bright woman wrote to the Ohio 
 Educational Monthly * .■ 
 
 " ' I was examined in the great and glorious Com- 
 monwealth of Ohio for the first time about three 
 years ago. The Board of Examiners consisted of a 
 preacher, a doctor, and a lawyer. The following are 
 some of the marks : 
 
 Grade, 1st class. Orthography, 10. 
 
 Reading, 7. Arithmetic, 9J, 
 
 Theory and practice of teaching, 10. 
 
42 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 " ' I could not understand, neither can I yet fully 
 comprehend, how I could teach ten when I could 
 only read seven. It is hardly just to certify that a 
 teacher is first-class when she can only cipher nine 
 and a half. The Association said we must exalt 
 our profession, and if we are first-class, let us be 
 first-class all the way through. I do not consider 
 teaching a profession. I regard it as a business, — 
 not a very profitable one, but a very honorable one. 
 It may be, if we should make the attem2:)t, that we 
 could exalt the business into a profession. If not, 
 we might bring the professions down to our level. 
 The doctor's certificate might be made to read : 
 Measles, 10. Theory and practice 
 
 Cholera, 3. of medicine, 9J. 
 
 Typhoid fever, 6J, 
 " ' We all know that there are good and bad law- 
 yers, and we might grade them something like this : 
 Criminal Code, 7|. Theory and practice 
 Real Estate, 3{^. of law, 9^^. 
 
 Divorce, 10. 
 " * It would never do to assert that there are good 
 preachers and bad preachers, but we may say there 
 are a few poor preachers, and if any one is offended 
 we can explain that poor means lean. Their license 
 might be filled out : 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS f'OR MEN 43 
 
 Repentence, 6|. Election, 8. 
 
 Conversion, 7^j. Theory and practice 
 
 Eternal punishment, 10. of religion, 5|-. 
 
 " ' I forgot one im})ortant matter. These papers 
 ought to be good for one year or two, according to 
 the grades, and only in the county where issued.' " 
 
 And not even yet is John discouraged. " I may 
 not get money or fame," he says bravely, compress- 
 ing his lips ; " I may not even command the respect 
 due to a professional man. But at least I can give 
 my life to making better men and women. I will 
 study ''the problem of education, evolve my princi- 
 ples, apply them with fresh differentiation to every 
 pupil, watch the development of the child that 
 enters a })rimary room into the young man that 
 goes out into the world better and truer and wiser 
 and more useful because part of my heart and life 
 have entered into him." 
 
 " You mean you would if you were permitted to, 
 John. But you must remember that the principal 
 of a school is hired by, and directed by, a board of 
 education. In the first place, you have got to 
 secure a position ; and in interviewing a board of 
 education with reference to your first engagement, 
 you are not unlikely to encounter some unexpected 
 
44 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 phenomena. When you are in 3'on have got to 
 keep in. Your engagement may be only during 
 the pleasure of the hoard, and at the best is hut for 
 a year. A single member of the board whose inter- 
 ference you have resented or wdiose child you have 
 slighted may defeat your re-election ; and y(^ur sys- 
 tem, which a first year can hardly have developed, 
 not to say put into operation, must l>e thrown aside 
 when you encounter the new problems of anotl^er 
 school. 
 
 " Even if by an intelligent or indifferent board you 
 are allowed to remain, j^ou are hampered by restric- 
 tions that would be scouted by strictly pi'ofessional 
 men. AVho directs a minister how he shall i)reach 
 his sermon, a lawyer how he shall conduct his case, 
 a physician how he shall com])Oun(l his }>i-es('rip- 
 tion ? But a teacher works under a course of study 
 and a scheme of regulations adopted by a board of 
 education. He is to be at school twenty minutes 
 before the hour, to stand in the entry durhig recess, 
 to report all cases of discipline for api)roval, and to 
 use text-books adoi)ted without reference to his 
 opinion by men ignorant of the very subject-matter. 
 Gail Hamilton says that a member of the board of 
 education in Washington objected to consrlting 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 45 
 
 teachers regarding text-books on the ground that it 
 was not dignified for employers to consult those they 
 employed. How would you like to develop charac- 
 ter undi'r such supervision as tliat? " 
 
 "But surely you will admit," urges John, "that 
 many noble men arc teachers. How did they come 
 to choose this business, if it was so unattractive?" 
 
 "They didn't choose it," I reph' ; "they chose 
 something else to which teaching was to be a step- 
 ping-stone. 
 
 "'Where is there a man among us,' says the 
 Sclioolmaster'^'' , 'from superintendent down, who be- 
 gan to teach with the distinct purpose of making 
 that a life-work? Find liim and lie will be one in 
 a thousand. We have drifted into the business, and 
 we have not drifted and cannot drift out of it.' " 
 
 " Truly, Socrates," says John, it seemeth that I 
 should consider further before I adopt a j^rofession." 
 
 " O xVlcibiades," I reply, "your head is level." 
 
 Fellow members of this Association, the truth is 
 not to be spoken at all times, and at these meetings 
 you do not always speak it, the whole of it. But 
 the subject assigned me by our president calls for a 
 
 * 11.114. 
 
46 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 practical, hard-headed statement of facts. Have I 
 not presented the case fairly? Would you, with 
 the exceptionally fortunate experience that has 
 attended most of you, would you advise a young 
 man of superior ability to become a teacher? Do 
 you want your son to settle down to teaching as the 
 work of his life? 
 
 I yield to no one in my appreciation of the joys 
 of teaching. The ha])piest work I ever did was in 
 the school-room. As T write, my eyes suffuse when 
 I recall the class that graduated thirteen years ago 
 at a village school a few miles nortli of here, and 
 remember the loyalty, the trustworthiness, the con- 
 fidence of those boys and girls Avho were rather 
 companions than })U})ils. But my salary was prov- 
 ing insufficient, and an op})ortnnity to engage in 
 other business came to me just as I was chafing 
 under restrictions upon my work, slight in them- 
 selves, but significant as showing by how indifferent 
 a touch the board of education may topple down 
 the foundations the teacher is building upon. And 
 so, after six years' experience, I gave up teaching ; 
 and I liave never regretted it. Indeed, I have 
 wondered sometimes how a man with ability to 
 succeed at anything else should continue to be a 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 47 
 
 teacher. Uuder its present conditions, the business 
 of teaching deserves to command only third-class 
 talent ; and the fact that some of the men whom 
 this Association assembles are by their own assent 
 teachers might be looked upon as an interposition 
 of Providence in behalf of our children. 
 
 These things ought not so to be ; they are not 
 always so to be : how long dejiends much upon how 
 clearly we recognize the causes, and with what unity 
 we strive to overcome them. 
 
 The usual appeal of the daily newspaper or the 
 public orator is for Higher Salaries, as though a 
 legislative enactment raising the compensation of 
 teachers 50 j^er cent, would raise the quality of their 
 work in the same proportion. 
 
 To experienced teachers, especially to those ac- 
 customed to read and to write upon this question, 
 the fallacy of such an assumption need not be 
 pointed out. There are at the present time hun- 
 dreds of good teachers ready to be engaged and to 
 do the best work of which they are capable at 
 the salaries now jiaid ; and they cannot get places 
 because of methods of appointment, especially in 
 cities, that give such j^laces to persons whose chief 
 recommendation is that they are unqualified to do 
 anything else. 
 
48 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 "Pat," said one Irishman to another, as they 
 paused from ditch-digging to mop their brows, 
 " Pat, what business would you Hke best if you had 
 the choosing of it ? " 
 
 " Why, for a nice, dacent, clane bit of worruk, I 
 think I'd hke to be a Bishop." 
 
 And so because teaching is to the incompetent a 
 nice, dacent, chine bit of worruk, they are lifted 
 into it by those who otherwise would have to sup- 
 port them. Raise salaries one-half without raising 
 the standard of qualification, and not only do you 
 fix more firmly than ever in place these relatives of 
 the board and friends of local demagogues, but you 
 turn the hungry eyes of politicians toward i)laces 
 not now considered fat enough to be worthy spoil, 
 and displace some of the best of the teachers you 
 already have. 
 
 " The wages paid by the community for teaching 
 in our public schools," says the Hon. S. M. Clarke*, 
 " are ample — are prodigal in some cases — to youth 
 and inexperience. They are scant and inadequate 
 to age and experience. But — save exceptionally — 
 supply governs price. Since the public — the demand 
 — is satisfied with youth as a teacher, and the sup- 
 
 * The Schoolmaster, Chicago, iii.125. 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 49 
 
 ply of youth for teaching is so abiindaut that every 
 school board in the land is worried with an excess 
 of applicants, that will inevitably fix teaching wage, 
 and the level of it will be youth's wage. Men and 
 women who give their lives to teaching must con- 
 front that grim and disheartening fact." 
 
 A^ project supplementary to arbitrary increase of 
 salaries, is that of Pensions to retired teachers. Here 
 there is among teachers some discussion f, though I 
 should judge the weight of opinion was manifestly 
 against them. 
 
 The objection just urged applies with even stronger 
 force against this innovation, since the incompetent 
 who have flocked after the places where they could 
 get i^ay for very little work, will clutch after them 
 the more greedily when there is attached to them 
 the possibility of pay for no work at all. 
 
 But there is another consideration. Already the 
 most discouraging feature of the profession is that 
 the teacher is looked upon as an impractical man, 
 useful enough to take care of boys and girls under 
 rules established by lawyers, doctors, and business- 
 men, but unfitted for participation in any of the 
 serious work of the community. I remember read- 
 
 i Indiana School Journal, xxvi.339. 
 
50 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 ing of a schoolhouse dedication, where at the very 
 close of the exercises, after the audience was wearied 
 by speeches from butcher and baker and candlestick- 
 maker, the chairman remarked benignly : " We 
 desire that at this festival of rejoicing all classes of 
 the community should be represented upon the 
 platform, and therefore we will call upon the princi- 
 pal of the school for a few brief remarks." Indeed, 
 a western normal school recently projjosed to ap- 
 point as principal some thorough-going and success- 
 ful business man, one of brains, but wholly free 
 from pedagogical superstitions, who should intro- 
 duce life and spirit and business methods into the 
 school. 
 
 " Savans and donkeys to the rear," was Napoleon's 
 order in Egypt. 
 
 For this conception of our calling we are much 
 at fault. Listen, for instance, to this proposition by 
 Adolph Douai * : 
 
 " The teacher ought to be a pensioner of the State : 
 every care for his existence should be taken from off 
 his mind. He should be spared every indignity of a 
 dependent condition, every struggle for existence, in 
 order to belong to his calling exclusively, and to 
 embrace it with devotion." 
 
 * In JVew England Journal of Education, xii.228. 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 51 
 
 This is making teachers not merely babes but 
 intellectual eunuchs. It is manhood in the teacher 
 that commands respect, and that makes men of his 
 scholars ; and what sort of manhood is that which 
 cannot contract its own bills and pay them and lay 
 by something for a rainy day? The word "pen- 
 sion" suggests a physical cripple; but he is an 
 intellectual hunchback who embraces a profession 
 in youth with the hope that in old age he may be 
 permitted to sun himself on the veranda of a State 
 poorhouse. 
 
 I know that pensions are paid to retired judges, 
 as well as to crippled soldiers ; and when the occu- 
 pation of teaching ranks with that of judges, and 
 our salaries correspond with theirs, we may be able 
 to receive without self-reproach what will then be a 
 pension liberal in amount. The man who would 
 not care to hold out his hat on a street-corner may 
 accept with beaming satisfaction a '' testimonial " 
 from his fellow-citizens. But with salaries as they 
 are and teachers as they are, the man who drew his 
 pension .would look like a beggar : and feel like one. 
 
 Without discussing the question of Tomre of 
 Office, I would merely suggest that in this effort we 
 are asking what the well-paid officers of corpora- 
 
52 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 tions do not find necessary. The bank-teller and 
 cashier hold office only for a year ; and they are 
 usuall}^ re-elected, — if they are still this side of the 
 St. Lawrence. The insurance-president, the cotton- 
 mill superintendent are subject to annual election ; 
 but it seldom worries them. The fact is, in all 
 such positions the man knows that he is practically 
 indispensable, and his confidence rests on that 
 assurance. 
 
 Now why should not the teacher make himself 
 indispensable in the same way? The answer is 
 easy : the board of education does not know how 
 to measure his work, as a board of directors knows 
 how to measure the work of a bank-cashier or a 
 cotton-mill superintendent. 
 
 For instance, perhaps no theory of education is 
 more thorouglily established than Jacotot's of mas- 
 terly inactivity. The teacher is most useful when 
 he is seemingly most useless. The little boy who 
 couldn't do his i)roblems, and didn't see why he 
 needed to learn because when he was a man he 
 would be a teacher and make his scholars do 'em, 
 hit upon a great educational principle. 
 
 But what would the average member of a board 
 of education think of it ? You know the story of 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 53 
 
 the petroliarch who hired a string-quartette for liis 
 daughter's reception. Passing by, he observed that 
 one of the vioHnists was not playing. 
 
 "See here, mister," lie said, "what's the matter 
 with you ? Why aren't you at it? " 
 
 " Why, sir, I have a sixteen bars' rest here." 
 
 "Rest? at three dollars a night? Not if I know 
 it : you start that fiddle ! " 
 
 So the average member of a board of education 
 sits beside the teacher and sees a class come in list- 
 less and indifferent, sees them march back to their 
 seats half an hour afterward brimming with life 
 and enthusiasm, reflects that they are bright child- 
 ren if his boy happens to be among them, but 
 declares the teacher has the easiest work he ever 
 saw — nothing to do but sit still and listen. He 
 never dreams — how should he ? — that the life and 
 enthusiasm these thirty scholars carry away have 
 been drained out of the teacher as positively as his 
 blood would be drained by a vein-opening. In 
 reverent imitation of tlie great JNIaster, the true 
 teacher may say at the close of school, "Virtue has 
 gone out of me." But it has gone out unobtrusively, 
 perhaps unconsciously ; and this quiet, observant, 
 sympathetic teacher, who has poured out his heart's 
 
54 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 life for his scholars, may be displaced by a brawl- 
 ing braggart who will make more impression be- 
 cause he makes more noise. 
 
 And this leads to what seems to me more import- 
 ant than raising of salaries, or establishment of 
 pensions, or lengthened terms of service — and that 
 is Discrimination in Employment. 
 
 "These, then," says President Eliot*, "are the 
 three main features of a well-organized public 
 school service : careful selection of teachers by ex- 
 amination and probation ; ultimate appointment, 
 without limitation of time ; and a system of retir- 
 ing annuities." 
 
 All I ask is that reforms be attempted in this 
 order. 
 
 I can only hint at some of the immediate steps 
 we might be taking. 
 
 (1) Teachers should discriminate among them- 
 selves and against themselves. I do not at this 
 moment remember conversing with a teacher about 
 a contemporary teacher superior to himself. It 
 amuses one whose attention has been called to 
 it to notice how inevitably inquiry about a fellow- 
 teacher leads the speaker to comparisons favorable 
 
 * yeiv England Journal of Education, xi.:30. 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 00 
 
 to himself. The nightingale has a tolerably smooth 
 voice, but somehow it lacks breadth. 
 
 Now there are lawyers who will admit that they 
 have superiors at the bar. If Mr. Evarts were 
 stricken with paralysis, not all the young attorneys 
 in the country would jump upon the train and rush 
 to New York to apply for his position. A good 
 many of them would be aware that they could 
 not fill the place. 
 
 (2) Teachers should be men among men, with 
 nothing in their dress or their manner or their con- 
 versation to indicate that their functions are limited 
 to the school-room. 
 
 I was urging one of the normal principals in this 
 State to forward a certain matter before the Legis- 
 lature, on the ground that he was so free from the 
 external characteristics of the pedagogue that he 
 could meet the members on a level, and not be con- 
 sidered an impractical visionary. 
 
 " Yes," he said, " I had evidence the other morn- 
 ing that I am not recognized at forty rods as a 
 teacher. I had been riding three or four hours on 
 the cars, and the limited accommodations at the 
 Brackett House did not enable me to remove all the 
 cinders. I sat down to be shaved, and the barber 
 
56 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 began his orchestral accompaniment by inquiring 
 where I had played the night before. 
 
 " ' Played ? ' I repeated. 
 
 " ' Why, yes,' he said ; ' don't yon belong to Cal 
 Wagner's minstrel troupe?' " 
 
 There are men in the profession, who if they saw 
 themselves as the public looks upon them would 
 take it as a compliment to be mistaken for a nigger- 
 minstrel. 
 
 (.')) The difference in the results of good teaching 
 and poor teaching should be proved and empha- 
 sized and illustrated. It is a common assumption 
 that the cost of educating a child is the cost of his 
 tuition ; hence that if one teacher at 1 1,000 a year 
 accomplishes half as much with fifty boys as an- 
 other at $2,000, he is as cheap, and it becomes a 
 mere question of the quantity one cares to purchase. 
 But as a matter of fact the tuition is as subordinate 
 an element in the ])ublic school as it is in the pri- 
 vate school. The board and clothes and general 
 care of the boy should be reckoned as ]-)iiri of the 
 cost of his education ; and when these are estimated 
 it becomes a question of $16,000 as the cost of edu- 
 cating under one teacher, against $17,000 under the 
 other, with twice the results. 
 
TKACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 57 
 
 " We tliiuk there is no exaggeration in saying," 
 re})orted the Committee on Normal Schools to the 
 New York Legislature*, "that a teacher who under- 
 stands his business will accomplish more in a year 
 than is accomplished in three years under untrained 
 instruction. " Suppose she is an intermediate teacher 
 at $300 a year, with fifty children under her ; and 
 that a competent teacher could be secured for $500. 
 Then estimating the home expenses of each child at 
 $300 a year, the cost of securing the same amount 
 of education is in the case of the incompetent 
 teacher $45,900 as against $15,500 in the case of a 
 sui3erior teacher. 
 
 Nor is this the measure of the extravagance of 
 hiring poor teachers. The old Greek musician 
 charged double price to those who had taken les- 
 sons before coming to him — one half for correcting 
 bad habits. It is questionable whether the bad 
 habits formed under an incompetent teacher can be 
 eradicated at any cost of time and money. Your 
 scholars might better have been pupils of Mr. 
 Wopsle's great aunt, " who kept a school in the vil- 
 lage ; that is to say," as Dickens puts it, " she was 
 a ridiculous old woman of limited means and un- 
 
 * Report 1879, p. 41. 
 
58 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 limited infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six 
 to seven every evening in the society of youth who 
 paid two jience per week each for the improving 
 opportunity of seeing her do it." 
 
 Nor is it a question of mental loss alone. 
 
 Describing the effect of an incompetent teacher, 
 the National Teachers' Monthly* said some years 
 ago: 
 
 " Ere long the unconscious parent is pained and 
 startled by the intelligence that the child is no 
 longer doing well. He is warned that he has been 
 absent. The influence of evil associates, unper- 
 ceived by the careless or stupid teacher, or neglected, 
 has overpowered her influence, notwithstanding the 
 immense advantage on her side, and truancy and 
 other moral delinquencies ensue. The bright, gen- 
 tle, confiding face which was entrusted you by the 
 hopeful parent loses its innocent, cleanly look, and 
 dirt and wile and sullenness overspread it. Correct 
 deportment is despised, and good scholarship loses 
 its attractions. He has entered an atmosphere 
 where disobedience, insubordination, and rebellion 
 are rampant, and the time and strength that should 
 be devoted to unfolding tlie mysteries of knowledge 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 59 
 
 are enlisted in a harsh and hopeless struggle to 
 maintain an odious and barren discipline." 
 
 "A weed," says Emerson, " is a plant whose vir- 
 tues have not yet been discovered." There are 
 weeds in every school-room that the indifferent 
 teacher neglects or casts into the highway, to become 
 desperados and criminals. There are teachers who 
 would recoonize strength under the rudeness of such 
 natures, and transform them by sympathy and cul- 
 ture into pillars of the school and of tlie State. 
 Do you think the })ublic could afford to make a 
 hundred dollars difference in the salaries of two 
 such teachers ? 
 
 (4) There should be less development of elaborate 
 systems, and more recognition of the personality of 
 the teacher. 
 
 " Education is a dynamical, not a mechanical 
 process," says Dr. Arnold, " and the more powerful 
 and vigorous the mind of the teacher, the more 
 clearly and readily he can grasp things, the better 
 fitted he is to cultivate the mind of another." 
 
 " Few people realize the fact," says President 
 Eliot, " that there can be no good teaching without 
 a quick sympathy and perception in the teacher, 
 and a strong personal influence going out from 
 him." 
 
60 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 Canning summarizes, wlien he says it is not the 
 harness but the liorses that draw the chariot. 
 
 "I do not care what you study," says Emerson, 
 "I only care to know wlio is to be your teacher." 
 
 Says the Century, " Tlie minister of pubhc instruc- 
 tion who boasted that lie could look at his watch 
 and know just what question was being asked in 
 every school of a given grade in France, was a good 
 illustration of a system-worshiper." 
 
 Another writer lias said : " A school committee 
 hires a superintendent, and then thinks it can safely 
 employ an inferior class of teachers, just as an in- 
 ferior class of laborers ma}" safely be employed for 
 digging or sweeping if a smart overseer is hired to 
 watch tliem. . . Now a gain in superintendence 
 which is })rocured at the expense of a loss of direct 
 teaching power is too dearly bought. The reason 
 of this is contained in a self-evident' pro2)Osition 
 which all people admit on its bare statement, and 
 yet too often lose sight of A good school is not a 
 grand building, or a nice set of furniture, or a series 
 of text-books selected l)y a committee, or a pro- 
 gramme of studies made up by the superintendent; 
 and all these things put together, though each were 
 the best of the kind, would not make a good school ; 
 for a uood school is a man or a woman." 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 61 
 
 The system, however complete, can give only the 
 general principles. The indispensable individual 
 application to each pupil can be made only by the 
 discriminating and sympathetic teacher. 
 
 The line between amateur and professional work 
 may be drawn through just the point where the 
 teacher recognizes that his study is not of the sub- 
 ject-matter but of- the class. 
 
