which
deserves a few paragraphs. I refer to the rights of the committee, or
the trustees, or patrons in the control of the school. The right to such
control, when claimed at all, is usually claimed in reference to the
teacher's new plans, which renders it proper to allude to the subject
here; and it ought not to be omitted, for a great many cases occur in
which teachers have difficulties with the trustees or committee of their
school. Sometimes these difficulties result at last in an open rupture;
at other times in only a slight and temporary misunderstanding, arising
from what the teacher calls an unwise and unwarrantable interference on
the part of the committee or the trustees in the arrangements of the
school. Difficulties of some sort very often arise. In fact, a right
understanding of this subject is, in most cases, absolutely essential to
the harmony and co-operation of the teacher and the representatives of
his patrons.

There are then, it must be recollected, three different parties
connected with every establishment for education: the parents of the
scholars, the teacher, and the pupils themselves. Sometimes, as, for
example, in a common private school, the parents are not organized, and
whatever influence they exert they must exert in their individual
capacity. At other times, as in a common district or town school, they
are by law organized, and the school committee chosen for this purpose
are their legal representatives. In other instances, a board of trustees
are constituted by the appointment of the founders of the institution,
or by the Legislature of a state, to whom is committed the oversight of
its concerns, and who are consequently the representatives of the
founders and patrons of the school.

There are differences between these various modes of organization which
I shall not now stop to examine, as it will be sufficiently correct for
my purpose to consider them all as only various ways of organizing the
_employers_ in the contract by which the teacher is employed. The
teacher is the agent; the patrons represented in these several ways are
the principals. When, therefore, in the following paragraphs I use the
word _employers_, I mean to be understood to speak of the committee, or
the trustees, or the visitors, or the parents themselves, as the case in
each particular institution may be; that is, the persons for whose
purpose and at whose expense the institution is maintained, or their
representati