ry guidance or help. No wonder
that the rural school is poorly organized and managed. It presents
problems of administration more puzzling than the town school, and yet
here is where we put out our novices, boys and girls not yet out of
their "teens"--young people who themselves have no concept of the
problems of the school, no knowledge of its complex machinery, and no
experience to serve as a guide in confronting their work. No industrial
enterprise could exist under such irrational conditions; and neither
could the schools, except that mental waste and bankruptcy are harder to
measure than economic.

Nor does the rural teacher know the technique of instruction any better
than that of organization and management. The skillful conducting of a
recitation is at least as severe a test upon mental resourcefulness and
skill as making a speech, preaching a sermon, or conducting a lawsuit.
For not only must the subject-matter be organized for immature minds
unused to the formal processes of learning, but the effects of
instruction upon the child's mind must constantly be watched by the
teacher and interpreted with reference to further instruction. This
skill cannot be attained empirically, by the cut-and-dried method,
except at a frightful cost to the children. It is as if we were to turn
a set of intelligent but untrained men loose in the community with their
scalpels and their medicine cases to learn to be surgeons and doctors
by experimenting upon their fellows.

As would naturally be expected, therefore, the teaching in the average
rural school is a dreary round of inefficiency. Handicapped to begin
with by classes too small to be interesting, the rural teacher is
mechanically hearing the recitations of some twenty-five to thirty of
these classes per day. Lacking at the beginning the breadth of education
that would make teaching easy, he finds it impossible to prepare for so
many different exercises daily. The result is that the recitations are
dull, spiritless, uninteresting. The lessons are poorly prepared by the
pupils, poorly recited, and hence very imperfectly mastered. The more
advanced work cannot stand on such a foundation of sand, and so,
discouraged, the child soon drops out of school.

When it is also remembered that the tenure of service of the teacher is
very short in the rural schools, the problem becomes all the more grave.
The average term of service in the rural schools is probably not above
two years,