 John B. Gough was once asked if ho did not find 
 it wearisome to repeat the same anecdotes night 
 after night. He replied tliat for the first two or 
 three times he delivered it, lie enjoyed his lecture. 
 Then it became for a dozen nights common-i)lace 
 and tedious, and lie dreaded to begin it. But by 
 this time it was familiar to him and he began to 
 turn his attention from the lecture itself to the 
 audience as affected b}- it. This always proved an 
 unflagging source of interest. As he approached a 
 humoi'ous or a pathetic climax he began to wonder 
 whether it would be a|)preciated, and he learned to 
 experiment upon expi-ession and emphasis to see 
 just what was surest to capture the i)articular audi- 
 ence before liim. Wlieii this stage was reached he 
 was sure of quite as much entertainment from the 
 audience as they could get from him. 
 
62 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 This is the attitude of the professional teacher. 
 He does not complain languidly that he is tired of 
 teaching arithmetic because he knows all about it. 
 He may know all about addition of fractions, and 
 what are on general principles the best methods 
 of teaching it, but he does not know till he exper- 
 iments just how addition of fractions will strike 
 the mind of Tommy Jones. The recitation teaches 
 him nothing new about fractions, but it teaches him 
 a good deal about Tommy Jones. 
 
 Now that is a sort of study the system cannot 
 provide for. " The teacher may adapt methods but 
 should never adopt them." " The man who would 
 translate a book out of one language into another 
 must know both," and the teacher who would put 
 ideas into a child's mind must know the mind as 
 well as the ideas. "It is not by his own taste but 
 by that of the fish, that a sportsman baits his hook," 
 says Macaulay, and the teacher will present his 
 subject not as would be clearest to himself, but as 
 experience and observation shows him will be clear- 
 est to this particular pupil. 
 
 " To be able to find out the peculiar constitution 
 of each child's mind," says Jean Paul Richter, "so 
 as to bring what you would teach down to the level 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 63 
 
 of its understanding, and yet to make it work in 
 such a way as to seize upon and comprehend the 
 subject and reproduce it, this is teaching : and noth- 
 ing else deserves the name." 
 
 Such considerations I would urge upon the pub- 
 lic, in conversation, at associations, — and in those 
 educational columns of local newspapers that prin- 
 cipals should seek to secure and control. Especially 
 would I avoid assuming at these associations any 
 attitude that makes examinations less severe, posi- 
 tion less dependent on results, simple incumbency 
 more secure. By etymology, the sinecurist is long- 
 lived, and if we wait for the lymphatic ins to die 
 off, young and vigorous outs will stagnate for want 
 of opportunity. 
 
 I do not quarrel with Life-Tenure, or even with 
 Pensions, provided we can first be assured of what 
 seems to me an indispensable pre-requisite to the 
 beneficial working of either. — viz., that the work of 
 superior teachers be recognized and secured. I do 
 not ask that only competent teachers be hired : — in 
 fifty years under the most favorable conditions we 
 shall not have enough competent teachers for our 
 schools. I do not ask even that the average teacher 
 recognize the demands his work makes upon him, 
 or try to meet them. 
 
64 TEACHING AS A BFSINESS 
 
 But 1 do ask that the teacher who is competent, 
 who does recognize these demands, and wlio does 
 meet them, shall no longer be compelled to contend 
 for a position on eqnal terms witli a beardless lad 
 from college, or a sole support of a widowed mother, 
 or a woodman-spare-that-tree old fossil whom the 
 committee are too tender-hearted to turn out. There 
 are a few men who love teaching, who were born to 
 enlist the sympathy of children, and who devote 
 their lives to study of a science of wliich the art is 
 so delicate and the results are so momentous. Show 
 these men the same recognition that is shown physi- 
 cians and lawyers and clergymen, by asking, not 
 What sliall be the salary ? but Where can we find 
 the man ? 
 
 To put it brietly, the fiital Haw in our status as a 
 profession, is tliat the average school-board is a 
 checker-board. In playing draughts the only im- 
 portant consideration is that the square be covered. 
 If a man rolls to the floor out of reach, another will 
 do as well, or a penny or a button will serve, — any- 
 thing to show that the place is not empty. And so 
 if a principal resigns, why, anybody will do that 
 can sit in the chair without being -[mi out by the 
 big' boys, — your cousin, my nephew, this graduate 
 
TEACHING AS A BUSINESS FOR MEN 65 
 
 who wants to earn money to pay his college-debts. 
 
 Now suppose we could convert our school-boards 
 into chess-boards. When a knight falls to the carpet 
 you do not replace him by a pawn, or a rook by a 
 bishop ; and you will make almost any sacrifice to 
 retain your queen. One of these pawns may some- 
 tirue be a queen, but not till by long probation 
 and many steps of progress, she has won her posi- 
 tion in the queen's row. 
 
 There should be a Queen's Row in teaching, and 
 all the steps of progress toward it should be definite 
 and certificated. 
 
 Then, and not till then, the Teacher's Business 
 will become the Teacher's Profession. 
 
THE TEACHER'S COMMERCIAL VALUE 
 
 One of those melancholy books written by an 
 alleged humorist a few years ago, began like this : 
 
 " Some write books for fame ; some write because 
 their friends insist upon it ; some because of a 
 heaven-born instinct that must find utterance ; some 
 because mankind is thirsty for what they have to 
 ^ay. But I Avrite for ducats. This book is pub- 
 lished to make money out of." 
 
 The joke and the book fell flat ; deservedly. The 
 man meant to be funny ; he simply showed himself 
 stupid. He was blind to the universal instinct that 
 whatever is artistic demands a motive above mere 
 gain. The laborer may shovel for his dollar a day : 
 but in proportion as intellect, purpose, ideal, enter 
 into work, the necessity increases that the basis of 
 effort be professional. And the essence of profes- 
 sional work is that however liigh or low be the price 
 accepted for service, when the service is promised it 
 is to be rendered with all zeal. 
 
 (67) 
 
68 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 Tile brakeinan who was reproved for pronouncing 
 Canisteo indistinctly, and inquired indignantly if 
 the passengers exj^ected a fine tenor voice for ten 
 shillings a day, spoke from the stand})oint of the 
 artisan who means that his work shall do justice to 
 his employer ; the artist means that his work shall 
 be worthy of himself. 
 
 Unhappy the teacher that does not classify him- 
 self an artist. Miss I^rackett well says : 
 
 "The teacher who is not willing, so long as she is 
 an apprentice, to work with her whole soul for |30(), 
 will never reach $1,200. 1 care not if she under- 
 stands two languages, or can calculate eclipses, or 
 knows all the lists of all the kings and all the 
 emperors from Confucuis down. She may even 
 have all the knowledge attainable : but without a 
 reverence for the art of education, all her acquire- 
 ments will be the broken pieces which she ma}^ hold 
 in her hand while the ' beistigos band ' is lacking. 
 We do sadly need in many cases the reverence of 
 the true artist for his work. We do sadly need 
 teachers who are artists and not artisans*." 
 
 But there is a certain satisfaction in feeling that 
 the quality of one's work is recognized and paid 
 
 * American Journal of Edncafion, Oct., 1877. 
 
THE teacher's ('OMMERCTAL VALUE 69 
 
 for, and it is from tliis subordinate point of view 
 that I ask you to consider some elements of the 
 teacher's commercial value. 
 
 Character has commercial value. 
 
 And the first element of character I shall men- 
 tion is Integrit}^' It is worth observing that this 
 word, which properly means " wholeness ", has been 
 limited until it comes to mean trustworthiness in 
 business transactions, the common sense of man- 
 kind thus formulating the conviction that of all de- 
 ficiencies the most fatal is that a man's business 
 word is not to be depended on. 
 
 Especially is this true of the teacher. The rela- 
 tions under which he meets the parents of his pupils 
 are mostly those of business ; the opinions of him 
 formed by those parents will depend largely upon 
 his promptness in payment. Now perhaps there is 
 no other kind of contempt so bitter, so acrimonious, 
 as tliat felt by a small tradesman who is embar- 
 rassed in his own payments by the delinquency of 
 customers who seem to him entirely able to pay. 
 To the grocer, the inilknian, the shoemaker, the 
 teacher's salary looks enormous ; and if he lets his 
 l)ills run, accumulates excuses, and finally seems 
 likely to default altogether, these men become violent 
 
70 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 in their expressions of indignation and contempt. 
 I have known one of the best instructors in the 
 State, holding a prominent position at a high salary, 
 reduced to ask credit for a beefsteak under pretence 
 of having left his pocket-book in his other trousers, 
 and humiliated by having that credit contemptu- 
 ously refused. 
 
 How are pupils to respect a teacher who has in 
 the community a reputation like that? Their lips 
 soon fall into the habitual curl of scorn that they 
 have seen on their parents' lips whenever the teach- 
 er's name is mentioned. 
 
 But there is a reflex influence upon the teacher 
 himself. The first demand society makes upon a 
 man is that he pay his way ; and the three-handed 
 men find that the little behind-hand interferes seri- 
 ously with the work of the other two. You know 
 the story of the minister who used regularly on 
 Saturday night to borrow a five-dollar bill of one of 
 his deacons, and as regularly to return it on Mon- 
 day morning. Having marked the bill lent, to be 
 sure the one returned was identical, the deacon 
 asked him why he kept borrowing this money he 
 never used. 
 
 '' Why, brother Brown," was the repl}', "the fact 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 71 
 
 is I preach better when I am on a sound financial 
 basis." 
 
 We all do our work better when we are on 
 a sound financial basis. " Income one hundred 
 pounds, expenses ninety-nine pounds, nineteen and 
 six-pence," says Thackeray in effect, somewhere, 
 "result, dignified happiness. Income one hundred 
 pounds, expenses one hundred pounds and sixpence, 
 result, a sneaking misery." 
 
 One of the normal principals in this State, told 
 me once that he had been unable to lay up much 
 money, but that when he began teaching he had 
 made a rule from which he had never varied : so 
 to limit his expenses, that when he drew his quar- 
 ter's salary he had no bills to pay out of it, — he 
 was always sure to be at least three months ahead. 
 The man with even that much start has an advant- 
 age usually underestimated over his fellow that is 
 living from hand to mouth, or is contracting bills he 
 only hojDes to pay. Is it Lowell who says that the 
 consciousness of a well-fitting gown gives woman at 
 church a serenity that piety cannot fully impart? 
 What a well-fitting dress is to the woman, a well-filled 
 pocket-book is to the man. He has no tradesmen to 
 avoid, no duns to evade, no excuses to make, and, 
 
72 TEAPHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 always in the wake of duns and excuses, no transpar- 
 ent falsehoods to tell. He can look every man in 
 the eye, can buy wliere he chooses, and can have 
 what lie wants because ho has disciplined himself to 
 want only what he can have. 
 
 To the teacher this attitude is especially import- 
 ant for this reason : his power with his trustees 
 depends mainly upon his independence. If he is a 
 superior teacher he can command a superior posi- 
 tion, if not in this school in some other; so if the 
 trustees propose to reduce his salary or to hamper 
 him by unworthy restrictions, he has only to say to 
 them : " Gentlemen, you evidently want a different 
 kind of man, and my resignation gives you a chance 
 to look liim up." 
 
 I>ut to hud the I'iglit }>lace may require waiting, 
 some Aveeks, possibly some months, without employ- 
 ment and without salary. With all bills paid and 
 money aliead this is easy enough, and is a good 
 investment ; but with the bills unpaid and borrow- 
 ing })ossibilities exhausted, it is sim})ly impossible. 
 The trustees know this, and take advantage of it. 
 The teacher knows it, and dares not insist upon 
 what he might otherwise safely demand. 
 
 "Put money in thy purse," teacher, and keep it 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALITE 73 
 
 there, some of it. You will never know what it is 
 to be ''integer vitae" till you are a quarter's salary 
 ahead of all money obligations. 
 
 Emerson somewhere remarks with that practical 
 common-sense so curiously allied in him with 
 glimpses of the unfathomable, that if you want an 
 over-due bill paid, you should not inform your 
 debtor that you are in need of money : for when 
 you do that you acknowledge yourself in his power, 
 and that it is a favor you are begging instead of a 
 right you are demanding. Years ago I taught the 
 high-school in Meriden, Ct., rattling around in the 
 shoes of Col. Homer B. Sprague, who had been 
 elected to the Legislature to secure the re-establish- 
 ment of the State Normal school. He drew his 
 salary and paid half of it to me, and I shall never 
 forget the impression that first payment made upon 
 me. The treasurer of the board was, I think, a 
 shoemaker, a small tradesman making perhaps a 
 thousand dollars a year ; and yet because it was 
 through his hands the public money was paid he 
 fairly patronized Col. Sprague, and someway the 
 Colonel's manly form seemed to weazen under it. 
 He had to have the money, and the shoemaker 
 knew he had to have it, and gloated in that for the 
 
74 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 moment he was put in the position of master of a 
 man whose shoes he was unworthy to cobble. It is 
 a position of dependence in which the teacher need 
 not and should not stand. His salary should be 
 brought to him, and he should accept it as the 
 savings-bank accepts the interest on a mortgage. 
 This he may insist upon, if he will put himself in 
 position not to be dependent upon getting his salary 
 on a specific day. The world respects a man with 
 capital, and the teacher with his debts paid and 
 money in his pocket is a man of capital. 
 
 Character involves Professional as well as Com- 
 mercial Honor. A. R. Hope says sadly : 
 
 " We dominies so seldom have a good word to say 
 of each other. This is a sad fact, but a fact, never- 
 theless, and the reason is clear enough. We are so 
 accustomed _ to have our own way and hear our 
 own tongues going, that we do not make good 
 society for each other. I believe the same rule holds 
 good with crowned heads and country parsons. If 
 there were a dozen emperors of Abyssinia living and 
 ruling within a convenient distance of one another, 
 we should find them by no means peaceable neigh- 
 bors ; and in the same way, we dominies, so far as 
 not bound over by Mrs. Grundy to keep the peace, 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 75 
 
 are given to sneer at the attainments and exertions 
 of our brethren*." 
 
 Wlien we not only sneer at our brethren but try to 
 supplant them ; when we decry and slander and 
 underbid them in our attempt to secure their places 
 for ourselves, we deserve to be pilloried for the con- 
 tempt of mankind. 
 
 Character further involves scrupulous honor in 
 the teacher's relations to his pupils. The best 
 teachers are often tempted to unwise familiarity 
 with their larger girls. We do not count as a 
 teacher the man who could stain such a relation by 
 an impure thought ; but we have known serious 
 difficulty to arise when the delight one feels in a 
 bright, lovable pupil is allowed to drift into senti- 
 mental fondness. As Longfellow puts it : 
 
 Came the preceptor, gazing idly round 
 Now at the clouds, and now at the green grass. 
 
 And all absorbed in reveries profound 
 Of fair Almira in the upper class. 
 
 Children are quick to see and to report, even to 
 
 misreport such weakness as this, and of a sudden 
 
 the teacher's influence is sapped. " If a student 
 
 convince you that you are wrong and he is right," 
 
 * Book about Dominies. 
 
76 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 says P]merson, " acknowledge it cheerfully, and hug 
 hhn." 
 
 That " him " should strictly preserye its gender. 
 
 Jean Paul well adyises : 
 
 " Holily preserye childlike trust, without which 
 there can be no education. Neyer forget that the 
 little child looks up to you as to a lofty genius, an 
 apostle full of reyelatioiLs whom he trusts altogether 
 more absolutely than his equals ; and that the lie of 
 an apostle destroys the whole moral Avorld." 
 
 Prof. Andrews declares that high character is the 
 source of all true authority in the teacher. " One of 
 the Greek writers truly said : There is no culture 
 from him who does not please. Popularity, indeed, 
 often attends what is superficial and spurious. Cater- 
 ing to the lower impulses of the student may for a 
 time secure fayor ; but sooner or later all worthy 
 popularity comes to him who deseryes it. It is but 
 another name for authority. Without this the effort 
 to impart knowledge will meet but a listless recep- 
 tion, and any attempt to influence character will be 
 repelled. . . It is this personal authority which 
 identifies the school and the teacher. Rugby was 
 Arnold and Arnold was Rugby ; while Union Col- 
 lege, for half a centuiy, w^as almost synonymous 
 
THE TEACHKK's COMMERCIAL VALUE 77 
 
 with the name of EHphalet Nott. The success of 
 such a teacher rests not on a mere ipse dixit. It is 
 not a moral com})ulsion tliat aims to break down 
 the student's convictions. It creates, liowever, a pre- 
 sumption in a teacher's favor ; it engenders a proper 
 and healthful deference, without which there is no 
 true culture*." 
 
 I got off tlie train once at a village where there 
 were two schools, under two principals. Of two or 
 three boys loafing near the station I asked after the 
 first. As soon as they found out whom I meant, — 
 "Old Tommy?" one of them said, "why he's out 
 of town. Vacation." — "And is the other school 
 closed?" "0 no, you will find Mr. Brown there." 
 It was not the "Old Tommy" and tlie "Mr. 
 Brown " alone that showed me how different was 
 the influence of the two men, but the very tone of 
 the boy's voice changed. He referred to the first 
 with a sneer, and drew down his face in speaking 
 of the second as ho would if he had been walking 
 up to his desk on an errand. Character that mani- 
 fests itself like that pays : it has commercial value. 
 
 Health has commercial value. "A nice person," 
 says Sydney Smith, " looks clean and cheerful." 
 
 * University Convocation, 1S7S. 
 
78 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 What a happy hght a clean and cheerful teacher 
 throws over the school-room. 
 
 Health involves earnestness and enthusiasm. 
 
 " Dr. Arnold's great power resided in this," says 
 Dean Stanley, "that he gave such an intense earn- 
 estness to life. Ever}^ pupil was made to feel that 
 there was a work for him to do — that his happiness 
 as well as his duty lay in doing that work well. 
 Hence an indescribable zest was communicated to 
 the young man's feelings about life. . . Pupils 
 of the most different natures were keenly stimulated. 
 None felt that he was left out, or that because he was 
 not endowed with large powers of mind tliere was 
 no sphere open to him in the honorable j^ursuit of 
 usefulness*." 
 
 *' Enthusiasm ! " cries Dr. Mears. " Not in thirty 
 years' hearing has that world lost its charm to my 
 ears. It speaks of youthful energy and glow and 
 ideality ; of the halo of fresh imagination cast about 
 the common-places of life and work ; of ardor and 
 momentum sweeping down obstacles, and commu- 
 nicating itself as a rare magnetism in a wide circle 
 of influence t-" ~- 
 
 * Life of Thomas Arnold. 
 
 ^ N. T. State Association, 1876, . ^ 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 79 
 
 " Enthusiasm," says Inspector Hughes of Toronto, 
 " is well directed energy ; not mere excitement, or 
 assumed animation. Enthusiasm must spring from 
 a genuine fervent desire for the accomplishment of 
 an understood purpose. Enthusiasm in teaching 
 must grow from a love for the work through ac- 
 quaintance with the subjects to be taught, and a 
 deep conviction of the great value of education in 
 forming the characters and securing the success of 
 his pupils. Some one says, ' Enthusiastic men are 
 narrow.' Perhaps they are to a certain extent, but 
 narrowing a man's energies to his legitimate work 
 is the most essential foundation for his success. 
 
 " The teacher should widen his mental range, and 
 concentrate his energies and his emotional nature. 
 ' Enthusiasm is not a reckless zeal without knowl- 
 edge ; neither is it that overplus of feeling or action 
 that overdoes tlie work but undoes the worker. But 
 it does consist in the combination of a high appre- 
 ciation of the importance of your work, and a hearty 
 zeal in the accomplishment of that work. Fanati- 
 cism is zeal without knowledge ; indifference is no 
 zeal whatever ; enthusiasm is zeal tempered by pru- 
 dence, modified by knowledge. Indifference chills ; 
 enthusiasm warms and quickens. A teacher with- 
 
80 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 out enthusiasm has no right to be a teacher. He 
 cannot be one, iu the truest and broadest sense, 
 without it.'" 
 
 But how can there be enthusiasm without health ? 
 W. H. Lambert declares : 
 
 " Both experience and observation have taught 
 me that teachers as a class are not careful of their 
 healtli, .aud do not sufficiently value a good sound 
 body as an element contributing to the largest pro- 
 fessional success ; that they too often forget that 
 cheerfulness, courage, patience, temper, self-control, 
 enthusiasm, and all the virtues which are constitu- 
 ents of the atmosphere of the child-garden, in which 
 are to grow and be developed the human plants 
 committed to their care, are the products, very 
 largely, of their bodily health. . . Although 
 teachers have more holidays, more and longer vaca- 
 tions, yet statistics show that no class of people so 
 early break down under their work *." 
 
 He specifies, (1) they are too anxious, (2) take too 
 little exercise, (3) work too many hours, (4) multi- 
 ply details of school management, (5) are too con- 
 stantly the pedagogue ; and he adds : 
 
 " The greatest power the teacher can carry into 
 
 * iF. £. Journal of Education, xiii. 267, 
 
THE TKACHKU'S COMMERCIAL VALUE 81 
 
 the school-room is u joyous, courageous, and enthus- 
 iastic disposition, the offspring of health. Bilious- 
 ness is as catching as enthusiasm, and the teacher 
 always becomes the pupil's barometer, by which the 
 latter may foretell the condition of his own mental 
 atmosphere. . . A cheerful school is always a 
 suQcessful one, and I hold that the success of a 
 school is proportioned to the happiness of its pupils. 
 Indeed, he who cannot teach a happy school has no 
 rioht to teach at all. But how can a teacher be 
 happy when a dyspeptic stomach is torturing him 
 with its never-ceasiiig pangs ; when a sluggish liver 
 is throwing its saffron hues into his face ; when the 
 body is trembling under the thumpings of a flabby 
 heart ; and when the entire system is reduced under 
 a nervous prostration ? " 
 
 Few teachers appreciate the commercial value of 
 Neatness. How often a man wonders why he ap- 
 plied in vain for a position, when he wore a frayed 
 frock coat with greasy lappels, his hair frowsy, his 
 boots unpolished, his visible linen made up of paper 
 collars and cuffs soiled by a week's travelling. 
 With all the testimonials in the world, such a man 
 could not expect to be engaged by an intelligent 
 board of education. The teacher is an example for 
 
82 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 his pupils, and no precepts about tidiness could 
 undo the effect of such a daily exhibition. 
 
