Amount of district tax for teachers' fund in 1871... ..$ 1,258,920.50

Number of volumes in school-district libraries in 1870

12399

Number of volumes in school-district libraries in 1871

11482

NORMAL SCHOOLS.

The subject of Normal Schools deserves special attention from the legislators and school authorities in the State. The time has evidently gone by when intelligent parents are willing to entrust the education of their children to the novices and quacks with which the profession is everywhere crowded. If parents are not sufficiently intelligent to perceive the lasting damage resulting to their children from the crude methods of ignorant and incompetent teachers, the State, at least, is supposed to be informed on this point, and is in duty bound to exert its resources to the utmost that the evil be removed. The intellectual and moral training of the youth of the land is a public trust, guarded with constitutional sanctions, and lying nearest the great heart of our republican institutions. The strength and permanency of a popular government are vested in the intelligence and refinement of the people, and therefore our common schools are the hope of the nation. Now, if these are neglected, or through defective supervision are suffered to fall into incompetent hands, the State thereby commits the two-fold error of squandering the public funds, and what is infinitely worse, of allowing meantime her occasions for strengthening the very foundations of government to go by unimproved. It is asserted that 94 per cent. of the 200,000 teachers in the United States have entered the school-room without any professional training for the work; and 40 per cent. of them without any design whatever of making it a profession. Certainly the public weal is largely bound up in the issues and responsibilities of the educational work, and there is as much call for vigilance, and public patronage, and judicious legislation with reference to the school teacher's profession, as there is with reference to the office of magistrate, or judge, or any civil interest whatever.

To some extent the profession is guarded by the legal restraints thrown around it through the office of the County Superintendent. A tolerable degree of literary qualification is in this way made indispensable in the applicant, and he must give evidence of possessing a good moral character before he can receive authority to teach in thə public schools, and receive his salary from the public fund. But literary qualifications and a good moral character by no means imply a capacity to teach. Sometimes it is urged that ability to manage a school and facility in imparting instruction, are so far natural and constitutional endowments of the individual, that the absence of them cannot be supplied by any amount of artificial training and preparation for the work. This objection is sometimes urged in such a way as would make the teacher's vocation an exception among all the learned and useful professions, which are ordinarily pursued by men in civilized communities; or, more properly, it would exclude it from the list of professions altogether. The very idea of a profession carries with it the notion of an acquired art, although in the acquisition of it there may be a greater or less degree of natural aptitude displayed. But if the power to govern a school, and the capacity to communicate instruction, are purely natural gifts, and in no sense to be acquired, then, indeed, is the teacher's vocation the most uncertain and unstable of all pursuits. Those thus endowed may not, in any considerable number enter the school-room; and as it is only after some experience in the business that the teacher can be certain of his capacity, he will be wanting beforehand in one of the strongest motives impelling him to this line of effort-a consciousness that he possesses the gifts requisite to success. Must he apply himself to so responsible a task in the spirit of a mere experimenter, and the children in the meantime be subject to the irreparable damage his blundering efforts may inflict? Allowing that these peculiar gifts cannot be acquired, still a process of experiment will be necessary to determine their presence, and would it not be infinitely better that the work of developing the native talent go on in a Normal School, than that it be prosecuted at the expense of unsuspecting and unprotected childhood? Perhaps it is because the primary and district schools of this country are so largely given over to ignorant charlatanry on the one hand, and the probationary blundering of novices on the

other, that the statement has gone out upon the endorsement of the Bureau of Education, that, "poor schools and poor teachers are in a majority throughout the country," and that, "multitudes of schools are so poor that it would be as well for the country if they were closed." It is important, however, to grant that an aptness to teach, and an ability to govern are very largely the inheritance of nature, and that the want of them makes many a teacher otherwise adequately furnished an incubus to his profession. It is true, too, that the absence of these faculties cannot be supplied by the most efficient and rigid Normal instruction that can be devised. But the fact is that the majority of men and women inclining to this work, are possessed of these faculties in greater or less degrees. It is here, as in all other professions, those entering the school-room bring with them every shade and variety of adaptation to their work, from perfect mastery down through all the grades of mediocrity and indifference, to the boundary line of absolute and complete unfitness for the calling. It is the office of Normal training to develop, strengthen, and stimulate whatever latent talent the individual may have in these directions and not to impart to him faculties he does not possess.

But we have failed fully to comprehend the office of professional training for the teacher, until the subject of method has been taken into the account. Teaching is an art, and as such has been undergoing progressive improvement through many ages of research and discovery. It has assumed new shapes, invented new facilities, and adopted successively a great variety of methods by which the young mind may be aroused to action, and all the spiritual faculties may be put in the way of an orderly and healthful development. As the human mind has been more and more profoundly studied, and its laws and capabilities, its social and material relations have been drawn out, the methods of imparting instruction and the whole art of school organization and management have undergone changes corresponding to these new directions of thought. Theory and practice have thus mutually kept pace with each other. It is pre-eminently the province of the Normal School to drill in method, and enforce the underlying principles which commend recent and improved methods to the acceptance of its pupils. Indeed, as a plan for professional training, the instruction should be exclusively special, at least, as nearly so as

the circumstances will allow. The general education should have been secured by the applicant before he subjects himself to a course of Normal instruction. He comes to make search under the direction of competent trainers and instructors, into the experience of the past, and puts himself down to a regimen of practice and criticism, in model schools and elsewhere, upon such methods of instruction and school government as shall best meet the wants, capabilities, and unfolding stages of the human mind.

Of course the Normal School, as a professional school, will itself be subject to progressive growth and advancement, and its methods, therefore, will never be held as final. In this respect it could not claim to be an exception to the general rule regulating all schools of a professional character, as, for example, those of law, theology, and medicine. Its results are proximate. The great tutorial art, like every other branch of human thought and effort, has its special epochs of awakened activity and progress, and these pour together their invaluable legacies of wisdom and experience into the bosom of the present. It is impossible for the novitiate to be inspired with any enthusiasm for his profession unless he can enter practically and appreciatively into the labors of the great educators of the past and present, and acquire in this way a conception of the magnitude and grandeur of his work. This the Normal School aims to accomplish. It would inspire the pupil with a love of his art by illustrating the phases of development through which it has passed, and incorporating the principles that have been attained in such methods of school management and instruction, as may have the aggregate consent and endorsement of the best educators of the age.

But neither for the school nor for the pupil would there be any benefit in an enforced routine of certain fixed methods in the schoolroom. The Normal School is not a machine to turn out machines upon the public schools of the land. Again we urge that professional training is serviceable in demonstrating whether the pupil is "cut out" as we say for the business, and having made that plain, in supplying him with a general ideal of the plan and order of his work. It would make him as has been aptly said an artist and not an artizan. In this respect again, we cannot discriminate disparagingly between this and other schools of a professional character. Special