 " It makes a difference in a man's prospects, 
 whether he keeps his finger-nails clean," I said to a 
 normal principal, the other day. " Yes," he replied 
 emphatically, " and whether he keeps his toe-nails 
 clean." He was right. A man applying for a 
 position does not uncover his feet to prove that he 
 is fond of water, but unconsciously he exhibits the 
 general character of his personal habits by a hun- 
 dred tokens that he can neither assume nor conceal. 
 
 Courtesy has a commercial value of which many 
 teachers seem ignorant. " Politeness," says Sydney 
 Smith, " is like an air-cushion ; there may be noth- 
 ing in it, but it eases the jolts of life wonderfully." 
 Gideon F. Thayer tells us : 
 
 " Governor Everett, of Massachusetts, widely 
 known as an accomplished gentleman, frequently 
 visited a primary school in the cit}^ .of Boston, when 
 every pupil evinced by his deportment that he felt 
 the influence of the governor's courteous manners, 
 even before he spoke ; and on one occasion a little 
 pupil said to the teacher, after he had withdrawn, 
 'Miss Brown, I always feel just as if I must keep 
 bowing, when that gentleman comes into school*.' " 
 
 * Barnard's American Journal of Education, ii.107, 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 83 
 
 There is but one safe basis of courtesy in the 
 school-room, and that consists in a genuine Love for 
 children. To quote again from AV. H. Lambert : 
 
 " The man who never unbends, who never throws 
 off his load of dignity, and who does not instinct- 
 ively seek to indulge in playfulness and the unre- 
 strained freedom of childhood, cannot be a healthy 
 man. The kingdom of heaven comes to us in this 
 world only when we are little children. Dr. John- 
 son on a frolic, Lord Chatham playing at marbles, 
 and Walter Scott romping with his dogs, show us 
 how such colossal minds unbend from their great 
 tasks. . . Whoever has read Stanley's biography 
 of that wonderful man, Dr. Arnold, has discovered 
 that the secret of this great teacher's success con- 
 sisted in his marvellous sympathy with boy-nature, 
 arising from his abounding animal spirits. When, 
 said he once to a friend, I cannot run up the library 
 stairs three steps at once, I shall think it time to 
 leave teaching *." 
 
 " What an amiable litter we have here in this 
 kennel of mannerism ! " says another writer ; " black, 
 snarling Asperity, red, yelping Dictatorialness, and 
 yellow, open-jawed Monopoly. The vital question 
 
 * N^w England Journal of Ediccation, xii.885. 
 
84 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 for the teacher is, how he may protect himself against 
 their too great annoyance, how get the mastery over 
 them, how chain to the scliool-room floor this Cer- 
 berean brood. 
 
 " We doubtless have all smiled at the credulity 
 of that old Sf)anisli cavalier who explored trackless 
 waters and ransacked pathless wildernesses to find a 
 fount of water that would wash out the unsightli- 
 nesses of age, and in their places evoke the graces 
 of eternal youth. . . The teacher stands con- 
 stantly in the very midst of such a fountain, with 
 innumerable jets disporting their aromatic, pellucid, 
 effervescent waters on every hand ; and most stupid 
 indeed, aye, culpable is he, if he shall not extract 
 from their sweet environment the elixir of peren- 
 nial youth*." 
 
 In answer to a letter asking how his poetry was 
 still as fresh as forty years ago, Longfellow answered 
 that ho knew a pear-tree two hundred years old that 
 bore as sweet fruit as when it was young, and 
 added, " I presume it is because the tree grows a 
 little every year." 
 
 And this suggests whose fault it is that Youth has 
 commercial value. As a rule the man commands a 
 
 * Qhio Educational Monthly, xxvi,424. 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 85 
 
 new position most readily at thirty, the woman at 
 twenty-five — ages at which in other professions their 
 success would hardly have begun. It is because 
 teachers so often lack sympathy with childhood, so 
 often lose the progressiveness of growth in them- 
 selves, that this impression so generally exists as to 
 the teacher's most valuable period of work. Rous- 
 seau says : 
 
 " The teacher of a child should be young, even 
 as young as possible, consistent with his having 
 attained necessary discretion and sagacity. I would 
 have him be himself a child, that he might become 
 the companion of his pupil, and gain his confi- 
 dence by partaking of his amusements. There are 
 not things in common enough between infancy and 
 manhood to form a solid attachment at so great a 
 distance. Children sometimes caress old men, but 
 they never love them." 
 
 It depends on the life one leads whether there are 
 things enough in common between himself and 
 childhood to permit of companionship. Unhappy 
 man, unworthy teacher, who at any age while his 
 faculties remain has lost his power of loving and 
 being loved by children. 
 
 Scholarship has commercial value. 
 
86 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 111 this State the present scale of salaries for men 
 is dependent upon their education somewhat in the 
 following degree. 
 
 The man just 'graduated at college with fair 
 scholarship and unblemished character is tolerably 
 sure of a ^-jOO position, whatever his other character- 
 istics. The demand for teachers at this price, where 
 scholarship is the main consideration, is quite equal 
 to the supply. 
 
 Beyond this, all depends on the man himself. If 
 he is without experience, he will be ranked mainly 
 by his personal api)earance. If he is prompt, posi- 
 tive, persuasive, he can get a small village school at 
 $800, and he may get $1,000 or more. If he has 
 marked specialties he may get a department in 
 some academy or small college, but usually at a 
 salary $200 less than he would receive as principal. 
 
 If he has had successful experience, even in a dis- 
 trict school, his lowest limit should be $800, and from 
 that upward according to the character of his ex- 
 perience. Sometimes he does not get it, but that is 
 only on account of undeveloped means of commu- 
 nication between schools and teachers. The de- 
 mand is equal to the supply at these figures. 
 
 The fresh normal graduate of the classical course 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 87 
 
 stands quite on a level with the inexperienced col- 
 lege-graduate. I emphasize the classical depart- 
 ment, because our village schools that pay $600 or 
 more to a principal demand ability to teach Latin 
 and often Greek. Most of them care little about 
 having these languages taught, but they feel as if 
 they were not getting their money's worth unless 
 the principal can teach them if required. Hence 
 the folly of the measure introduced into the legis- 
 lature last winter, abolishing the study of Greek in 
 the normal schools. It would simply close to normal 
 graduates the doors of our best union schools, where 
 at present the normal schools are doing more than 
 anywhere else to justify themselves. 
 
 But though our normal graduates begin on a 
 level with our collegians, they do not rise so fast 
 with experience. Their practical limit, so far as 
 their education helps them, apart from exceptional 
 natural ability, is |1,000 a year. Schools that pay 
 more than that want a college graduate. This fact 
 a great many normal graduates after a little teach- 
 ing recognize, and accordingly make the necessary 
 sacrifices to secure a college course. This gives us, 
 so far as training can do it, the best teachers we 
 have, always in demand for superior schools. 
 
88 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 An exceptional instance in reversed order was 
 that of Prof. Burchard, editor of the State Educa- 
 tional Journal founded at Saratoga fourteen years ago. 
 He was graduated from Yale College first, and then 
 took a course in the Oswego Normal. But that was 
 pedagogical enterprise too exceptional to last. Like 
 the good little boys who die young, he soon gave 
 up teaching and went into Colorado banking. 
 
 For experienced teachers capable of carrying 
 through the entire course of Regents' advanced 
 examinations, of managing a school without fric- 
 tion, and of manipulating a board of education 
 without the board's finding it out, $1,000 is at 
 present a low salary. Villages of more than a 
 thousand inhabitants with a school under the Re- 
 gents and doing well do not grumble at $1,200, and 
 pay from that up to $1,700 or $1,800, as at Ilion 
 and Waterville. City ward schools, outside New 
 York and Brooklyn, pay usually $1,500, high 
 schools $1,500 to $3,000, superintendencies $1,200 
 to $4,000. The limit of salary a teacher may ex- 
 pect to reach in New York is $2,000. He may 
 happen upon one of the bigger places ; — and he 
 may pick up a diamond in Broadway : people some- 
 times drop them. 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 89 
 
 Of course many of these places, some of the best of 
 them, are filled by men with neither normal nor col- 
 lege training, who were never graduated anywhere, 
 but whose natural fitness and professional progres- 
 siveness have enabled them to keep abreast of those 
 with greater educational advantages. But there is 
 no such man who does not regret that he is not a 
 graduate. He knows that his home-made armour 
 has cost him dear, and that with all his labor it 
 has fissures here and there that gape open at un- 
 happy crises. If he had not the discrimination to 
 recognize this, he would not have the discrimina- 
 tion to hold his place ; and he is always the first to 
 urge upon young men the commercial vajue of a 
 broad and thorough education. 
 
 These general principles apply also to young 
 women, so far as they mean to make teaching a life- 
 work. Indeed, there is more definiteness of demand 
 for certain training in women than in men teachers. 
 There are many schools that make the rule abso- 
 lute to employ as assistants in lower grades only 
 normal graduates ; and while a few boards of edu- 
 cation have a prejudice against them, born of un- 
 happy experience, in general it may be said that a 
 normal diploma is recognized as the surest single 
 proof of fitness. 
 
90 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 But it is gradually becoming recognized that it 
 makes quite a difference whether this diploma be 
 from the English or from the classical department, 
 not so much from the greater range of studies, as 
 from the discipline gained by the extra year of train- 
 ing. It is an unhappy fact that many teachers hold 
 a normal diploma who cannot spell correctly, who 
 do not know the courtesies of correspondence, who 
 have not yet obtained that most essential element 
 of control of others — the mastery of themselves. 
 My experience leads me to think there should be a 
 distinction in nomenclature, so that the terms " nor- 
 mal graduate" and "normal diploma" shall not 
 apply ii]discriminately to a two-, a three-, or a four- 
 years' course. 
 
 Within a few years the college-graduate has be- 
 come an important factor in the selection of women 
 teachers. Not only Vassar and Smith and Well- 
 esley, but Cornell and Syracuse and IVIichigan Uni- 
 versity are sending out women-graduates to teach. 
 These command a higher salary than normal grad- 
 uates from the start, and seem likely to assume 
 virtual control of the best positions. The demon- 
 stration is even more positive than in the case of 
 men, that mental discipline is worth paying for ; 
 
THE teacher's ('( t.MMEKClAL VALUE Hi 
 
 and if it is obtained without sacrifice of health it 
 affords a capital likely to pay a liberal dividend. 
 
 It is only within a few years that Pedagogical 
 Training has begun to have a recognized commer- 
 cial value. The fiict that the normal graduate con- 
 tends on terms so nearly equal with the college 
 graduate of much broader scholarship shows that 
 the normal schools are accomplishing what is much 
 their most important work — the awakening of the 
 public mind to the fact that teaching is an art the 
 principles of which may be learned as the princi- 
 ples of other arts are learned. 
 
 The difficulty just now, as in all crude begin- 
 nings, is the conceit that comes from partial train- 
 ing. Grace C. Bibb says : 
 
 " It is charged that some of these representatives 
 of normal schools carry into their work a certain 
 dogmatic self assertion, sufficiently unpleasant when 
 dignified by sound scholarship and thorough knowl- 
 edge of pedagogics, but offensive to the last degree 
 when sustained only by very moderate scientific or 
 literary attainments and by no particular pedagogic 
 skill. Perhaps no one agency has done so much to 
 produce a feeling of antagonism towards our schools 
 in the minds of people who have no other reason 
 
92 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 for hostility than the assumption of this class of 
 young persons, who are especially obnoxious to the 
 veteran teacher and more mildly noxious to other 
 sensible people everywhere*." 
 
 But so long as gold is valued for ornaments, it 
 will bo imitated Ijy pinchbeck, and the pinchbeck 
 will be the heavier and the showier. The worst 
 effect of this conceit is that it shuts out further pro- 
 gress. 
 
 Take "Methods", for instance; teachers now-a- 
 days speak of their Methods as a sort of stock in 
 trade, that may be purchased by the dozen and laid 
 away in packages. A few years ago it was the 
 Oswego Methods. They were l)Ound up in brown 
 cloth and sold for fourteen shillings a set. Just 
 now it is the Quincy Methods. They are done up 
 in blue cloth, at a dollar and a half 
 
 Well, methods, are all right if they are under- 
 stood to be .simply a bridge from the mind of tlie 
 teacher to the mind of the pupil, and if it is remem- 
 bered that as the distances and the embankments 
 vary, so must the bridges vary both in size and in 
 pattern. The methods given in a book are simply 
 suggestions of a few of the infinitely varying appli- 
 
 * Education, i.581. 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 93 
 
 cations of principles. Ytt there are teachers who 
 have purchased and memorized a few of these 
 methods, and who thiidc pedagogical wisdom will 
 die with them. Nay, the most conceited are not the 
 normal graduates or the teachers of a single hook, 
 but the "self-made" teachers who have such 
 confidence in their creator that they have never 
 needed either training or books. They have methods 
 of their own as rigid as a soldier's leather stock, and 
 so satisfactory to them that they have no desire to 
 investigate others. 
 
 You have heard of the newly elected Congress- 
 man from a back district wdio was invited to his 
 first fashionable dinner. He was unaccustomed to 
 having his dinner at night, but he did not want to 
 spoil his appetite and so went without his usual 
 noon meal. The hour was eight o'clock, but it was 
 nearly nine before they sat down, and he was fam- 
 ished. 
 
 What was his disgust to find the table practically 
 empty. There were silver and flowers and elegant 
 programmes with outlandish names, but not a scrap 
 of anything to eat. He had heard of pinching 
 your stomach to array 3'our back, but this was car- 
 rying it a little too far. 
 
94 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 At last, however, the waiter did bring him a plate 
 of soup. Now he hated soup — wish-washy stuff: 
 give him a good side of roast-beef for such an appe- 
 tite as he had. But soup was all there was, and he 
 had to make the best of it. So he swallowed it 
 down, and as it didn't fill up much he called for 
 another plate, and another, and another, wondering 
 whether the rest of the guests lived on air. 
 
 At last, however, he liad enough, and he folded 
 up his napkin and began to push back his chair. 
 
 " And what do you think ? " he afterwards told 
 the story. '' Darn me if they didn't fetch on fish, 
 and game, and roast, and boiled, and all the gim- 
 cracks you could think on for more'n two hours : 
 and there I sot chock full o' sou})." 
 
 Go to a teachers' institute, and you may give 
 these teachers the choicest results of modern educa- 
 tional science, and after the hour feel that your 
 time has been thrown away ; for there the^^'ve sot, 
 chock full o' Methods. 
 
 I have named a few of the elements of a teacher's 
 commercial value, and I fancy you are already 
 asking whether if all these elements be united 
 they will command the price. 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE J*-") 
 
 Ah ! my friends, it is with teachers as it is with 
 diamonds. The rule is simple enough. A flawless 
 diamond of a single cg,rat is worth say $100 : of 
 two carats, $250 ; of three carats, $500, and so on — 
 the value growing rapidly as the size increases. 
 And these are not only values but prices. You 
 may sell them in the hotel-corridor, at the jeweller's, 
 at auction, and they will bring substantially these 
 sums. But how about the Kohinoor, the Regent, 
 the Princess ? Intrinsically the same rule of increase 
 more than holds good, but practically the commer- 
 cial value cannot be named because the possible 
 purcliasers are so few. There are thousands ready 
 to buy your one-, two-, three-carat diamonds, but 
 only a queen or a nation has money to invest in a 
 Kohinoor ; so it must await a purchaser, and be 
 rated at an approximation to its value. All that a 
 man hath will he give for a stone like that, but all 
 that most men have is not to be mentioned in con- 
 nection with it. 
 
 So with teachers. Your eight-hundred dollar 
 man may depend with considerable certainty upon 
 an eight-hundred dollar place, the thousand-dollar 
 places are frequent, and there are many schools 
 that pay twelve, fifteen, eighteen hundred. At two 
 
96 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 thousand, schools become scarce, at twenty-five 
 hundred and three thousand one may wait for years 
 before he finds liis niche. 
 
 But wlio sliall put a price on the work of William 
 Hutchison, who died at Norwich, Conn., a few 
 months since ? Just twenty years ago he was prin- 
 cipal of the academy at Groton, Mass., at a salary 
 of $1,200. He had much sickness in his family, 
 he could not live on that amount, and he asked the 
 trustees to increase it. A\'hile tliey were assuring 
 him, and believing it, that the funds of the institu- 
 tion would not permit an increase, a committee 
 came up from the Norwich Free Academy, and 
 offered him $4,000. Then tlie Groton trustees hast- 
 ened to meet, and offered liim $2,000 to stay. But 
 their judgment of the value of his services was cor- 
 rected too late. He had already made his engage- 
 ment, and Lawrence Academy lost a chance it will 
 never recover to rank among the first-class fitting- 
 schools of New England. 
 
 William Hutchison was a Kohinoor ; and Nor- 
 wich got him, not because $4,000 measured his ser- 
 vices, but because no other school was then ready 
 to offer so large a salary to anybody. But mark 
 how the Groton trustees changed their opinion of 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 97 
 
 what they could afford to pay him. The visit of 
 the Norwich committee did not increase the value 
 of his work, but it gave a new notion of its expres- 
 sion in decimal currency. He was the best princi- 
 pal the Groton school had ever known, far the best 
 it was likely to find ; but its ideas of salary were 
 founded on a $1,200 basis. The unprecedented 
 competition of a $4,000 school was an earthquake 
 that by a single convulsion lifted the financial level 
 of these trustees' estimates GOf per cent. 
 
 Let us hope the level was maintained, and that 
 such convulsions will be frequent. 
 
 There are signs of progress. 
 
 A month ago, a Long Island trustee wrote to me 
 for a principal, and after he had finished the letter, 
 added, as a sort of superfluous caution, — as who 
 should say, "If it rains you had better bring an 
 umbrella " — this postscript : "Of course he must 
 hold either a Normal Diploma or a State Certificate." 
 
 Do you mind that? " Of course''' he must hold 
 either a Diploma or a State Certificate — in other 
 words of course he must be a professional teacher : 
 no amateurs or stepping-stoners need apply. 
 
 Now ten years ago who would have believed that 
 possible? Thirteen years ago. Dr. Hoose stood 
 
98 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 before this ver}^ Association, in this very place, and 
 shook his mane, and roared that there were to the 
 profession of teaching no science, no maxims, no 
 code, no status, no prospects. 
 
 And in these years tliere has been such an ad- 
 vance in pubhc sentiment that a httle thousand- 
 dollar school on Long Island calls for a professional 
 teacher as confidently as a man at the restaurant 
 calls for chops and tomato sauce. 
 
 I want to say a word for these State Certificates. 
 However some of us may diff'er as to the wisdom 
 and the justice of some acts of the late State super- 
 intendent, I think we shall all agree that he took 
 an important step forward when he established this 
 system of State examinations. I like to see a col- 
 lege-bred union school principal refer with pride to 
 his certificate by examination. He has a right to 
 be proud of it ; and I tell you, my friends, the day 
 is coming when he can't be principal of a union 
 school without it. The influence of these examin- 
 ations reaches every teacher in the State. I know 
 personally, and you all know by experience or ob- 
 servation, how the ambition is spreading among 
 teachers, old as well as young, to pass this examin- 
 ation. Why, I tried it once, myself I went into it 
 
THE teacher's COMMERCIAL VALUE 99 
 
 rather patronizingly, if I remember aright, but 
 before I was half-way through I was mighty glad I 
 was on good terms with the examiners. 
 
 We are living in lively times, educationally. 
 The contrast between the spirit of a dozen years ago 
 and of to-day is amazing. The question was then 
 asked with a sneer, "Who ever reads a book on 
 education ? " You may ask a long time now before 
 you find a teacher who doesn't. Two or three years 
 ago, to oblige ( ol. Parker, who lent a copy of the 
 book and wrote a preface for it, a publisher I know 
 rei)rinted Tate's " Philosophy of Education ". He 
 made only a thou.sand copies, and had not faith 
 enough in the demand for such a book even to 
 stereotype it. But he soon had to put it into type 
 again, and he sold more than a thousand of them 
 this last month of June alone, mostly in lots of a 
 hundred to counties where it had been adopted as a 
 ''Reading Circle "book. Look at the editions of 
 Payne and Fitch and Quick and Currie, written for 
 English schools, but reprinted for our own because 
 of the appetite suddenly developed for professional 
 reading. 
 
 But Mr. President, I am in the position of the 
 Irish steward who apologized for so long a letter 
 because he had not time to write a shorter one. 
 
100 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 When I engaged to appear on this occasion, I 
 fully intended to have 1113^ paper written out on 
 wide-lined sheets, tied with a blue ribbon, with quo- 
 tations from the poets, and a lovely peroration. But 
 during the last month or two my daily duties in 
 unexpected pressure have taken the bit in their 
 teeth, and I have had to do, as I once did with a 
 four-year-colt — drop the reins, grab her mane, dig 
 my feet into her ribs, hang on' like grim death, and 
 promise the Almighty all sorts of things if he got 
 me to the bottom of tlie hill without breaking my 
 neck. 
 
 I am at the bottom of the hill now, thanks to 
 your forbearance ; and though I might have pre- 
 sented what I had to say more gracefully and more 
 completely, I think my main points would have 
 been the same, however much time I had had : 
 that Character pays ; that Courtesy pa^^s ; that 
 Scholarship pays ; that Training pays ; and that 
 there is a good time coming for the teacher who 
 combines these elements of Commercial Value. 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 
 
 Doing busiuess without advertising, somebody 
 has said, is like winking at a pretty girl in the dark, 
 — you know what you are doing, but nobody else 
 does. Advertising is a systematic means of inform- 
 ing people who want something where they may get 
 it. Before you cook a hare you must catch it. Before 
 you fit teachers to i)laces you must find them. 
 
 NEED OF ADVERTISING TEACHERS 
 
 This is not so easy as it looks, for teachers are 
 not well advertised. The clergyman is advertised 
 by his sermons, the physician by his patients, the 
 lawyer by his cases ; in each instance the work is 
 to a large extent under the public eye and a matter 
 of public discussion. But the teacher's work is 
 done in the school-room, which few people visit, 
 and few of those who visit know how to judge. 
 The average community is best satisfied with the 
 teacher, as with the stomach, when he does his 
 work without attracting attention. 
 
 (101) 
 
102 tEAriflNG AS A ErSTNESS 
 
 The history of famous teachers iUustrates how 
 other teachers might have become famous if they 
 had been advertised. Cyrus Peirce was principal 
 of the first normal school in the country only be- 
 cause Horace Mann happened to visit his little Gape 
 Cod village ; and Nicholas Tillinghast would never 
 have been appointed at Bridgewater had his private 
 school been elsewhere than in Boston. 
 
 SOME METHODS OF ADVERTISING 
 
 Teachers occasionally advertise themselves 
 through the newspapers. The Nation now and 
 then contains a description of a young man by 
 himself, with announcement that those who are 
 eager for his services may apply to such-and-such 
 an address. I doubt if anybody ever got a place 
 that way, partly because schools are not in the habit 
 of looking in the advertising columns when they 
 want a teacher, and partly because a teacher cannot 
 in an advertisement of this sort tell modestly and 
 at the same time effectively all that might be said 
 of his qualifications. In England, where the sys- 
 tem of certification is more complete, so that a 
 teacher ma}^ be judged by the credentials he holds, 
 the journals contain a good many such advertise- 
 ments. In the London Journal of Education for 
 
FITTING TEAf'HEKS TO PLACES 103 
 
 June there are four pages of advertisements of 
 teachers and for teachers ; thus : 
 
 " Wanteci in September, post as non-resident assis- 
 tant mistress in girls' school. Subjects English his- 
 tory, literature, geogra})hy, grammar, arithmetic, 
 junior French, freehand drawing. Good disciplin- 
 arian. Several years experience in public school. 
 South coast preferred." 
 
 " James Allen's girls' school, East Dulwich Grove, 
 S. E., wanted in September second mistress, non- 
 resident. Subjects English history and literature, 
 good Frencli, elementary mathematics. Must have 
 degree of Tripos certificate ; salary £140. Also 
 junior form mistress : usual English subjects, ele- 
 mentary French and German; physiology; salary 
 £100. Very good discipline and experience in 
 management of large classes essential for both. 
 Apply with full address and copy of testimonials to 
 the head mistress not later than June 21." 
 
 But the number of these advertisements is much 
 smaller than it used to be because the work is done 
 so largely now by the various teachers' agencies, 
 such as the Teachers' Guild of Great Britain and 
 Ireland, the Scholastic and Transfer Agency, The 
 Scholastic, Clerical, and Medical Association, Ltd., 
 etc. 
 
104 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 An expedient sometimes adopted is for a teacher 
 to print a circular letter telling what a great man 
 he is, and send that around to boards of education 
 in general, hoping to strike upon some vacancy. I 
 have known this to be tried a good many times but 
 never knew of its ])eing successful. I hold such a 
 letter in my hand. It is as you see, four quarto 
 pages long, and much of it is in nonpareil. I 
 make some extracts. 
 
 " P^rom 16 to 18 I was one of the very best stu- 
 dents in an excellent ])ublic school. 
 
 " I was very successful, more by reason of my 
 natural gifts and ability as a teacher than because 
 of my education. 
 
 "As a teacher 1 have always been very successful 
 in inspiring my pupils and in imparting inform- 
 ation. 
 
 " Personally I am well fitted to teach. I am a 
 young man of mature years, tall, well-built, of 
 excellent health, of pleasing appearance, personality, 
 and address. ... I am well-bred, member of 
 one of the best families in Central New Jersey. I 
 have always been popular ; was class president, 
 editor of the literary magazine," etc. 
 
 Now that man is not as you might think an idiot. 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 105 
 
 He is really a very good teacher, and he got this 
 summer a i)lace at $175 a month in a first-class 
 high school. But he got it through a teachers' 
 agency, and in asking him to make a})})lication the 
 agency advised him not to send that letter. " Tell 
 plainly and simply what you have done," it said, 
 "and leave it to us to tell how you did it." 
 
 You all remember how suddenly and ingloriously 
 the presidency in France of Monsieur Grevy came 
 to an end. It was discovered that his son-in-law 
 Wilson was selling decorations of the Legion of 
 Honor. I happened to be in the city of Tours ten 
 years ago when Monsieur Wilson came back to his 
 constituents to be vindicated. The town hall was 
 literally packed with an excited audience. Monsieur 
 Wilson came forward to make the great effort of his 
 life. His speech consisted of four words, — " As an 
 honest man — " for he got no further. Such shouts 
 of derision, such cries of " A bas ! a bas!" arose, 
 that his friends soon found it discreet to hustle him 
 out of the hall by a back exit. 
 
 ADVERTISING THROUGH A TEACHERS' AGENCY 
 
 There are few occasions when it is desirable to 
 say, " I am an honest man." There are no occa- 
 sions when it is desirable to say, " I am a well-bred 
 
106 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 and popular man." These are things that some- 
 body else sliould say ; and it is partly because a 
 teachers' agency can say these things for a man 
 when he cannot say them himself, can get recom- 
 mendations that warrant it in saying these things 
 for a man when he would not like to apply for them 
 himself, that so many teachers find this the medium 
 through which a modest man may best present his 
 claims. 
 
 The time is j)ast when it was thought humiliating 
 to get a place through an agenc3^ The majority of 
 teachers holding high positions are or have been 
 registered in agencies, including superintendents of 
 large cities, the presidents and professors of influ- 
 ential colleges. With many of these men and 
 women it is a matter of self-respect. No one gets a 
 place without some help either from friends or from 
 persons interested, and this always involves an 
 obligation. For instance, next to the teachers' 
 agency, the most potent influence in placing teach- 
 ers is the text-book agent. He is usually a man of 
 culture, of successful experience as a teacher, of 
 good judgment, and is often consulted with benefit 
 both by teachers and by school boards ; but no 
 teacher ever got a place through a book-agent with- 
 
rTTTJNTi TEACHERS TO PLACES 107 
 
 out feeling a more or less definite obligation to favor 
 his books wlien opportunity offered. Self-respecting 
 men and wonien would usually rather pay their 
 obligation by a definite commission of five })er cent, 
 which ends the transaction, than by an indefinite 
 obligation to reciprocate. 
 
 AGENCY WORK IN OTHER BUSINESS 
 
 The value of agency work in other kinds of busi- 
 ness is recognized. Most real-estate in cities, for in- 
 stance, is rented and bought through agencies. In 
 October, 1889, I got into Paris at eight o'clock one 
 Sunday night on a through train from Germany, 
 with a family of six. The train was long and 
 crowded and late. It would take some time to get 
 our baggage through the custom house ; so I left it 
 in charge of my family while I went down to the 
 hotel to make sure that the rooms I had telegraphed 
 for were secured. I found the landlord too over- 
 worked and worn out to be even fairly apologetic 
 that he had no rooms. I went into a large hotel 
 near by and asked for c^uarters. The woman in 
 charge took down a book, entered my name, and 
 asked, " For when ? " 
 
 " For to-night, of course," I replied ; '■ my family 
 are at the station." 
 
108 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 " Either it pleases monsieur to be facetious, or lie 
 is ignorant how crowded the city is. In three 
 weeks he niiglit liave the rooms, — certainl}- not be- 
 fore." 
 
 I hurried Ijaek to the station and incjuired at the 
 hotel opposite if any rooms were left. ] was told 
 that ever^'thin'g was taken except three servants' 
 chambers. I secured these, and while I stood there 
 a man rushed in nnd offered double price for them. 
 It was perha}»s just as well that my bed Avas hard, 
 for it made it easy for me to lie awake all night 
 studying the problem of liow to take care of my 
 family. 
 
 I solved it. After breakfast I paid the bill, left 
 my luggage there, took my family to the Exposition 
 grounds, made some necessary arrangements, and 
 at noon left tliem sitthig down to lunch. 
 
 I jumped on another omnibus, rode to the Place 
 de la Concorde, stepped into tlie first real-estate 
 agency under the Continental hotel, got a list of a 
 dozen suites of furnished appartments in the riglit 
 neighborhood and at a jnice I could afford, visited 
 them all, picked out one, paid the rent for a month, 
 paid to have an inventory taken, hired the silver 
 and linen needed, hired a maid, ordered wood and 
 
FITTING TEAPHERS TO PLACES 109 
 
 coal and the necessary groceries ; and was back up- 
 on the Exposition grounds at four o'clock. At six 
 niv family sat down to diinier in its own liome, and 
 we liad Ixttcr accommodations for a montli than we 
 could have'got at a hotel for four times the money. 
 To do this so easil}', so readily, and so surel}^ was 
 poseilde only through putting confidence in an hon- 
 orable and capable real-estate agency. 
 
 EARLY HISTORY OF TEACHERS' AGENCIES 
 
 Long ago the necessity was recognized of some 
 system of registration and ascertainment of qualifi- 
 cations by wiiich fit teachers for im})ortant places 
 could be found in some other way than by accident. 
 In 1835 the American Association for the Supply of 
 Teachers w^as established in Philadelphia, with Hor- 
 ace Binney for president and several influential 
 friends of education among its officers. The consti- 
 tution stated that, being impressed with the convic- 
 tion that the common schools of our country are 
 often inadequately supplied with comj^etent teachers, 
 the subscribers associated themselves to facilitate 
 "the engagement of teachers of either sex qualified 
 to take charge of schools and seminaries in tlieir 
 several grades, and also of children in private 
 families." 
 
110 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 It was proposed to do this by registering candi- 
 dates and applications for teachers, and whenever 
 the wishes of appHcants corresponded putting them 
 in communication. I have the circular of this As- 
 sociation for 1839, at whicli time John Ludlow, 
 D.D., was president, and E. C. Wines one of the 
 managers. It states that the Association had been 
 in operation four years, during which period the 
 extent of its action had been constantly increasing. 
 Its first attempts were made as an experiment, and 
 its correspondence and other daily business were 
 gratuitously attended to by one of the members who 
 acted as secretary. Its operations increased to such 
 an extent as to require " the unremitting attention 
 of a competent individual ". It was determined to 
 engage an efficient officer ; and to defray the ex- 
 penses it was deemed expedient by the managers 
 that every teacher who was successful should give 
 to the society 2 J % upon the amount of the first 
 year's salary, while the schools and the families 
 supplied should contribute the same amount. 
 
 I quote : 
 
 "Teachers applying for situations will state in 
 their own handwriting : 
 
 " 1. Place of education and present residence. 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 111 
 
 ''2. Age. 
 
 " 3. Whether married or single, and if married 
 as to whether the gentleman and lady [this is the 
 language of the modern department store] will 
 engage in teaching. 
 
 " 4. Whether the applicant has ever taught ; 
 where, and how long. 
 
 " 5. The branches the applicant j^rofesses to teach. 
 
 " 6. The situation desired, whether in an acad- 
 emy, school or private family ; as principal or assist- 
 ant. 
 
 "7. The location preferred, and within what 
 limits the applicant would expect a situation. 
 
 " 8. When and for how long the services of the 
 applicant can be secured. 
 
 "9. What amount of compensation is expected 
 by the year. 
 
 " 10. Profession or previous employment of appli- 
 cants. 
 
 " 11. Miscellaneous remarks. 
 
 "12, It is indispensable that all applicants fur- 
 nish written testimonials of their literary attainments 
 and character." 
 
 This, it will be seen, covers very nearly the 
 ground of the modern teacher's application blank ; 
 
112 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 while the fee is as now five per cent on the first 
 year's salary, thougli now the entire fee is paid by 
 the candidate and not half of it by the school. 
 How long the Association lasted after its enforce- 
 ment of a fee Barnard's Journal of Education (xv:280) 
 is unable to state ; but it ends its rejjort of the As- 
 sociation by saying : 
 
 " There is a great want, which is still very syste- 
 matically supplied by such an agency as that of 
 Schermerhorn, Bancroft & Co., — established in 1855, 
 and styled the American School Institute." 
 
 In the mean time, however, other attempts had 
 been made. The Common School Journal, New 
 York's earliest school paper, j^rinted the following in 
 Oct., 1839 : 
 
 " To teachers and schools : Teachers can be 
 informed of vacant schools by applying at our office, 
 and schools desiring teachers can always be sup- 
 plied by applying as above. Schools should always 
 state the wages, etc., they are able to offer." 
 
 In the Teachers' Advocate, another New York 
 journal, there is on Dec. 24, 1847, an advertisement 
 of the United States School Agency, established in 
 New York by E. IT. Wilcox. It charged institu- 
 tions from $2 to $8 for furnishing teachers, and 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 1 13 
 
 would keep an academy sui)plied with all its teach- 
 ers for |lo a year, or a college with all its professors 
 for |25 a year. It charged teachers from $1 to |15 
 for getting })hices, and recpiired teachers on regis- 
 tering to pay the fee, promising to return it if a 
 position was not secured, — an ingenious project 
 afterwards revived by C. H. Evans & Co., St. Louis, 
 Mo. Mr. Wilcox proved to be an irresponsible man, 
 for subsequently (iii:249) the editor was obliged to 
 announce that ^Ir. Wilcox as agent for that journal 
 had wrongfully sent out bills, and that in the future 
 all dealings should be with the managers alone. 
 From this time the advertisement disappeared. 
 
 The American School Institute however, proved a 
 great success. At the time IMr. Schermerhorn's 
 business became bankrupt tlu'ough mining specula- 
 tion and was sold at auction in 187G, some of his 
 friends secured for him the books and name and 
 business of the American Institute for the sum of 
 $250, and it was continued by him, and after his 
 death by his widow. At one time the income was 
 said to be $20,000 a year. In plan it was based, 
 like most of the modern teachers' agencies, upon 
 this American Association for the Supply of Teach- 
 ers fovinded in 1839, 
 
114 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 INFORMATION VS. RECOMMENDATION AGENCIES 
 
 The main distinction among agencies is between 
 the information and the recommendation agencies. 
 The information agencies depend npon early notifi- 
 cation of vacancies. They learn in all ways they 
 can where a teacher is likely to be wanted, and then 
 notif}^ the teachers on their list who have anywhere 
 near the requirements in the hope that some one of 
 them may secure the place. Some of them attempt 
 nothing more. One agency, established in 1881, 
 announced : 
 
 " I offer to teachers desiring employment or 
 change of location the readiest means for obtaining 
 it. I have ample facilities for learning of vacan- 
 cies in all parts of the United States, and by placing 
 your interests in my hands you may obtain a desir- 
 able position. I send out reports of vacancies every 
 few weeks. These reports contain a list of positions 
 that have been reported to me as vacant and those 
 that I have good reason to believe are vacant. 
 When a member sees one or more vacancies that he 
 wishes to apply for he writes me for the address of 
 the number, which I give at once. He then applies 
 for the })lace if he desires to secure it for liiraself. 
 I charge an advance fee of one dollar. This must 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 115 
 
 accompany the application. I charge an additional 
 fee of $25 when a position is secured." 
 
 So far as I know this business was not continued 
 after the first year, from which I judge the scheme 
 did not prove successful, though new attempts on this 
 plan are occasionally advertised. At the present 
 time there are at least three news-agencies in Chi- 
 cago that offer daily reports of vacancies, made up 
 from newspaper clippings, at the rate of ten cents a 
 day. 
 
 The Assistant Masters' Association of London 
 "supplies particulars of vacancies for Assistant 
 Masters' notified to the Association by Head Mas- 
 ters, and of advertised vacancies collected from all 
 sources." It charges members 62| cts. and non- 
 members $1.25 for "at least 20 suitable notices".* 
 
 The information agency usually, however, as- 
 sumes to do more or less recommending ; and it has 
 a good many advantages. Take for instance my 
 own State of New York. There are every year about 
 one hundred changes of principals in schools paying 
 from $1,000 to $1,500, and it may be predicted at 
 the beginning of tlie year that most of the one 
 hundred new places will be filled from a list of say 
 
 * Education, London, June 5, 1897, 
 
116 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 two hundred men. If the information agency can 
 secure either by registration, or b)^ personal letters 
 offering free registration, the names upon its lists of 
 all these two hundi-ed men, if it can learn of tliese 
 vacancies beforehand, and if it can inform all these 
 men of each vacancy before they learn of it else- 
 where, it will earn a commission upon the entire one 
 hundred places. 
 
 On the other hand suppose the recommendation 
 agency has also all these two hundred men u})on its 
 list and is asked to fill every one of these one hun- 
 dred places ; suppose it recommends three men for 
 each place, and supi^ose that, owing to its suj^erior 
 facilities for knowing the men and the schools and 
 the relative wants of each, it really does select in 
 each case the best three men for each place ; yet out 
 of all these one hundred places it may not fill a 
 single one. Every board may choose some man on 
 the agency list, not quite so close a fit as the three 
 recommended, but still a very good man for the 
 place. 
 
 In fact, it not infrequently happens that it is a 
 disadvantage to an agency to have application made 
 to it, because specifications are stated which are not 
 afterwards insisted upon. Suppose a school writes 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 117 
 
 for a principal at $1,200, and says, "Give us the 
 best man on your list who is married and can speak 
 German fluently." The agency carefully selects 
 three men with these qualifications, and learns a 
 fortnight afterward that the board has elected a 
 principal v/ho is not married and knows nothing of 
 Gefnuin. The very fact that the board applied to 
 it and made these specifications which it did not 
 insist upon, prevents the agency from recommend- 
 ing the man afterwards elected. 
 
 One development of the information agency is 
 especially deplorable. In their anxiety to get early 
 information of vacancies some agencies offer five 
 dollars to any one who gives them the first word of 
 a vacancy they afterwards fill. This has led some 
 city superintendents to accept five dollars for each 
 teaclier whom they place in their schools, — a form 
 of Inibery beneath contempt ; and it has also led 
 teachers to play the Paul Pry, seeking after knowl- 
 edge of dissatisfaction, if possible magnifying it, 
 and thus hel})ing to create a vacancy in order that 
 the}^ miij get paid for giving notice of it. Some 
 enterprising teachers have even gone so far as to 
 send in, without any knowledge concerning them, a 
 list of fifty schools, on the general theory that out 
 
11 A TEACfiING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 of the fifty at least half-a-dozen will change princi- 
 pals anyway, and that if any one of these half- 
 dozen places is filled by the agency it brings the in- 
 formant five dollars. No matter that hundreds of 
 teachers are led to write careful letters and send 
 copied testimonials with photographs and return 
 envelopes, no matter that boards are overwhelmed 
 with applications for vacancies that do not exist ; 
 there is here a possibility of getting a few dollars 
 and it is eagerly seized. I have no hesitation in 
 saying that any agency which pays for this kind of 
 work is for that reason alone unworthy of confidence. 
 
 THE BEST WAY TO SECURE TEACHERS 
 
 The work of the information agencies has put 
 many school boards upon the defensive, so that 
 when a vacancy can be anticipated the school board 
 goes upon a still-hunt for a new teacher before the 
 vacancy is made known. This is undoubtedly the 
 best way of securing a teacher. The board can go 
 to a recommendation agency, can look over the 
 credentials of fifty candidates who would be eligible, 
 can narrow the choice down ,to three or four, can 
 send a representative to visit these three or four 
 teachers in their own schools, can make engagement 
 with the teacher whose work is most satisfactory, 
 
PITTIXa TEACHERS TO PLACES 119 
 
 and need never tell the others why they were visited. 
 This is the highest work an agency can do, and the 
 best development thus far of methods of securing 
 teachers. 
 
 But the recommendation agencies still fail to give 
 schools anything like the help they are capable of 
 affording because they have not yet overcome some 
 of the prejudices that a new enterprise is sure to 
 encounter. 
 
 DO AGENCIES CHARGE EXCESSIVE COMMISSIONS? 
 
 For instance, it is felt by a good many teachers 
 and boards of education that the commissions ex- 
 acted are disproportionate to the service rendered. 
 Not infrequently a candidate registers, proves to be 
 precisely the man that has been wanted for a particu- 
 lar position, and is engaged within 24 hours at a 
 salary of $2,000. 
 
 When the devil was sick the devil a monk would be ; 
 When the devil got well the devil a monk was he 1 
 
 When a man has suddenly lost his place and 
 must get another he is willing to make almost any 
 promise to secure it, and while the place is still in 
 the future he thinks the $100 he is to pay for get- 
 ting it a small amount ; but when he has got it, he 
 sometimes grudges giving up his salary for tw^o 
 
120 TEACHIXn AS A BUSINESS 
 
 weeks to pay for work the manager did in five 
 minutes. 
 
 It will be found, however, that even tlie largest 
 and most successful agencies are not more highly 
 paid than other business as well done. Agency 
 work is like diamond-mining ; for the hour in which 
 a man finds a diamond he is extravagantly paid, 
 but for tlie days he is hunting for diamonds with- 
 out finding them his time must be charged up with 
 the rest. Agencies have lucky strikes. A single 
 call and half a day's work may bring $200 in com- 
 missions ; but on the other hand the agency does 
 thousands of dollars worth of work without return. 
 The book-keeping and correspondence, and the time 
 given to study and selection of candidates involve 
 great outlay ; a good inany thousands of dollars 
 must come back to any large agency before the 
 actual running expenses for the year are met. 
 
 It is not strange that a business which seemingly 
 requires no capital should prove attractive to many 
 idle men and women, so that every year scores of 
 agencies are started. But few of them survive. 
 They take in some registration fees for a year or 
 two, with here and there a commission ; but they 
 find that the field is pretty well occupied by agencies 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 121 
 
 already established and having sources of informa- 
 tion and influence which no new agency can com- 
 mand, and they soon disappear. You may be 
 sure that any recommendation agency which en- 
 dures earns every dollar of its income. 
 
 DO AGENCIES MAKE TEACHERS UNEASY? 
 
 Another objection urged is that agencies tend to 
 make teachers uneasy and thus promote unneces- 
 sary changes. This depends largely upon the 
 agency. Just as there are pettifoggers who always 
 advise prospective clients to go to law, for the sake 
 of the fees, so there are agencies that try to make 
 teachers discontented for the sake of placing them 
 and their successors. But not all lawyers recom- 
 mend litigation. The respectable counsellor-at-law 
 in the majority of cases advises the client that, 
 whatever his rights in the matter may be, he is not 
 unlikely under our imperfect jury system to lose his 
 case ; while even if he wins it the game will not be 
 worth the candle. So the better class of agencies 
 counsel teachers who come to them with sole regard 
 to the interest of the teachers themselves, almost 
 never advising a teacher to give up a place until 
 some other has been secured, and usually advising 
 him to remain where he is giving satisfaction and 
 his services are appreciated. 
 
122 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 So when schools consult agencies, as they fre- 
 quently do with reference to possible changes, the 
 better ao-encies often advise the retention of teachers 
 at i)resent employed. 
 
 I know of a case where the principal of one of 
 our best normal schools wrote to an agency that he 
 was not satisfied with the work of one of his teach- 
 ers, but was not sure he could better it ; and unless 
 he was certain of improvement he did not want her 
 to know that she was even under criticism. The 
 agency replied that this same lady was upon its list, 
 and that if the principal had come to it for such a 
 teacher without telling who he was, the agency 
 would liave recommended this lady as the best 
 qualified for it. It gave the principal the names of 
 three or four others likely to do the same work 
 somewhere near as well, and advised him to call 
 upon them, see their work in their own schools, 
 consider the circumstances under which the work 
 would be done in his normal school, and then judge 
 for himself whether he was likely to profit l»y the 
 change. The 2)rincipal did so, became satisfied that 
 his teacher was doing relatively better work than 
 he had supposed, and still retains her. She does 
 not know to this day that there was ever a thought 
 
FittiNG TEACHERS TO PLACES 1"23 
 
 of replacing her, aud no one of the three teacliers 
 on whom the ])rincipal called ever learned why he 
 came to see them. 
 
 This was a case where the agency lost a $50 com- 
 mission which it could have secured by giving dif- 
 ferent advice ; but the purposes of the agencies that 
 endure is not to get fees in isolated instances, but to 
 build up a reputation for fair dealing and sound 
 advice which makes it seem natural and proper for 
 boards of education to consult them. And as the 
 better class of lawyers discourage litigation, so the 
 better class of agencies discourage changes, and 
 recommend them only where there is manifest unfit- 
 ness between the candidate and the place. 
 
 As to the candidates the agency itself places, their 
 permanence is the corner-stone of its success. The 
 proof that a square peg has been found for the 
 square hole is that it stays. The agency's interest 
 in a candidate does not end when it has got the 
 commission. It watches his work ; inquires about 
 him ; gives him encouragement, suggestion, warn- 
 ing sometimes ; and feels that its own reputation is 
 dependent somewhat upon his remaining. It has 
 no greater pride than when the continued success of 
 a teacher is applauded to say, " We put him there." 
 
124 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 But do agencies never encourage changes? Yes, 
 sometimes. When a teacher is imposed upon, the 
 agency protects him. If a teacher worth fifteen 
 dolhirs a week can get only eiglit dollars at home 
 because the board counts u})on her being afraid to 
 give u}) her place, the agency says to her, Resign ; 
 the laborer is worthy of his hire and he can get it. 
 When trustees surround a principal with such 
 restrictions that he cannot work freely, the agency 
 says, Resign ; teaching is hard enough when con- 
 ditions are favorable ; do not chafe under an ill- 
 fitting harness. The connnon-place, the incompe- 
 tent, the fault-finding had better hang on to the 
 places they happen to have : the agency has no use 
 for them. But the man who has proved himself a 
 real teacher need submit to no indignity ; he ma}^ 
 stand ui)on his manhood, assured that the agency 
 will take care of him. 
 
 DO AGENCIES SUPPRESS THE FAULTS OP CANDIDATES ? 
 
 Again it is urged that agencies tell only the good 
 things about candidates, suppressing the faults that 
 they have discovered. It may be replied in the first 
 place that reputable agencies, even if they do not 
 always speak of the faults of a candidate, always 
 consider them in selecting the candidate for a par- 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 125 
 
 ticular place. If the candidate is weak in discipline, 
 for instance, the agency will recommend him only 
 where discipline is not an important feature ; and 
 again if the candidate is weak in scholarsliip and 
 strong in executive management, it will i)lace him 
 where his work will be suijerintendency rather 
 than teaching. Any agency of experience knows 
 that it costs it more to place one teacher where he 
 fails, than to lose a dozen places. 
 
 An agency would be willing to go further than 
 this, and state what are the weak points of a can- 
 didate if it was properly sustained by boards of 
 education ; but as a matter of fact it cannot do this 
 because its communications to the board are not 
 alwa3^s considered as they should be strictly confi- 
 dential. Not infrequently the recommendation of 
 the agency is bundled up with the recommendations 
 sent by the candidate, and all are returned to 
 the candidate together. Now the recommendation 
 of the agency usually quotes from the replies from 
 those to whom the candidate has referred, and these 
 letters are sent under a special guarantee that their 
 contents shall not be made known to the candidate, 
 whether favorable or not. If then unfavorable 
 criticisms made upon the candidate were quoted in 
 
126 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 the letter of recommendation, and this letter of 
 recommendation were returned to the candidate, the 
 pledge of secrecy to those to whom the candidate 
 referred would be broken. 
 
 But there is a consideration beyond this. It is 
 not safe to mention to the average board of educa- 
 tion the faults of a candidate. The board knows in 
 a general way that all teachers must have faults, 
 yet it seldom asks what the faults are or consider 
 them in perspective if they are named. Take for 
 instance a ver}^ common t3^pe of teacher, and a 
 very useful one. Suppose an agency writes to a 
 board of education that has applied for a teacher of 
 the 8th grade : 
 
 Miss is a hustler, with all that the word im- 
 plies. 8he is quick-tempered ; rather coarse ; full 
 of life and energy ; able to cope with boys on their 
 own ground and get the best of them ; not broad in 
 general scholarship, but sound in the subjects she is 
 called upon to teach ; and the kind of woman that 
 never fails. You would think to see her with her 
 children at recess that she was a tomboy, but when 
 the bell rings she is mistress of the school : and 
 boys whom no other teacher has been able to man- 
 age would give Sir Walter Raleigh points by lying 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 127 
 
 down themselves in the mud for her to walk over 
 them if she feared to get her feet wet." 
 
 Now that is a frank descrij)tion of a superior 8th 
 grade teacher in a rough school, yet there are almost 
 no boards of education that would engage her if 
 thus recommended. They would remember that 
 she was coarse and quick-tempered ; they would for- 
 get that she had the power of making boys swear 
 by her. You may select her in your own mind for 
 the school, with every point counting, but to get her 
 into the school you must say : 
 
 " I take pleasure in recommending Miss . 
 
 She is a lady of great energy and force of cliaracter, 
 strong in discipline and always successful." 
 
 The more you go into detail beyond that the less 
 likely you are to secure her a position, not because 
 you do not want to be frank, but because your ex- 
 perience teaches you that it is not safe to be frank. 
 
 Have you ever tried recommending a teacher 
 who was lame or deformed, and have you not been 
 exasperated to find how deaf that single statement 
 makes the employer to all you may say ? One tells 
 you coarsely that while he is hiring a teacher he 
 thinks he might as well hire a whole one. Another 
 remarks that in a school where the teacher limps 
 
128 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 the scholars will all limp with the same leg. You 
 tell him that you would be glad to have your boy 
 limp if that unconscious physical imitation were a 
 sign that he were imitating in his soul the sweetness 
 that struggle and victory have impressed upon that 
 teacher's countenance ; but you tell him in vain. 
 
 DO AGENCIES RECOMMEND UNFIT CANDIDATIiS? 
 
 Another and perhaps the most frequent objection 
 to agencies is the number of candidates they send, 
 and the unfitness of them for the particular ])lace. 
 
 Here is the broad distinction between the infor- 
 mation and the recommendation agencies. Still it 
 must be • admitted that in this respect even the 
 recommendation agency is under constant tempta- 
 tion. If it has just the teacher wanted at just the 
 salary named, the work is simple ; but every si^ecifi- 
 cation reduces the number of available candidates, 
 so that few calls can be exactly met. A man comes 
 to an agency and says, " I want a teacher." 
 
 " Very well," the manager replies, "I have 10,- 
 000 on my list." 
 
 " I want a man teacher." 
 
 "I have 5,000." 
 
 " I want a college graduate." 
 
 ''I have 2,500.". 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 129 
 
 " A graduate of a New England college." 
 
 ''I have 400." 
 
 " Pie must have had experience as principal of a 
 high school." 
 
 " 1 have 75." 
 
 " Able to speak French fluently." 
 
 i'l have 4." 
 
 " A member of the Baptist church." 
 
 " I have one." 
 
 " Who can be had for $1,000 a year." 
 
 "■ I haven't any." 
 
 Now what is the manager to do ; reply simply 
 " I cannot meet your wants " ; or come as near as 
 he can to the demands ? Naturally the latter, and 
 the number of candidates will be greater in propor- 
 tion as it is difficult to approach closely to the speci- 
 fications. This approximation is sometimes ex- 
 tended to a very wide range. " Have you ever been 
 abroad ? " was asked of a woman ; who replied 
 hesitatingly, " M^hy, no, not exactly ; but my mother 
 had an aunt whose maiden name was French." 
 
 A physician returning from his morning calls 
 found written on his slate : 
 
 " Please come to 13 Grape street at once ; my 
 wife has the small-pox." 
 
130 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 The physician informed the board of health, and 
 hurried to the house, armed with fumigants ; but 
 when he saw the patient he exclaimed to the 
 husband : 
 
 " Why this is not small-pox ; she has inflamma- 
 tory rheumatism." 
 
 "I know that," he replied, "but I couldn't spell 
 rheumatism." 
 
 Now small-pox is as near to inflammatory rheu- 
 matism as some teachers are to the requirements of 
 the places for which they are recommended. 
 
 Just where to draw the line between teachers 
 wholly unqualified and those who might possibly 
 be considered is often, even for the careful and re- 
 sponsible agency, a difficult problem. 
 
 SPECIFICATION OF NON-ESSENTIALS 
 
 In fact, it may be said in general that the great- 
 est obstacle to the entire success of agency work is 
 specification of non-essentials. You have all seen 
 the formidable blanks that various superintendents 
 send out to be filled by prospective candidates. I 
 hold in my hand one which I select as a specimen, 
 not by any means because it is the longest or most 
 minute, but because it has the curious characteristic 
 of numerical percentages ; something on the plan 
 of John Phcenix, who thought our quantitative 
 
PITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 131 
 
 adverbs too indefinite, and would have our novels 
 read that on a 72 delightful evening in the 99 
 simrkling moonhght, a 67 tall and 93 handsome 
 young man was walking with a 79 petite and 100 
 charming maiden, etc. 
 
 No Name Age.. Exam 
 
 ined 189... 
 
 Note.— Perfection is represented by 100, and deductions 
 are to be made as jn-ovided under each liead. 
 
 1. Figure.— Heiglit ft., ...inches. Weight — 
 
 pounds. 
 
 ^~ Heights and weights should correspond as 
 follows: 5 feet, 110; 5 feet 2, 120; 5 feet 4, 130; 5 
 feet 6, 140 ; 5 feet 8, 150. For every variation of 10 
 lbs. from this standard deduct 10. 
 
 Deduct also as follows, filling out blanks when 
 deduction is made : Ivound shoulders 50, ; nar- 
 row shoulders 30, ; pinched waist 99, ; languid 
 
 or slouchy walk, 50, ; large hands (gloves above 
 
 T's) 20, ; finger nails short to the quick 60, ; 
 
 large feet (shoes above 6's) 30, ; too narrow 
 
 shoes, run over at the sides, 70, ; small heels 
 
 in middle of the foot, 80, ; general bony ap- 
 pearance, 40, . 
 
 Extras. Add as follows : Natural erect seat, 
 
 without using back of the chair, 40, ; firm and 
 
 graceful walk, 40, ; small hands (gloves 5's or 
 
 under), 10, ; hands white and plump, 25, — 
 
 small feet (shoes 4 "s or under), 20, ; general neat- 
 ness and nattiness, 50, . 
 
 2. Hair.— Deduct as follows : Bangs, 20, . . . ; friz- 
 zing of the bangs 30,— . . . ; false hair (if perceptible), 
 
 70, ; straggling behind, 20, ; loose hairs on 
 
 garments, each, 50, . 
 
 Extras. Add for clear, clean parting, 50, ; 
 
 for notable smoothness and neatness, 50, . 
 
 3. Eyes.— Deduct as follows ; shortsightedness, 
 20, . ..; evasive glance, 40, . 
 
 Extras. Add for heavy lids and eyebrows, 
 
 30, ; notably clear, calm, straightforward glance, 
 
 100, . 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
132 
 
 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 4. Nose.— Deduct as follows; Roman, 20, ; 
 
 beaked, CO, ; pu^, 30, ; turn-up, 70, ; sharp- 
 pointed, 70, . 
 
 5. ^louTH. — Deduct as follows : If habitually 
 
 open, 90, ; excessively large, 20, ; thin 
 
 pinched lips, 40, ; discontented, scornful ex- 
 pression, 80, . 
 
 Eiitras. Add for Cupid 'show, 20, ; red lips, 
 
 20, — — ; appearance of continually hovering on a 
 smile, if not affected, 30, . 
 
 6. Voice. — Deduct as follows : Loudness, 40, : 
 
 high pitch, 60, ; habit of confidentially whisper- 
 ing what should he said aloud, 8C, . 
 
 7. Teeth— Deduct as follows ; Uncleanly, 90, — ; 
 
 teeth visibly wanting, each, 10, ; disposition to 
 
 show them unnecessarily when handsome, 40, . 
 
 Extras. Add when white, even, complete, 
 100, 100. 
 
 8. Chin. — Deduct as follows : Recessive, feeble, 
 80, ; sharp-pointed, 30, . 
 
 9. Complexion.— Deduct as follows : Sallow, 20, 
 
 ... ; dead, colorless white, 60, ; scrofulous 
 
 blotches, 40, ; any evidence of paint or powder, 
 
 90, . 
 
 10. Attire.— Deduct as follows : Unmatched col- 
 ors, 50, ; loud colors or figures, 40, ; greasi- 
 
 ness, especially about the necls, 80, ; faded, es- 
 pecially under the armpits, 30, ; soiled, espec- 
 ially collar and cuffs, GO, ; tears or rips, if seen 
 
 a second time, 50, ; ragged edge, as to skirt 
 
 of dress, 50, ; general appearance of expensive- 
 
 ness without pleasant effect, 50, . 
 
 Extras. Add for simplicity when attractive, 
 80, ; general appearance of getting pleasing re- 
 sult by care and good taste at little cost, 100, 
 
 Total. Normal basis 100 on each of 10 points, or 
 1000 ; 600 required to pass. Balance, 
 
 It is hereby certified that the candidate has 
 passed 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 100 
 
 Chairman Examining Committee. 
 
 There is a good deal of judgment in that schedule. 
 The points made are generally sound, and the 
 marking is as just as could be expected. But the 
 
r'lTtlNG TEACHERS TO PLACES 133 
 
 difficulty is that in its attention to details it forgets 
 the main point. With all tliesc extras a woman 
 might stand 1765 on the l)asis of 1000, and yet not 
 have the soul of an educated flea. 
 
 GREAT TEACHERS SELDOM FAULTLESS 
 
 Look back over your life as a pu})il, call to mind 
 the teacher who did most for you, and ask yourself 
 whether that teacher would ever have 'oeen engaged 
 under this schedule. I know a man the hairs on 
 whose coat-collar alone would on this schedule carry 
 him below zero to a point beyond where mercur}'' 
 freezes ; and yet who was a great teacher, — a teacher 
 who could 2)incli the maker of this schedule between 
 his thumb and first finger and laugh at him as 
 the king of Brobdingnag did at Gulliver. 
 
 You know I suppose some of the anecdotes about 
 Prof. Sylvester, who died not long ago. He was the 
 man, who walking by one of the markets of Balti- 
 more, and suddenly hitting upon the solution of a 
 mathematical problem, pulled a piece of crayon out 
 of his pocket and began to cipher on the back flap of 
 a buggy that was standing by the curb. The owner 
 mounted the buggy and drove off, and Prof. Sylves- 
 ter followed, still working at his jjroblem. The 
 horse began to trot, Prof. Sylvester still worked at his 
 
134 tEACHiNG AS A BUSINESS 
 
 problem, and he hung on to the buggy, still cipher- 
 ing, until the pace of the horse became too much 
 for him, and he was forced, somewhat indignantly, 
 to let go. 
 
 His wife had learned that he needed close looking 
 after. One day he purchased a new pair of trousers 
 without her knowledge. She went into his room 
 about nine o'clock the next morning, found his old 
 pair hanging over the back of a chair, seized them 
 in consternation, pulled on her hat, and at the top 
 of her speed rushed with them on her arm for the 
 university building. Entering she met one of the 
 professors and inquired breathlessly : 
 
 ''Oh, Dr. Runkle, have you seen my husband?" 
 
 "Why, yes," he replied, "I just passed him at 
 the door of his classroom." 
 
 "And did he have on ?" 
 
 "Why certainly." 
 
 " Thank heaven ! " and she sank upon a bench 
 exhausted. 
 
 Now suppose, and it is well within the range of 
 possibility, Prof. Sylvester had j^resented himself 
 without his trousers to this committee-man, how 
 would this committee-man have marked him ? 
 And yet, in the perspective of eternity, which 
 
PITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 135 
 
 measures men by what they accomplish, Prof. Sylves- 
 ter's shadow will obscure a million such dainty 
 commi ttee-men . 
 
 THE ESSENTIALNESS OF DYNAMIC FORCE 
 
 The great fault in the selection of teachers to-day 
 is failure to recognize the essentialness of dynamic 
 force. What we want in the school-room is more 
 positive elements. If you buy a horse your first 
 question is not how he is shod or groomed, but, Can 
 he go ? That is what you buy a horse for. And 
 so when you hire a teacher, all these inquiries about 
 whether he has a pug nose, or wears a red necktie, 
 are subordinate to the great question. Can he teach ? 
 Can he give our boys the vigor, the force, the 
 manliness, that will make them get somewhere ? 
 
 Do you never realize that if you put into your 
 school-room a woman who drags one foot after the 
 other as though the day's task were an imposition 
 too hard for her, you are lowering the vitality of 
 every child in the room ? What 3'ou want to con- 
 sider before scholarship, before normal training, 
 before experience, and even before good manners, is 
 the spirit, the vigor, the sound character, the bright 
 and cheerful views of life, that make a woman like 
 a ray of sunshine in the school-room. First a 
 
136 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 woman, then a lady, then as much more as you can 
 get ; but while you are marking how short her 
 finger nails are cut, and whether her gown is faded 
 under the arm-pits, you lose sight of the one thing 
 which determines whether she is fit to be put over 
 your children. 
 
 THE AGENCY A STOREHOUSE OF INFORMATION 
 
 Wlien this basis of selection is insisted upon the 
 importance of the teachers' agency will be more 
 generally recognized. A long-established agency 
 becomes the store-house of an immense amount of 
 knowledge about teachers. There are the registra- 
 tion blanks from year to year, the replies from 
 references, the conversations about tliem held with 
 neighboring teachers, and the various ways in 
 which they reveal themselves in their own corres- 
 pondence and in interviews, until in the field that it 
 covers an agency knows all teachers of prominence 
 to an extent that would not be j^ossible except with 
 the facilities offered and the care and labor bestowed. 
 I cannot in this place dwell upon the wholly un- 
 worthy men and sometimes the wholly unworthy 
 women, who are still teachers because school 
 boards continue to engage them upon first impres- 
 sions without looking into their records. There are 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 137 
 
 at this time in the State prisons of New York tliree 
 men who were simultaneously principals of large 
 union schools in the State, and there are in other 
 States teachers who would be in Slate prison if their 
 crimes were detected. 
 
 SQUARE PEGS IN SQUARE HOLES 
 
 But apart from this very serious consideration, 
 for some of these men have left trails of iniquity 
 behind them that generations will not wipe out, 
 there are personal peculiarities of men and women 
 with which an agency becomes acquainted and 
 which render them especially fitted or especially 
 unfitted for certain places. A thoroughbred would 
 never be successful before the plow, nor a cart- 
 horse upon a race-track. There are thoroughbreds 
 and there are cart-horses among teachers, and there 
 are places for both. Only a broad and intimate 
 knowledge not only of the teacher but also of the 
 school will enable an agency to determine where 
 the fit is closest. 
 
 For instance, there are differences in the manage- 
 ment of schools which make them require entirely 
 different teachers. In general it may be said that 
 schools as regards assistants are under three kinds 
 of control. 
 
138 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 There are schools, not so maii}^ of them as could 
 be desired but still a good mauy, where teachers 
 and pupils have so long worked together in harmony 
 and good fellowship that the new teacher need only 
 be an accurate scholar with the manners of a lady, 
 to find herself at once at home, with little other 
 care than to prepare her lessons carefully and to fit 
 them to the individual pupils of her class. 
 
 In another kind of school each teacher is held 
 entirely rcsponsil)le for her own class. She must 
 take the pupils as they come to her, no matter what 
 the discipline has been in the other rooms, and 
 manage them in her own way without calling upon 
 the principal for help. 
 
 There are still other schools, and schools under 
 principals in some ways strong teachers, where it 
 would almost seem as if the principal took delight 
 in making difficulties for the teacher, — as if it grati- 
 fied him to give her such classes or to surround her 
 teaching with such conditions that necessarily the 
 best of her care must be given to the discipline. 
 
 Now suppose there comes to an agenc}" a young 
 woman just out of college who has known from her 
 babyhood only the refinements of life, whose path 
 has always been made easy for her, who has hardly 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 139 
 
 heard a harsh word, and who if a principal should 
 speak to her with his hat on would flush as if she 
 had been slapped in the face. Suppose such a 
 teacher is sent to a school where the principal is 
 rugged, uncouth, unsympathetic, strong in his way, 
 but accustomed to use his hands as fists. Such a 
 teacher will w^ilt under him like a lily in a hail- 
 storm. 
 
 THE QUESTION OF DISCIPLINE 
 
 Take for instance the question of discipline. This 
 is the young teacher's great test. Her first term 
 usually determines whether or not she will rank 
 among the successful. Now discipline is almost 
 entirely a matter of the point of view. Schools are 
 like horses. If a horse finds himself mounted by a 
 man whose knees take tight grip, and whose hands 
 holds the reins lightly but firmly, after a prance or 
 two to assure itself there is no mistake, it is satisfied 
 that its rider is able to take care of it under all 
 emergencies and it trusts itself to him ; but if the 
 rider has to get near a horse-block to mount, wob- 
 bles about after he gets on, yanks at the reins, 
 grasps the pommel of the saddle, and acts as if he 
 expected to be thrown over the horses head, the nag 
 is a sorry beast if it disappoints him. 
 
140 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 Schools like horses enjoy an acknowledged master, 
 but they want to be sure he is the master. When 
 a young man first enters the school-room it is neces- 
 sarily for him something of an exi)eriment. A 
 wise superintendent will give him a hint or two 
 beforehand, will keep an eye upon his work for the 
 first few days, will give a suggestion here and there ; 
 and if there is really anything in him will soon 
 make him feel so much at home that the experi- 
 mental feature disappears. The consciousness comes 
 to him that he is master, and he can concentrate 
 his attention upon how he shall exert the authority 
 that is no longer questioned. 
 
 If I may transgress upon the seriousness of the 
 occasion I should like to tell a little stoiy, for three 
 reasons : because it is true ; because it illustrates 
 what I am saying ; and because it is a joke upon 
 one of the former presidents of this Institute. 
 
 When I was a good deal younger and doing some 
 teaching myself, it came to my knowdedge that 
 Isaac N. Carleton had said some i)leasant things of 
 me to a high school committee looking for a princi- 
 pal, and that he had recommended me as especially 
 ■successful in discipline. 1 want to tell you how he 
 came to do it. 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 141 
 
 When Mr. Carleton was principal of the New 
 Britain normal school, a teacher of sciences was 
 wanted for the spring term, and I was invited to go 
 up tliere. The work was principally to teacli chem- 
 istry, but the place carried with it the title of vice- 
 principal. This was of little consequence, as Mr. 
 Carleton managed the school, and as in fact discipline 
 was little in evidence ; I never knew a school where 
 teachers and pupils all worked together in more 
 perfect harmony. 
 
 But one day Mr. Carleton called me into his 
 office and said, " Mr. Bardeen, I am going away for 
 four or five days." 
 
 I said, " Yes, sir." 
 
 He said " As you are vice-principal I shall leave 
 the school in your charge ". 
 
 I said, "Yes, sir." 
 
 He said " I believe everything is all right, except 
 one possibility. Three girls," and he named them, 
 " have asked permission to go to a party at Mr. 
 Smith's on Monday night. I have refused it, but I 
 have some reason to think that they intend to go. 
 I want you to find out whether they go or not, and 
 if they go to discipline them." 
 
 I said, " Yes, sir," 
 
142 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 Well, I just hoped those girls wouldn't go. They 
 were women-grown, and to me, barely out of college, 
 that particular embodiment of humanity was still 
 formidable. But they went, and Tuesday was a 
 troublesome day for me. I heard my classes me- 
 chanically with tins problem in the background — 
 what am I going to do with those girls ? I spent 
 the afternoon getting ready my experiments for the 
 next day, and acids and alkalis and retorts were all 
 questioned in vain as to what I should do with those 
 girls. Finally the 4 o'clock bell rang for prayers 
 and I went in to conduct them ; still I did not know 
 what to do with those girls. I read the longest 
 chapter I could turn to, but I did not find anything 
 in it as to what to do with those girls. I picked 
 out the longest h3'mn and had every stanza sung, 
 but still I did not know what to do with those 
 girls. When the singing stopped there was only the 
 Lord's prayer between me and those girls. It was 
 customary for the principal to lead and the students 
 to join in. I started it, still my thought on those 
 girls ; but when I got to " Give us this day our 
 daily bread ", to my dismay I could not remember 
 what came next. My mind had so wandered tliat 
 I had lost the connection, and a most painful ])ause 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 143 
 
 followed. Now, I could be cool enough to go back 
 mentally to the beginning and let the momentum 
 carry me over the hummock ; but then I was too 
 embarrassed to do tliat, and it seemed half an hour 
 that the school waited. Finally I reflected that the 
 students knew the prayer if I did not, and that the 
 moment they heard my voice they would continue 
 it ; so I murmured in an indistinct tone, " Tliine 
 eartlily sabbath, Lord, we love," and the school 
 went on, " Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive 
 those who trespass against us." 
 
 All this did not prepare me any better to deal 
 with those girls ; but I said in my severest tone that 
 Miss so, and Miss so, and Miss so, would retire to 
 the principal's room. Two or three students came 
 up to the desk to ask questions as they passed out, 
 and I detained them as long as I could ; but finally 
 the room was vacant and I had to face those girls. 
 I went in with my heart in my heels, but to my 
 astonishment they were in tears. I straightened 
 up. One of them said : 
 
 " Mr. Bardeen, can you ever forgive us? We felt 
 guilty all the time we were doing it. Everybody in 
 the school has been so kind to us that it was a shame 
 to be anything but obedient. If Mr. Carleton had 
 
144 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 stayed we should not have thought of going. Some- 
 how when he went away we felt mischievous, and 
 rather wanted to see what you would do with us. 
 But you have been so sad and solemn all day that 
 we just hated ourselves, and when in the Lord's 
 prayer you made that impressive pause before ' For- 
 give us our trespasses as we forgive those who tres- 
 pass against us ', to show us that j^ou forgave us, we 
 broke right down ; and now if you really do forgive 
 us we will apologize to Mr. Carleton when he comes 
 back, and you may be sure you will never have any 
 better scholars in tliis school." 
 
 That was the only case of discipline I had under 
 Mr. Carleton, and it was my success in dealing with 
 it that led him to recommend me as a disciplinarian. 
 I suppose it must go on I'ccord as a, sojnewhat unique 
 illustration of the efficacy of })rayer. 
 
 When accidents like these, and most of you can 
 give similar instances, determine the success of a 
 teacher, what a difference it makes whether his first 
 experience is under a kiudh% keen, sympathetic 
 superintendent, or under a man whose only thought 
 is to hold him to his work and judge him by the 
 mistakes which in his immaturity he is sure to 
 commit. 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 145 
 
 THE MODEL SUPERINTENDENT 
 
 There are superinteudeuts, all of us know some of 
 them, who are an inspiration to a young teacher, 
 and are recognized from the first as friends ; who 
 are watchful and ready with the word of warning, 
 but who give it so gently and in the midst of so 
 much encouragement that it is wholly helpful. 
 
 Some of you must have been teachers under Col. 
 Homer B. Sprague. When I was a junior in college 
 I was asked to go up to Meriden to take charge of 
 the high school of which he was principal while he 
 went to the legislature to secure the re-establishment 
 of the normal school. He drew $200 a month and 
 paid me half of it, and all he did was to sit by my 
 chair for an hour or two on three Monday morn- 
 ings ; yet he well earned his half of the salary. 
 The little hints he gave me were needed, and they 
 came in such a kindly way that they encouraged. 
 I recollect he said to me one morning, " Are not 
 those two girls over there rather noisy?" 
 
 I said, " Yes, but it is just physical exuberance. 
 There is not a bit of mischief about them. They 
 simply bubble over when they are near each other." 
 
 " Why don't you separate them?" he asked. 
 
146 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 "Why," I said, "that would be like punishing 
 them, and they do not deserve that." 
 
 He said, " Suppose you look over your school, 
 study it a little this week, see what other instances 
 there are where the fact that pupils are near each 
 other is a disadvantage to both, and then next Mon- 
 day reseat the whole school." 
 
 A simple thing that seems to you, but you must 
 remember that it was my first term. I reseated the 
 school the next Monday on some pretext, and the 
 difference was marvellous. It was like Columbus's 
 egg on end — easy enough after you know how ; but I 
 might have taught for a long while before I thought 
 of it. It had not occurre'd to me that the pupils 
 must not retain the seats in which I found them 
 when I took the school. 
 
 Now it is little hints like that given in such a 
 way that build up the teacher. Not the young 
 woman alone. Many a young man out of college 
 has his whole future determined for him by the 
 kind of principal he teaches under the first term. 
 He may go where everything is mechanical, and 
 fall into the way of doing his work by the week so 
 as to get his salary at the end of the month ; or he 
 may go where the spirit of the school is so earnest, 
 
FITTING TEACHERS TO PLACES 147 
 
 its working on lines so broad, that he feels that his 
 work is a vocation worthy to call forth his highest 
 efforts. This is the kind of school for thorough- 
 breds. When these possibilities are recognized it 
 does not seem extravagant to say that our most 
 important problem is fitting teachers to places. 
 
INDEX 
 
 PAGE 
 ..83 
 
 ..101 
 .. 84 
 
 107 
 16 
 
 01 
 
 aboiindinp: animal spirits 
 
 advertisinn; teachers 
 
 age of teaeliers 
 
 agency work in renting houses 
 
 algebra recitation 
 
 amateur vs. professional worlc, 
 American Association fur the 
 
 Supply of Teachers 109 
 
 Institute of Instruction -10 
 
 Journal of Education (Harn- 
 
 ard) q 82, 113 
 
 Journal of Education (:. t. 
 
 Louis) q 68 
 
 School Institute 1 13, 1 13 
 
 an experience in discipline 1-11 
 
 Anderson, Martin, q 'M 
 
 Andover Pliillips academy 18 
 
 Andrews, X. Lloyd 9, 32, (i. 70 
 
 Anglo-Saxon expressions 21 
 
 apparel .^5, 81 
 
 applications for places 104 
 
 appointment of teachers 47, 54 
 
 appreciation of other teachers.. ■)4, 74 
 Arnold, Thomas 
 
 11,10,19,31,59,76,78,83 
 
 art of education C8 
 
 Artemus Ward, q 10 
 
 artisan vs. artist 68 
 
 artistic not for mere gain 67 
 
 asperity 83 
 
 Assistant Masters' association, 
 
 London 115 
 
 attire 71, 81 
 
 baiting the hook 62 
 
 Barnard's American, Jour., q.82, 1 12 
 
 PAGE 
 
 behind-hand, the little 70 
 
 beixtigos band 68 
 
 best way of securing teachers 118 
 
 Bibb, Grace C, q 91 
 
 biliousness 81 
 
 IJinney, Horace 109 
 
 boards of education. .33, 43, 46, 52, 72 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, q 50 
 
 Bonner, Robert 25 
 
 boolcs on education 99 
 
 born teachers 89 
 
 Brackett, AnnaC, q 68 
 
 Bridgewater normal school 102 
 
 bright and cheerful 135 
 
 Browning, Robert 32 
 
 Buckham, Henry B., q 71 
 
 Burchard, Oscar R 88 
 
 business men compared 49, 55 
 
 relations of the teacher 69 
 
 vs. profession 65 
 
 calling and election 29, 44 
 
 Canning, q 60 
 
 Carleton, Isaac N 140 
 
 Century magazine, q 60 
 
 certification of teachers 41 
 
 changes discouraged 123, 124 
 
 character C9, 100 
 
 source of authority 73 
 
 characteristics vs. character 19 
 
 Chatham, Lord 83 
 
 cheerfulness 80, 81 
 
 chess vs. checJvcrs 64 
 
 child study 62 
 
 childlilce trust 76 
 
 "ciiockfull o' soup " 93 
 
 (149) 
 
150 
 
 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 choosing a profession 37 
 
 church membership 21 
 
 circular letters of aijplication — 10-1 
 
 civil service examinations 26 
 
 Clarke, S. M., q -18 
 
 clean and cheerful 77 
 
 clergymen compared 
 
 -M. -11, 42, Al. 101 
 
 minister's five-dollar bill 70 
 
 clothing 71,81 
 
 Coleridge, q Iti 
 
 college grad uates 86 
 
 vs. normal graduates 87, 91 
 
 commercial honor 611-74 
 
 commissions of tejichers' agen 
 
 cies ll-> 
 
 Common School .Journal (N. Y.) 
 
 *1 ll-^ 
 
 comparison with oilier cMlliugs 
 
 bishops "18 
 
 busiuess-mon J'J, ri5 
 
 clergymen 34, 41, 42, 44, 101 
 
 corporation ofRcers 51 
 
 lawyers 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 
 
 51,55, 101, 121 
 
 lecturers 61 
 
 overseers 60 
 
 physicians.. 33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 101 
 
 competitive examination 27 
 
 conceit in teachers 91 
 
 congressman's first dinner 93 
 
 consideration in the community. 40 
 
 control in schools 137 
 
 conversation Tio 
 
 Cornell university 90 
 
 corporation officers compared... .".1 
 
 courage 80, ): 1 
 
 courtesj' 82, 100 
 
 Currie's Common School Educa- 
 tion 99 
 
 Curtis, George William 26 
 
 dead school a good school 29 
 
 debtor and creditor 73 
 
 deorving others 75 
 
 PAGE 
 
 description of a teacher 126 
 
 development of the child 43 
 
 Dexter, the trolter 25 
 
 diamond-mining 120 
 
 Dickens, Charles, q 57 
 
 dictatorialness 83 
 
 discipline 138 
 
 a (iiu'stion of 139 
 
 an experience in 141 
 
 discrimination in employment 
 
 54, 63,64 
 
 Douai, Adolph, q 50 
 
 Draper, Andrew^ Sloan 11, 27, 33 
 
 draughts, game of 64 
 
 drawing salaries 73 
 
 drifting into teaching 45 
 
 ily namic force essential 135 
 
 dyspeptic stomach 81 
 
 early breaking down 80 
 
 earnestness in life 78 
 
 econoni}' of good teaching . . .56 
 
 edition de luxe 28 
 
 education dynamical 59 
 
 Education (London), q 115 
 
 educational quack 33 
 
 effect of poor teaching 58 
 
 ellicacy of prayer 142 
 
 ICIiot, Charles \\'., q 54, 59 
 
 Kmerson, R. W., q .'9, 60, 73, 75 
 
 empiricism 32 
 
 employers and employed 45 
 
 encouraging changes 125 
 
 Ihiglish advertisements 103 
 
 certification 102 
 
 enthusiasm 78, 79, 80 
 
 —. — drained away 53 
 
 eunuchs, intellectual 51 
 
 Kvans, C. II. &. Co., St. Louis.... 113 
 
 Evarts, Wm. :M 55 
 
 I>-erett, Edward, q 82 
 
 examinations 63 
 
 examiners of teachers 41 
 
 experience as an element of sal- 
 
INDEX 
 
 151 
 
 PAGE 
 
 familiarity with girl-pupils 75 
 
 faults of candidates 124 
 
 of great men 16, 133 
 
 finger nails clean 83 
 
 Fiti-h's Lectures on Teaching.. . 99 
 
 flabby heart 81 
 
 force 135 
 
 fountain of youth 84 
 
 Gilmour, Neil 98 
 
 girl-puiiils, familiarity with 75 
 
 gown, well-fitting 71 
 
 Gough, John B., q 61 
 
 grappling with difficulties 30 
 
 great teachers not faultless 133 
 
 Greek musician's theory 57 
 
 Grevy, President, fall of 105 
 
 growing teachers 84 
 
 Hall, G. Stanley, q 40 
 
 Hamilton, Gail, q 44 
 
 happy school 81 
 
 health 77-81,135 
 
 hero worship 15 
 
 higher salaries 54 
 
 history of teachers' agencies .... 109 
 
 Hope, A. R., q 74 
 
 Hopkins, ISIark 11 
 
 horses, not harness 60 
 
 Hoose, James H., q 41, 97 
 
 Hughes, James L., q 79 
 
 Hutchison, Wm 16, 96 
 
 " I am a well-bred man " 105 
 
 ideal teacher 9 
 
 immoral teachers 137 
 
 income vs. expenses 71 
 
 independence 33 
 
 of the teacher 72 
 
 In (liana School Journal, q 49 
 
 indispeusability recognized 53 
 
 individual application 61 
 
 influence of courtesy 82 
 
 of teachers 39 
 
 of the poclcetbook 71 
 
 on the pupil 43 
 
 PAGE 
 
 influence upon bad children .59 
 
 information vs. recommendation 
 
 agencies . .114 
 
 inspectors of academies 27 
 
 instruction vs. discipline 59 
 
 integer vitae 73 
 
 integrity 69 
 
 intellectual eunuchs 51 
 
 iron liand in velvet glove 30 
 
 Jacotot's theory .52 
 
 Johns Hopkins university 133 
 
 Johnson, Samuel 83 
 
 joyous disposition 81 
 
 joys of teaching 46 
 
 Judge Hilton's jjark 22 
 
 judges compared 51 
 
 keeping one's place 44 
 
 Koch's cure for consumption 15 
 
 Knott, Eliphalet 77 
 
 Lafayette, General 12, 13 
 
 Lambert, W. H., q 80, 83 
 
 Latin and Greek., 87 
 
 Lawrence academy, Groton 16, 96 
 
 lawyers compared 
 
 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 51,55, 101, 121 
 
 lecturer compared 61 
 
 licenses of teachers 41 
 
 life tenure 63 
 
 limit of salaries 88 
 
 Lincoln, Abraham 13 
 
 local amateurs in education 35 
 
 luOiuXon Journal of Education, q.l02 
 
 Longfellow, H. W., q 75, 84 
 
 love for children 83 
 
 of children for old men 85 
 
 I^owcll, James Russell, q 71 
 
 Ludlow, John 110 
 
 Macaulay, q 62 
 
 making teachers uneasy 121 
 
 man among men 55 
 
 of capital 73 
 
 of the one talent 32 
 
152 
 
 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 manhood 10, 51 
 
 manliness 135 
 
 Mann, Horace 102 
 
 manner 55, 83, 100 
 
 with girl-pupils 75 
 
 masterful men 29, 140 
 
 masterly inactivity 52 
 
 Hears, John W.,q 78 
 
 mental discipline 90 
 
 Mephistopheles of Coleridge 16 
 
 Meriden, Ct., high school 73, 145 
 
 methods 92 
 
 adapted, not adopted 62 
 
 of advertising 102 
 
 Michigan university 90 
 
 Milne, Wni. J., as a nigger min- 
 strel 55 
 
 minimum standard 27 
 
 monopoly 83 
 
 moral supremacy 31 
 
 morality should be stalwart 31 
 
 Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt 57 
 
 mushroom agencies 120 
 
 National Educational associati'n. 40 
 
 Teachers'' Monthly, q 58 
 
 neatness 81 
 
 nervous prostration 81 
 
 New Britain, Ct., normal school. 141 
 New England Journal of Educa- 
 tion, q 39, 50, 54, 80, 83 
 
 New York civil service commis- 
 sion 28 
 
 Common Sc?ioolJournal, q..ll2 
 
 legislative committee, q 57 
 
 State Educational Journal.. 88 
 
 State Teachers' Association, 
 
 15, 41,78 
 
 Teachers' Advocate, q 112 
 
 newspaper advertising 102 
 
 nice persons 77 
 
 non-essentials specified 19, 30 
 
 normal diplomas 90, 97 
 
 graduates 86, 89, 91 
 
 schools, report on, q 57 
 
 vs. college graduates 87, 91 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Norwich, Ct., free academy 96 
 
 not how much but where 64 
 
 what but who 60 
 
 number 6 hat and number 12 
 shoes 26 
 
 Ohio Educational Monthly, q..41, 83 
 
 "one stew" 20 
 
 Oswego methods 92 
 
 overseer com pared 60 
 
 Paris house-hunting 107 
 
 Parker, P. W 99 
 
 Pat wanted to be a bishop 48 
 
 patience 80 
 
 paying bills promptly 69 
 
 for favors done 107 
 
 for placing teachers 117 
 
 Payne's Lectures on Teaching... 99 
 
 pedagogical training 91 
 
 pedagogy, chairs of 40 
 
 Peirce, Cyrus 102 
 
 pensioner of the State 50 
 
 pensions 49, 50, 54, 63 
 
 permanence of teachers placed.. 123 
 
 personal influence 76 
 
 personality of the teacher 59 
 
 Phillips Academy, Andover 18 
 
 Phoenix, John, idea of adjectives. 130 
 
 physical deformity 127 
 
 physicians compared 
 
 33, 39, 41, 42, 44, 49, 101 
 
 playfulness in teachers 83 
 
 pocketbook well filled 71 
 
 policy 28 
 
 politeness 82 
 
 position without magnitude 29 
 
 positive elements 31 
 
 principals 77 
 
 and assistants 138 
 
 principles of education 125 
 
 profession of teaching, 40, 41, 65, 97 
 
 professional honor 74-77 
 
 rank 40 
 
 spirit 11 
 
 teacher's attitude 62 
 
INDEX 
 
 153 
 
 professional traininc: 100 
 
 work 67 
 
 punctuation 23 
 
 pursuit of usefulness 78 
 
 " Put money in thy purse '" 72 
 
 quaolv defined 33 
 
 quarter's salary ahead 7t 
 
 queen's row in teaching 65 
 
 quick perception 59 
 
 sympathy 59 
 
 Quick's Educational Reformers.. 99 
 Quincy methods 92 
 
 Raleigh, Sir Walter 126 
 
 ray of sunshine 135 
 
 recitation, faults in 17 
 
 recitations 44, 46 
 
 regents of the university... 19, 27, 32 
 
 examinations 88 
 
 religious character 31 
 
 reseating pupils 145 
 
 respectability of teachers 39 
 
 rest at $3 a night 53 
 
 retiring annuities 54 
 
 rheumatism and small-pox 130 
 
 Richter, Jean Paul, q 62, 76 
 
 Rousseau, .J. J., q 85 
 
 royal and empirical 33 
 
 Rugby school 76 
 
 salaries 38, 47, 56, 86, 95, 100 
 
 savans and donkeys 50 
 
 Schermerhorn, J. W 112, 113 
 
 Scholastic and Transfer Agency. 203 
 
 scholarship 31, 85, 100 
 
 of teachers 11 
 
 school a man or a woman 60 
 
 Schoolmaster (Chicago), q 45, 48 
 
 Scott, Walter 83 
 
 " se nubere'" 24 
 
 self-conceit 54 
 
 self-control 80 
 
 self-made teachers 93 
 
 sentimental fondness 75 
 
 iE PAGE 
 
 sinecurists 63 
 
 sizing up the teacher 131 
 
 skilled worlvmen 34 
 
 slandering other teachers 75 
 
 sluggish liver 81 
 
 Smith college 90 
 
 Smith, Sydney, q 77, 82 
 
 social position 39 
 
 sound character 135 
 
 financial basis 71 
 
 source of authority 76 
 
 specialties of the scientist 14 
 
 specification of non-essentials.. . 
 
 19,30, 116, 130-135 
 
 speech of four words 105 
 
 spelling faulty 21 
 
 Sprague, Homer B 73, 145 
 
 square pegs in square holes 137 
 
 Stanley, Dean, q 78 
 
 State certificates 19, 97, 98 
 
 storehouse of information 136 
 
 study of the class 61 
 
 success proportioned to happi- 
 ness 81 
 
 sunshine in the school-room 135 
 
 superintendent and teachers 60 
 
 influence of 144 
 
 superintendent's blanks 130 
 
 supplanting others 75, 117 
 
 Sylvester, Prof 133 
 
 sympathy with boy nature .59, 83 
 
 system in France 60 
 
 limit 61 
 
 worship 60 
 
 Syracuse university 90 
 
 tact 28, 31 
 
 Tate's Philosophy of Education. 99 
 
 Taylor, Samuel Harvey 18 
 
 teacher like the stomach 28, 101 
 
 should be an artist 68 
 
 sure of a living 38 
 
 Teachers' Advocate (X. Y.), q 112 
 
 teachers' agencies, history of 109 
 
 need of 136 
 
154 
 
 TEACHING AS A BUSINESS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 teachers' iifrencies, work of 106 
 
 Teachers' Ouild of Great Britain 
 
 and Irehmd 103 
 
 teachers impractical 49 
 
 not by choice 45 
 
 teaching as a profession 35 
 
 defined 63 
 
 teni per 80 
 
 tenure of office 51,54, 63, 64 
 
 text-book agents 106 
 
 Thackeray, \Vm. M., q 71 
 
 Thayer, Gideon F. , q 82 
 
 tliird-class talent 47 
 
 Tlii)ni]ison, C. O., q 40 
 
 thoroughbreds 137 
 
 tlu'i'e teachers in State prisons. . .137 
 
 three-handed men 70 
 
 Thring, Edward 11, 19, q. 34 
 
 Tilliughast, >'icholas 102 
 
 underbidding 75 
 
 unfit candidates 128 
 
 Union college 76 
 
 United States school agc^ncy 112 
 
 University convocation, q 77 
 
 unnecessary changes 121 
 
 upstairs three steps at a time 83 
 
 PAGE 
 
 val ue and price 94, 97 
 
 of diamonds 95 
 
 vanity 12 
 
 Vassar college 90 
 
 vigor 135 
 
 vigorous mind needed 59 
 
 '■ \'irtue has gone out of me " 53 
 
 Washington board of edu('ation. 44 
 
 Washington, George 10, 13 
 
 weak points of teachers 125 
 
 weed defined 59 
 
 Wellesley college 90 
 
 what living involves 38 
 
 Whitehall union school 46 
 
 Wilcox, K. H 112 
 
 Willard, Emma 11-15 
 
 Wines, E. C 110 
 
 women college graduates 90 
 
 teachers 89 
 
 work for everyone 78 
 
 young teachers 146 
 
 youth 84 
 
 — in teactiing 48, 63 
 
 zeal and enthusiasm 79 
 
ADVER-riSEMENTS 
 
School Bulletin Teachers' Agency 
 
 Not one desirable iil;ii-i.> in lilly is filled iion-;i-<l;iys cxri'iil, dii-rclly ni' 
 iiuliriM-tly throuirli the iiiriliuiii <il' a'Teuclicrs" Agency. Nearly mII tciu-liers 
 tidkluiK responsible positions are themselves enrolled in some Ajieney and 
 Kive their A<;ency immediate information of prospective chanees. Hence 
 an outside teacher has no chance to learn of vacancies. Before he hears of 
 them they have b(>en filled by candidates notified by the Agency. A pro- 
 gressive teacher could afford the annual fe(! for enrolment for the informa- 
 tion alone. He ini^dit not care to use it, but it is worth two dollars a year 
 to be sure he has missed no opportunities he would like to know of. 
 
 We happen to know as we write tliat a man now princii)al nf a llfi(X) 
 school will soon be appointed teacher in a normal school. We are pretty 
 sure that a man now <i:''l'iny: $\A()0 will liave the $1600 place. If he gets i"t 
 we have our eye on another man now getting $1100 who \\ ill be glad of the 
 fl400 place: in <'very case because these niiMi are especially fitted for these 
 places and desirous of them. All this in .laniuiry. Now ni'\t .June some 
 principal who saves his two dollars by not registering in an .\gency will 
 read in the morning newspaper that Principal So-and-so has been atipoint- 
 ed to such a chair in such a normal school, and will pack his valise, take 
 the train, and hurry off to I'riiicipal So-and-so's present pla<-e to ai)ply for 
 his position before anyone else gets there. It will surprise him to learn 
 that the vacancy was provided for six months l)(?fore. He has saved his 
 two dollars registr.-iiion I'l'e, but he has lost his time, his car-fare, and 
 whatever chance he stood of the place. 
 
 The Best Agencies, however, do not depend on information alone. By 
 repeated successes, by fair dealing, and through the mfiuence of the teach- 
 ers they have placed. "they have won the confidence of many school boards 
 and emjjloying principals. 'I'here are hundreds of schools that systemati- 
 cally engage all their teachers through .in agency and will not consider 
 applications from any other source. 
 
 One year we sent Princi])al Poland, now assistant superintendent in 
 New York city, to the .Tersey City high school at ^iiOO: that left a vacancy 
 at Hion which we filled by sending I'riiicipal W'inne, now of the Pough- 
 kee])sie high scliool. at $1600: that left a v.icancy at Canastota which we 
 filled by sending I'rinciiial Ottaway at $1300: that left a vacancy at Amster- 
 dam Academy, and so on. 
 
 Bid you ever see people stand in line at the post-olllce waiting for their 
 mail? As each one is supplied he goes away, giving place to the next, and 
 so there is a continual moving up: the man who keeps his place in the line 
 will eventually get to the head. In no profession is there so frequent and 
 so rapid movihg-up as in teaching. To get to the top, do your work well 
 where you are and keep registered. Presently you will be tile man that fits 
 and will be elected, and if you do fit when you get there the Agency will 
 keep its eye on you for the ne.xt fit. Try it. 
 
 It is Important, however, not only to register, but to register in the 
 Agency most likely to help you. Without reflection upon others it may be 
 said with confidence that the School Bulletin Agency is safe and trust- 
 worthy. Aaron Gove, superintendent of schools in Denver, Colo., and late 
 president of the National Teachers' Association, said in the Colorado 
 School Journal for July, 1890: 
 
 " The School Bulletin, edited, owned, and conducted by C. ^V^ Bardeen, 
 at Syracuse, N. Y., is an old and reliable school journal, its proprietor is a 
 
 school man and understands his business He is iilso at the head of an 
 
 educational bureau As at present advised, we are suspicious of Bureaus 
 
 unless we know the man at the head." 
 
 "The man at the head " of the School Bulletin Agency makes personal 
 selection of every teacher recommended. Send for circulars. 
 
THE SCHOOL BULLETIN TEACHERS- AcEXCY. 
 
 Positions for Women Teachers. 
 
 The advauoe in the salaries of superior women teachers has been of 
 hite years remarkable. Prof. Payne, of Vanderbilt University, wrote to us 
 in 1890 for a primary teacher at $1,200, with no duties outside of simply 
 teaching a primary class three hours a day. In 1894, we were asked to find 
 a woman as college president at salary reaching to $10,000. The difficulty is 
 not to find such places: it is to find the women who are sure to succeed in 
 such places. Some of the places for women we have filled are as follows: 
 
 At $1,500.— Principiil High School, Des Moines, Ja. 
 
 At $1,400. — Milwaukee Normal, Wis. 
 
 'At $1,200.— Buttalo Normal, Syracuse, JV. Y.; Scrantou, Pa.," Birming- 
 ham, Ala.; Davenport,/a.,' Moorhead Normal, Minn.; Colorado Springs, C'o^o. 
 
 At $7,000,— Little Falls, Ou(!onta Normal, Saratoga Springs, Syracuse [3], 
 Utica [3], N. Y.; Birmingham, Ala.; Cedar Falls [2], Marshalltown [2], State 
 Agricultural College, 7a,,- St. Joseph [2], J/o.,- Grand Forks, iV: Z>.,' Ouray[2], 
 Colo.; Helena, Mont.; Cheney Normal [2], Wash. 
 
 At $900.— Auhurn, iV. F.; Plymouth Normal, iV". H.; Florence, Ala.; 
 Baton Rouge, La.; West Des Moines, la.; Winona Normal, i1/jrt?i.,' Em- 
 poria Normal, Ks.; Omaha, Peru Normal, Neb.; Grand Forks, Mayville, 
 N. D.; Colorado Springs, Pueblo, Colo.; Napa, Cal. 
 
 At $800. — Auburn, Binghamton, Elmira, Garden City, Gouverneur. 
 Kingston, Newburg [2], New Roohelle [2], Norwich, Potsdam Normal, 
 Poughkeepsie, Syracuse [2], Waverly, N. Y; Bennington, Vt.; New Haven 
 [2], Ct.; Florence [3], .-l^a.; Campbell, Texas; Clinton [2], Decorah, Coates 
 College, la.; Whitewater, Wis.; St. Cloud, St. Peter, Minn.; Grand Junc- 
 tion, Ouray, Pueblo [.3], Colo. 
 
 At $700.— Amsterdam Ac, Batavia [3], Catskill, Dunkirk [4], Ellenville, 
 Elmira, Fort Plain, Hornellsville, Ithaca, Jamestown, Lyons, Oneonta Nor- 
 mal [4], Plattsburgh, Plattsburgh Normal, Port Jervis, Saratoga Springs, 
 Watkins, Yonkers, iV. Y.; Naugatuck, South Norwalk [2], Ct.; Bradford, 
 Erie, Oil City, Shippensburg Normal, Waverly Youngstown, Pa.; Ishpen- 
 ning, Mick.; Normal [2], HI.; St. Cloud, St. Peter, J/j«m. ,' Lincoln [2], Neb.; 
 Madison, Yankton, S. D.; Fort Collins, Ks.; Takoma, Wash. 
 
 At $600. — Besides more than 70 places in New York, Deering, Me.; Ben- 
 nington, Vt.; Providence Normal, li. I.; Hartford, Norwalk, Ct.; East 
 Orange [2J, New Brunswick, N.J.; Erie, Warren, Pa.; Marietta [2], Ga.; 
 Florence [.5], Ala.; Owensboro, Ky.; Youngstown, 0.; Adrian, Mich.; 
 Jacksonville, HI.; Marshalltown, la.; Fergus Falls, Menominee, St. Cloud, 
 St. Peter, Minn.; Portage, Wis.; Lincoln [3], Neb.; Wessington Springs, 
 Yankton [6], S. D.; Meeker, Colo.; Salt Lake City, Utah; etc., etc. 
 
 Who get these places ? Born teachers, whether or not they are normal 
 or col lesre graduates. Our standard of estimate is, " First a true ivoman, 
 thi'u a lady, tlien as much more as we can get." 
 
 C. W. BARDEEN, Proprietor, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-THE SCHOOL BULLETIN TEACHERS' AGENCY. 
 
 New York Principalsliips. 
 
 Whether this Agency is trustworthy may be judged from the fact that it 
 has filled the following New York priiicipalships, with aggregate salaries 
 exceeding $400,000. 
 
 Adams, Alexander [2], Amenia<S«?»., Amsterdam Ac, Andes [6], Andover, 
 Apalachin [2J, Apulia, Attica, Auburn, [2, $1,200 and $2,000J, Ausable Forks. 
 
 Bainbridge, Baldwinsville [3], Batavia [Inst, for the Blind], Bayville, 
 Belfast, Binghamton [3], Bouckville, Brasher Falls [2], Brookfield [3J. 
 
 Cambridge [2], Camillus, Canajoharie, Canandaigua, [Union School, 
 $1,700, Academy, $2,000], Canastota,, 'Cnnistci) [2], Cauoga [2|, Cape Vincent, 
 Carthage, Castile, Catskill f2|. ( 'aU,-ir:ni<.Mis [2|. Cayuga, Chaniplain, Chat- 
 ham, Chester, Chittenango [2], Cliui'cliville, Cicero, Cinciiinat us Ac. [2], 
 Clayville [2J, Clarence, Collins Centre 15], Constahlcville, (jooper's Plains 
 [2], Corinth, Corning [3], Cortland Normal [$2,800], Craigsville, Crown 
 Point [2]. 
 
 Dansville, De Ruyter, Dolgeville [3], Deposit [3] Dundee [4], Dunkirk. 
 
 East Bloonifleld, East Randolph, East Springfield .-Ic. [.5], East Syracuse. 
 Elbridge, Elizabethtown, Ellenville, Elmira [4], Fabius, Fairfield Sem., Fair 
 Haven, Fairport, Farmingdale, Pa3'etteville[2], Fort Edward, Friendship >4c. 
 
 Geddes. Ghent, Gilbertville ,4c. [2], Gloversville [3, $800, $1,300, $2,000], 
 Good Ground, Granville [3], Great Neck, Greenville Ac, Groton, Guilford. 
 
 Hamburg, Hammond [2], Hammondsport. Henrietta [2], Hermon, Heuvel- 
 ton. Homer, Hudson, Ilion, Islip, Ives-V(S//t. [2],.Tamesvillc> [21. Jasper[2J,.lor- 
 dan,.Iordanville [4], Keeseville, Kenwood [3], Kingston [2, $2,500], Kyserike. 
 
 Lafayette [2], Lansingburgh, Lawrenceville Ac. [2], Le Roy, Little Falls 
 [2], Little Neck, Liverpool [2], Locke, Lockport [2], Lodi, Lowville, Ly- 
 sander [2]. 
 
 Madison, Madrid, Malone, Manlius [2], Manlius Station [2], Mannsville, 
 Marathon, Margaretville, Marion [2], Massena, Maryland, Matteawan, Mav- 
 ville [2], McGrawville, Medina. Middletown [3], Mohawk [2], Mooers [3], 
 Moravia, Morrisville, Munnsville. 
 
 Napanoch [2], Naples, Narrowsburg. Nevyark [2], New Berlin [2], New 
 Paltz, Newport, Nicliols, North port [2], North Easton, Nunda, Ogdensburg, 
 Olean, Onondaga Valley [2], Oriskany, Ovid [2], Owego. Oxford. 
 
 Painted Post [2], I'almer Falls, Palmyra, Parish, Patterson, Pawling. 
 Penn Yan, Peterboro [4], Philmont, Phcehix, Pompey ^(?. [5], Port .Ic^rvis 
 [3], Port Henrv, I'ort Leyden [2], Portville, Potsdam Normal [$2,800]. 
 Poughkeepsie [2], Pulaski [2]. 
 
 Red Creek, Remsen [3], Rensselaerville ^c. [4], Richfield Springs [2], 
 Richmond Hill, Riclnuondville, Rochester Industrial School, Rome [3]. 
 
 Sagapanock, St. .Tohnsvllle [3], Salamanca [3], Salem, Sandy Creek [2], 
 Saratoga Si)rings [8]. Saugerties, Sauquoit vie, Savannah [2]. Sherburne [2]. 
 Slierrill. Siiliiev, Silver Creek [2], Sinclairville, Smithville, Sm.vrna [2], Sus- 
 pension Bridge, So. Glens Falls [2], So. New Berlin [2]. Spencertown [2], 
 Stamford, Syracuse [3]. 
 
 Ticonderoga [2], Tioga Centre, Tonawanda [3], Trumansburg, Tucka- 
 hoe [2J, Troy, Tully [2]. Unadilla, Union [2], Utica [2]. 
 
 Walden, Walton. Walworth Ac, Warrcnsburg [2], Warsaw, Warwick, 
 Washingt()nvill('[2].\Vassaic[2], Waterford [2], Watertown [High], Webster. 
 Weedsi)ort. Wellsburg [•!!. W'ellsville, West Cornwall f21,\Vesternville,West 
 Hebron, West Leyden. West Troy [2]. West Winfield. Westburv Station [2], 
 Westfield, Westport, Whitehall. Whitestown. Whitney's Point [2], Williams- 
 town, \Villianisville. Wolcott [2], \Vyoming [2]. 
 
 C. W. BARDEEN, Proprietor, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-THE SCHOOL BULLETIN TEACHERS- AGEXCY.- 
 
 Positions obtained for Men. 
 
 Besides the New York Principalsliips else\vh<M-e named, here are some 
 other specimen positions obtained by men throutih this Agency. 
 
 ^< $4.000.— Headmaster, St. Paul's School, Garden City, iV". Y. 
 
 At $3, 300.— fiapt, Jersey City, iV. ./. 
 
 At .$.y. 000.— Principals, StateNormal, Providence, E. I.; Blairstown, 3'. J.; 
 Superintendent, Lincoln, Neb, 
 
 j4<$2,700.— Assistant Superintendent, Cleveland. 0. 
 
 At $2.500.— Prin. High School, Jersey City, Sup't. Xew Brunswick, ^V. J.; 
 Sup't. Blind Asylum, Raleigh, JV. C; President, Normal Institute, Lincoln, 
 Neb. 
 
 At $2.000.— \'r\\w\\)a\s. State Normal, Peru, Neb.; High School, Leaven- 
 worth, Ks.; Assistants, Brooklyn Boys' High School [3]: Albany Normal: 
 President. Coates College, la.; Principal, Preparatory Dep't, Univ. of Colo.; 
 Lecturer, University E.xtension, Philadelphia, Pa. 
 
 ^< $7, NOO.— Mathematics, Newark, N. J.; Principals, Factoryville, Pa.; 
 Davenport, la.; Pueblo, Colo.; Sciences, University of Deseret, Utah. 
 
 .4); $7, 6"00.— Mathematics, Sciences, Oneonta Normal, N. Y. 
 
 At $7,500.— Sup'ts, Norwich Un., Vt.; Liberia, Africa; Yjinkton [2], S. D.; 
 Principals, Krie Acad., Pa.; Lincoln, Neb.; Methods, Florence Normal, 
 Ala.; Winona Normal, Minn.; Mathematics, Kalamazoo College, Mich.; 
 Classics, St. Joseph [2]. iVo.,- University of Deseret, Utah; Sciences, Omaha, 
 Neb.; Methods, Emporia Normal, A's. 
 
 At $1,400. — Sciences, Cortland Normal; Classics, Mathematics, Potsdam 
 Normal, N. Y.; Principal, Warren, Pa.,- Music, Coates College, /a.; Sup't, 
 Hopkinsville, Ky.; Principal, Hiawatha, Ks.; 
 
 At $1,200. — Vice-principal, Salamanca, iV. Y.; Principals, New Haven, 
 Vt.; Canton, Oil City, Pa.; Brackett, Texas; Decorah, la.; Fort Lewis, 
 Colo.; Assistants, Auburn, Garden City [2], N. Y.; Toledo [2], 0.; State 
 Normal, La.; Covington [4], Krj.; Faribault, Minn.; Peru Normal, Univ. of 
 Neb., Neb.; Pueblo, Colo. 
 
 .4<$7,000.— Assistants, Oneonta Normal [4], Newburg [2], N. Y; East 
 Orange, N. J.; Shamokin, Mansfield Normal, Pa.; Fredericksburg, Va.; 
 Lake Forest, 111.; Des Moines, la.; Principals, Hawley, Oil City [2], Pa.: 
 Talladega, Ala.; Straight University, La.; Somerset [2], Ky.; Highland 
 Park Col., la.; Lincoln, Neb.; Ourayj Meeker, Colo. 
 
 ^< $900.— Principals, Rowayton, Ct.; Weehawken, N. J.; Tuscola, 7i/.; 
 Assistants. Brooklyn Polytechnic: Binghamton, N.Y.; Blairstown, N. J.; 
 Des Moines, la.; Sweet Springs, Mo.; Spokane Falls University, ]Fa«A. 
 
 At $S00.— Assistants, Auburn, Cook Academy [2], Dolgeville [2], Fairfield 
 Seminary, Gouverneur, Malone, Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn, Pulaski 
 Academy, iV! Y.; Northfleld. Vt.; East Orange, Highlands, Patterson, Rut- 
 gers Grammar School, N. J.; Princeton. Ind.; Des Moines, la.; Menomi- 
 nee, Wis.; Canon City, Colo.; Principals, Highlands, N.J.; Youngsville, Pa.; 
 Perry, 0.; Apalachicola, Fla. 
 
 .4/; $700. —Assistants, Aurora Academy [4], Canandaigua Acad. [6], Cats- 
 kill ["2], Clinton Liberal Institute, Cornwall Military Institute, Delaware Lit- 
 erary Institute, Rlmira Free Acad., Lansingburgh Acad., Lowville Acad, [2]. 
 Malone, Penn Yan, St. John's Acad., Manlius, Mechanicsvilla Acad., 
 Owego, Tonawanda, Utica, ^V. Y.\ Burlington. Northfleld, Vt.; New Provi- 
 dence, N. J.; Bradford, Pa.; Russelville, Ala.; Manchester [2], Vt.; For- 
 tress Monroe [21. Va.; Searcy College, Ark.; Brackett, Texas; Sweet Springs, 
 Mo.; Clinton [3]. la.; Detroit, Michigamme. Mich.; Nebraska City, Neb,; 
 Lyndon, Warn.; Principals. Fairfax, Poultney [2], 17. 
 
 C. W. BARDEEN, Proprietor, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-THE SCHOOL BTTLlETm PUliLTCATIONS.- 
 
 The School Bulletin 
 
 AND NEW YORK STATE EDUCATIONAL JOURNAL, 
 
 Established 1874. 24 pages, 9 x 14. $1.00 a year. 
 
 The School Bulletin is one of the five oldest educational journals in 
 America, and the only one of them that has been under the same ownership 
 and management from the beginninj?. It was the only American School .imir- 
 nal which received the gold medal at the Paris Exposition of 1889, and it 
 received the highest awai-d offei-ed at the Chicago Exposition of 1893, the di- 
 ploma pronouncing it " of the greatest interest and historical value to 
 educators of all grades ". It is not filled with " methods " and spoon-food 
 for young teachers who want their ideas ready-made, but appeals to super- 
 tendents, principals, and all teachers who regard their work as a vocation, 
 and who want to look upon it broadly and comprehensively. 
 
 In the feature of educational news it has never had a rival. Its chroni- 
 cles of what has happened in New York schools since its establishment are 
 unmatched in educational literature, and it has taken note of whatever has 
 happened in other States that involved general principles. 
 
 Its Current Topics give a chronicle of w^hat occured during the preced- 
 ing month with forcible terseness, and in a perspective that bi'ing tlie im- 
 portant events clearly to the front, adding maps wherever necessary. For 
 the instruction of classes in this branch, now commonly recognized as essen- 
 tial, and for preparation of teachers' examinations, the Current Topics as 
 here presented have been declared to be the best anywhere to be found. In 
 New York they are of especial value in preparation for the Uniform Exam- 
 inations, as the Bulletin is issued every month of the year (not for ten months 
 only), at such a date that it will reach New York subscribers just before the 
 Uniform Examination of the month, and thus present the news fresh and up 
 to date. 
 
 It publishes each month all the Uniform Examination questions and an- 
 swers of the preceding month, with all the illustrations in drawing and 
 other subjects. It publishes all the questions given at the examinations for 
 State Certificates ; all the circulars and legal decisions issued by the De- 
 partment of Public Instruction ; and has indeed two Official Departments 
 edited and conducted by members of the Department of Public Instruction 
 and of the Regents, respectively. 
 
 It is therefore primarily an educational journal for New York teachers, 
 and is meant to be a journal no New York teacher can affoi'd to be without. 
 But teachers in other States will find it of great service, both for the intrin- 
 sic value of its contents, and for the vivid picture it gives of educational 
 progress in the Empire State. 
 
 C. W, BAKDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
STANDARD TEAVUEUS' LIBEARY, NO. r, 
 
 Bardeeii's Roderick Hume. 
 
 The Story of a New York Teacher. Pp. 31!). Cloth, $1.25 ; niaiiilla, 50 
 cts. This is one of the 22 best books for teachers recommended by Chancel- 
 lor W. H. Payne in the Nexv Enrjland Journal of Educaiion for Nov., 1893. It 
 is also one of the books described by W. M. Griswold in liis "A Descriptive 
 List of Novels and Tales dealing with American Country Life." 
 
 Roderick Hume took possession of me, and the book was finished in one 
 sitting that lasted beycnd the smallest hour. I have joined t!s crowd in 
 your triumphal procession. The characters are as truly painted as any in 
 Dickens, and the moral is something that cannot be dodged.— Professor 
 Edward North, Hamilton College. 
 
 * My confinement at home gave me an opportunity to read it carefully, 
 which I have done with great delight. I can certify that it is true to life. 
 I liave had experience in country and village schools as well as in the 
 schools of the cities. The picture is true for all of them. I know too well 
 how self-interest, jealousy, prejudice, and tlie whole host of meaner mo- 
 tives are likely to prevail in tlie management of school affairs anywhere. 
 That the people .should know this and yet entrust the management of their 
 schools to men who are most likely to be influenced by personal considera- 
 tions is strange indeed.— My memory brings to mind an original for every 
 portrait you have Avawn.— Andrew J. Rklcoff, former Sup't of Schools, Cleve- 
 land, O. 
 
 Teachers cannot fail to be greatly benefited by the reading of the book. 
 Roderick's address to his pupils is a compendium of the be.st points in the 
 highest kind of school management. Mi.ss Duzenberrie's victory and Vic 
 Blarston's closing remarks ought to teach lessons of warning to many 
 teachei's wlio are even the most in earnest about their work. Mary Lowe 
 is a beautiful model of a teacher, and no one will be surprised that Roder- 
 ick should make her his helpmate instead of his assistant. It is a capital 
 story, and we recommend it strongly to every Canadian teacher. Each one 
 should get a copy for himself, as he will wish to read it more than once. 
 — Inspector James Z. Hur/hes, in Canadian School Journal. 
 
 In the columns of The Bulletin, in 1878, appeared a serial story which at- 
 tracted the attention of educators in all parts of the country. It was en- 
 titled Roderick Iliime. and was professedly '" the story of a New York teach- 
 er." It was written with the specific view of portraying certain phases of 
 the modern graded school. The narrative was not designed as a satire, 
 though a vein of huiiior ran througli it all ; nor was it to Ije taken as an au- 
 tobiography, though the author's own experiences were more or less inter- 
 woven with it. The interest of the story increased from montli to month, 
 and widely extended the reputation of 2'Ite School Bulletin and its editor. 
 Letters received from all parts of the country revealed, in fact, a plic- 
 nomenal interest in its outcome. * * * Subsequentlyit appeared in book 
 form, and it has since held a unique place in American literature. — The 
 Schoolmaster in Voniedy and Satire, p. 453. 
 
 C, W. BABDEEN, Publisber, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 30.- 
 
 Bardeen's Common School Law. 
 
 The revision of 1896, entirely rewritten, not only brings this standard 
 text-book up to date, but adds much new matter, including a chapter on 
 Rules and Kegulations and the relations of teachers to the trustees and the 
 superintendent. It is based on the New York consolidated school law as 
 amended to date, but it gives references by page to the latest editions of the 
 laws of all the other States and Territories with more than 500 of the latest 
 judicial decisions in this country and in Kurope. For .lormal schools and 
 training classes the book, of course, is indispensable; and since School 
 Law is one of the subjects required in uniform examinations in New York 
 of all grades, the book is indispensable to teachers here, as well as without 
 rival for the teachers of other States. 
 
 The first thing a teacher wants to know about such a book is whether 
 it can be depended upon. The highest authority in the country, the Har- 
 vard Law Review, speaks as follows in the number for December, 1896: 
 
 " This admirable book, first published in 1875 and for twenty years the 
 only text-book on the subject for general use, has now for the first time 
 been entirely rewritten. Iia its present form it is of general interest, and, 
 it would seem, of practical necessity to the teacher. Part I, which has to 
 do with school oiBcers, is based almost entirely on New York law, but Part 
 II, which relates particularly to the teacher, is a safe guid(i throughout the 
 country both in school and in court. * * * The author cannot be too 
 highly commended in that avoiding the common error of trying to draw 
 hard and fast lines, he contents himself with illustrating by copious and apt 
 quotation of legal di^cisions the various views possible on disputed points, 
 and the application of such rules as admit of definite statement." 
 
 The following are other testimonials from standard legal authorities: 
 
 It seems to us that the work must be invaluable to trustees, as well as 
 teachers, because innumerable questions concerning proper school rules, 
 their enforcement, the line between proper and improper authority on the 
 part of teachers, the subjects of punishment, expulsion, wages, and kindred 
 topics, are gone into.— New Jersey Law Journal, Oct., 1896. 
 
 The book contains a very complete tabular analysis of its contents, as 
 well as a list of references to Superintendents' Decisions in the State of 
 New York, and to statutes of the various States. It will undoubtedly be use- 
 ful to both lawyers and teachers.— ^?m. Law Register and Review, Oct., 1896. 
 
 This compact little book has been invaluable to the teacher, school 
 ofHcer and lawyer. Of the new edition it is sufficient to say that it will be 
 even more useful than former editions.— Xa;icas)!«/' Law Review, Aug. 3, 1896. 
 
 The decisions of the courts in different States are very fully noted and 
 cited. The book will prove very useful to the lawyer, as well as a work of 
 much importance to the school olFicer and teacher. — American Lawyer, 
 Aug., 1896. 
 
 16n-io, pp. 276. Cloth Sl.OO ; Manilla SO ets. 
 
 C, W» B\IlI)li:EN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y, 
 
■STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 3- 
 
 Pap's Theory and Praclice of Teaclini. 
 
 No other Americau book on teachinK has so much ohiim as this to be 
 considori'd a classic. For nearly fifty 
 years it lias been rejjarded almost uni- 
 versally as the one book the young 
 teacher would most profit by. A hun- 
 dred thousand teachers have drawn 
 help and inspiration from its pages. 
 
 It seems only just to the author of a 
 work so successful that his book should 
 be printed just as he wrote it. The day 
 is past when commentators re-write 
 Shakspere. They may annotate and 
 explain and conjecture, but they take 
 the te.xt as they find it, and print their 
 observations in another type. This 
 book has been less fortunate. In different editions since Mr. Page's death 
 chapters have been added, details have been changed, passages have been 
 entirely rewritten. 
 
 This volume goes back to the book that Mr. Page published, and fol- 
 lows word for word the text of the only edition he ever authorized. Where 
 the times have changed and we in them, references to present conditions 
 are given in the notes that follow, which will be found of great value as 
 illustrating how different in many respects is the environment of teaching 
 now from what it was half a century ago, while yet the teacher's difficul- 
 ties are largely the same, and his failure or his success depends upon the 
 same fundamental principles. These notes are also in some part explana- 
 tory and historical, with portraits of Page, Mann, Colburn, Emerson, Pot- 
 ter, Wadsworth, and Olmsted. There are also a biography of Mr. Page and 
 a full topical index for review. 
 
 In short this is so much the best edition issued, that even those who al- 
 ready have another edition can afl'ord to throw that aside and use this alone. 
 The following are among the commendations it has received : 
 " This work has so long been recognized as one of the great educational 
 classics that comment here is unnecessary, except to say that Jlr. Bar- 
 deen's latest edition is especially well printed and has a fine full-page por- 
 trait of its great author. — Art Education.'' 
 
 " While it Is one of the oldest books on teaching published in this coun- 
 try none of its successors surpass it in its high ideal of the teacher's life 
 and work, which is held constantly in view. The true spirit of the teacher 
 breathes in every line, and it is a continual source of guidance and inspira- 
 tion to all who would realize the most fruitful results in this noble and 
 responsible vocation. It should be the first book studied by every teacher, 
 and should be his constant companion at all times." — School Forum. 
 
 C. W. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syraquse, N. Y, 
 
STAXDARI) TKACIIKRS' LIBRARY, No. 7 
 
 DeGrraff's School-Room Griiide. 
 
 What (1 
 
 in Prof. DeGniff's luetliod of i>i-c: 
 - — ^ and holds the 
 
 •iflitutioii lh:it so ri'achcs 
 vouiil;' ;<';ic'hiT, it, iiii;:lit 
 be hard to say : but lie li.-is nrvcr li.id 
 his equal as an institute instrueior in 
 the inspiration lie <rave : and suiicrin- 
 tendents everywlierc a^iree that wlicn; 
 'itlier books are bouyhl, and put away, 
 the "School-Room Guide" is bouLzht 
 and kept on the desk, fcU' daily use. 
 Some books are recouiui(ii(l<'(l because 
 it is creditable (o own iliern; this is 
 recommended liv llmsc who know it 
 because it irill /h/jj. it is siunllle.ant 
 that this was one of the tliree books 
 selected by tin? i;\auiiualion Hoard of 
 the State of New York as one of the three ui)oii whirh all Uniforn'i and 
 State Examinations in Methods and School ICcouomy should be based for 
 the year lSQr>. mid that it ivas unanimously readopted for 1896. 
 
 It is just what its name implies, a real guide to school-room work. — 
 Practical Teacher. 
 
 We do not know of any other book that contains so much help for a 
 youn;; teacher, or an old one for that matter, as (liis. — Wis. Journal of 
 Education. 
 
 The striking point in the work is the practical sense of it. Showy 
 methods and visionary schemes get no toleration in these pages.— T/ie 
 Independent. 
 
 We cannot say too much in praise of this book. It contains just the 
 very hints that the progressive teacher needs every day. We do not think 
 that a teacher who loves his work and desires to excel can afford to do 
 without DeGraff's Guide. — N. C. Teacher. 
 
 It is not a mere collection of rules and formulas to be followed implicit- 
 ly and automatically by every teacher alike, but is rather a series of hints 
 and suggestions well calculated to assist the teacher to thinic and desire 
 new methods for himself or herself. It were well for our sclmoU if this 
 book were used by every teacher. — Pf/ft^ic Opinion. 
 
 This volume is designed to be a practical one. It contains suggestions 
 on every subject that comes usually within the work of the common st^hool 
 teacher. It discusses the various methods used in tciichin-j; the dilfereiit 
 subjects and presents what is thought to be i\w b<'st. Tin' [ilau u -cd in 
 treating any given subject is to givg an introduction followed by si' vera! 
 lessons, explicit directions as to what is to be done, cautions to be observed 
 and results to be obtained. It is just such a manual as every teacher needs. 
 —Educational Journal of Va. 
 
 Complete Inde.rjust added. 16mo. i)]). -105. :\Ianilla. 50 cts., ('loth. )?1.50 
 
 C. AV. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 5. 
 
 Herbert Spencer's Ertucation. 
 
 There is perhaps uo other single book that it is so iiulispensaljle foi- a 
 teacher to I'viiow as this. Thus Quiclv 
 says of it, in his " Educational Re- 
 formers " : 
 
 "There are three Eu<;lishnien who 
 have written so well that, as it seems, 
 they will be read by Enulish-speaking 
 teachers of all time. These are As- 
 chani, Locke, and Herbert Sjjencer. If 
 a teacher does not know these he is not 
 likely to know or care anythinu about 
 the literature of education." 
 
 Joseph Payne says, in his " Lec- 
 tures " : 
 
 "I agree with Mr. Quick in considering it one of the most important 
 works on education in the English language. I strongly recommend any 
 of you to get it, and to read it with all possible attention.'' 
 
 Prof. S. G. Williams says, in his "History of Modern Education": 
 
 "But of all that has been written in English, during the present cen- 
 tury, probably no pedagogic treatise has attracted more wide-spread atten- 
 tion, or has exerted more iutlueuce than Herbert Spencer's 'Education'. 
 It is characterized by that cleiirness of exposition and felicity of illustra- 
 tion of which Mr. Spencer is so great a master and which never leaves one 
 in doubt as to his opinions. Of all the pedagogic works of the century that 
 have appeared in English, I am inclined to think that a brief examination 
 of this will give us the fairest sample of the nature and direction of peda- 
 gogic thought." 
 
 Gilbert Compayre says, with discrimination : 
 
 "Mr. Spencer's essay, then deserves the attention of educators. There 
 is scarcely a book in which a clean scent for details comes more agreeably 
 to animate a fund of solid arguments, and from which it is more useful to 
 extract the substance. However, it must not be read save with precaution. 
 The brilliant English thinker sometimes fails in justice and measure, and 
 his bold generalizations need to be tested with care." 
 
 It is just here that this edition differs from all others. It gives tlie text 
 as published, intact, with side-heads, and a Topical Analysis for Reviews. 
 But it adds 29 pages of notes, giving, with references to the text by page, 
 the chief criticisms of Compayre, Quick. .Joseph Payne, William II. Payne, 
 and S. S. Laurie, thus guarding the young teacher from being misled by 
 statements often too positive and broad. There are also numerous bio- 
 graphical notes, often accompanied by portraits, and historical notes when 
 required, thus making the book one of the best illustrations of the special 
 plan and purpose of the Standard Teachers' Library. 
 
 16mo, pp. 331. In Manilla 50 cts., in Cloth «1.00. 
 
 C. W. BARDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-STAXDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, NO. U. 
 
 Kein's Outlines of Pedagogics. 
 
 This is :i tiuiisliit ion "f t In- slaiularil German text-book of the Herbartian 
 s.ysteni.aiid Hihn only complete niiWion. 
 The present discussion over this system 
 :iiid its wideninjr adoption mal<e this 
 liiiok an absolute necessity to the 
 iiacher. Note some commendations: 
 "If we mistake not, this work will 
 do more for Herbart in America than 
 anything that has hitherto appeared. 
 It is clear, as translated Herbart has 
 not always been : it is iuspirin;"; as few 
 translations of modern German peda- 
 go^iics have been. Few recent profes- 
 sional books deserve so universal an 
 American reading."— iV. E. ./. of Ed'n. 
 '■ ThefHTMian original of this book was noticed in the Educational Review 
 for AiH'il, 1891. and a very favorable judgment passed upon it. In its English 
 dress it is heartily welcome. The translation is remarkably good, the 
 dillicult subject of technical educational terms being handled with especial 
 skill. Mr. Van Liew has also done wisely in including in his version the 
 portions of the first edition of the original that were omitted, largely from 
 considerations of space, in Dr. Rein's own revised edition. 
 
 " The translator's notes are also helpful. He is particularly happy in his 
 discussions, from the Ensilish and .Vmerican pointof view, of concentration 
 and co-ordination (pp. 116, I3ii), and of the formal steps of instruction (i)p. 
 146, ]r)7). These notes will help the American tea(;her to a clear under- 
 standing of th(? essential points in the Herbartian practice. 
 
 " Persons desiring to purchase this book should bear in mind that the edition 
 under notice is the authorized one, being brought out in this country by 
 arrangement with the English publishers. This warning is necessary, as a 
 firm of guerilla pntilishers, whose high notions of morality in education do 
 n/)t appear to find application in the field of business, are advertising a 
 7'eprint tohich is both mutilated and pirated, though owing to the ^infortu.nate 
 condition of our copyright law they cannot be jjrosecuted." — Prof. Nicholas 
 Murray Butler, in Educational Review, Jan., 1894. 
 
 '• Although the volume has become familiar to the educational public, I 
 wish to exi)ress my appreciation at the appearance in English of this most 
 worthy volume. As is claimed, it forms the best introduction to Herbartian 
 doctrines which has yet come into my hands. The insight of Dr. Rein is 
 penetrating, whih; the lucidity of his pen puts him in easy communication 
 with the reader. Indeed, the author is clear in his exposition of Herbart, 
 and sound in the few advances which he ventures beyond the master. — 
 Prof. E I ward F. Buchner, Yale University. 
 
 IGmo, pp. 333, Cloth, *1.35 ; ManiUa, 50 cts. 
 
 C. AV. BAKDEEX, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-THE SCHOOL BULLETIN PUBLICATIONS.- 
 
 Huiitiiigtoii's Unconscious Tuition. 
 
 This is without question the most 
 remarlvable address upou teacViint? 
 ever written in America. Delivered 
 years ago before tlie American Insti- 
 tute of Instruction, it has been re- 
 printed again and again, and has 
 brought help and inspiration to liun- 
 dreds of thousands of teachers. B'rom 
 a multitude of testimonials we select 
 the following : 
 
 " I heard the lecture when first given, 
 have read it several times, and have 
 given away a good many copies. I 
 wish every teacher in the land could 
 read it and take in its spirit." — Charles 
 Hiitchins, Agent American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. 
 We may add that this Board has purchased and sent out to the mission- 
 aries all over the world more than a thousand copies, and we have fre- 
 quently printed grateful letters from these missionaries expressing the de- 
 light and help it gave them. 
 
 "I have had it in mind for a long time to write you a few words -in 
 regard to ' Unconscious Tuition ' by Huntington. I wish something might 
 be done to bring it to the knowledge of teachers everywhere. It Is the first 
 book to put into the hands, head, and heart of every young teacher. I know 
 of no gift of equal value to bestow upon a young person undertaking the 
 instruction of little children."— X E. Frye, Hyde Park, Mass. 
 
 " We give much of our space this month to Dr. Huntington's grand 
 classic. There is probably nothing finer in the whole range of pedagogic 
 literature. We trust everyone will read it, and we are sure that many will 
 read it more than once."— OAio Educational Monthly. 
 
 " Surely it is a masterpiece. Sometimes when reading or hearing lec- 
 tures on our obligations as teachers I have felt like crying out in despair: 
 ' Lay no more burdens upon us I Are we not already crushed beneath the 
 weight of responsibility! ' But this paper, while it reveals with singular 
 vividness the duty resting upon us, yet carries with it such a healthful and 
 strengthening power that it inspires determination and hope. It presents 
 a most exalted ideal, and neglects not to speak of the means by which it is 
 attained. It brings commendation and hope to the few who are worthy, 
 and has also a word of encouragement for the most of vis who have made 
 as yet little progress. Such words stir the soul to its depths with its un- 
 voiced thoughts which breathe forth a holy, sacred influence that is uplifting 
 and purifying. At such times our eyes are opened and we see more clearly 
 than ever before that character is the one thing that shall endure." — E. M. 
 N., in Ohio Educational Monthly. 
 
 Paper, 16mo, pp. 45, 15 cts. Also the second of four monographs in 
 "The Teacher's Mentor", cloth, pp. 274, $1.00. 
 
 C. W. BAKDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y. 
 
-STANDARD TEACHERS' LIBRARY, No. 35- 
 
 Quick's Educational Eeformers. 
 
 malcos Uiis tliu most, iMiUTtiiininii; of books for 
 teucli(!rs. Dr. Win. T. IlaiTis says : "I 
 have called this book of Mr. Quick the 
 most valuable history of education in 
 our niother-tonsue." We are glad to 
 present it in new dress, worthy of its 
 merits. 
 
 This U3W edition is a careful reprint 
 of the original London edition with the 
 followinfr additions: 
 
 (1) Mr. Quick's Pedasosical Auto- 
 biography, written for the Educational 
 Review, and used here by permission.. 
 
 (2) The chapter on Froebel, written 
 by iNIr. Quick for the Kncyclopffidia Britannica. 
 
 (3) Portraits, including the following: 
 
 Arnold Goethe Montaigne 
 
 Aschara .Tacotot Pestalozzi 
 
 Basedow Kant Quick 
 
 Colet Lavater Rousseau 
 
 Comenius Locke Spencer 
 
 Fellenburg Loyola Sturm 
 
 Froebel Milton Tobler 
 
 (4) Illustrations, including the following: 
 
 Facsimile page from one of Mr. Quick's letters. Facsimile page from 
 one of Pestalo/.zi's manuscripts, with notes in the handwriting of Ramsauer, 
 Niederer, Tobler, and Kriisi. Janua Linguarum, 3 facsimile pages. Orbis 
 Pictus, 2 facsimile pages. Pestalozzi's birth-place at Zurich. N'iews of 
 Stanz, Burgdorf, Yverdun, and the schoolhouse at Birr, with Pestalozzi's 
 Memorial. The well-known picture of Ascham and Lady Jane Grey. 
 
 (5) Translations of all the passages in French, German, Latin, and 
 Greek, with which the book abounds. 
 
 These added translations are put at the bottom of the page and are 
 indicated by numbers. In the chapter on Rousseau, tlie quotations in 
 French mii e nearly as much matter as the F,nglish, so that the chapter 
 might well serve for an exercise in learning French l)y jiarallel translation, 
 after the methods of Ratich, Locke, or Jacotot. 
 
 (6) Side-heads, giving the substance of the paragraph. 
 
 (7) Additional notes, always in brackets. 
 
 (8) An index much extended. 
 
 Ifinio, pp. 420, Price postpaid in Manilla 50 cts. ; in Cloth, $1.00. 
 
 C. W. BAKDEEN, Publisher, Syracuse, N. Y.