f a properly
qualified blind teacher." The wisdom of this recommendation is
recognized in the largest schools of England and France, and some of
them have blind superintendents as well. America is slower to recognize
the ability of the blind, but this period of reconstruction and
readjustment through which we are passing may quicken their sense of the
importance of employing blind teachers and superintendents, whenever
possible. Superintendents are no longer required to perform clerical
work. All these details are left to stenographers and bookkeepers.
Neither is the superintendent expected to teach. But he should be a
scholar, a man of culture, with broad vision and high ideals, and with a
sympathetic knowledge of the difficulties to be met and overcome by the
students in his care. It should be the aim of the residential school to
train its pupils along lines best suited to their individual needs, and,
when possible, to fit them to become partially self-supporting, if not
wholly so.

The child in a residential school knows very little of life outside the
buildings, knows little of the trials and struggles going on in its own
home, perhaps. Its days are well ordered. It is clothed and fed, and is
not expected to practice self-denial or to exercise any of the qualities
of courage or fortitude which the exigencies of later life demand.
Clarence Hawkes says: "courage a blind person should have above
everything else. He must be literally steeped in it. It will not do to
have just the ordinary, temporary supply allotted to the average seeing
man--he will run out in a single day. But he must have courage that is
perennial, a ceaseless fount of it--courage for the morning, courage for
the noonday, and courage for the evening. Life is a battle and a
struggle which never ends. He must fight for hope and cheer, laughter
and happiness, every inch of the way along life's path." Another writer
has said, "courage is the standing army of the soul, keeping it from
conquest, pillage and slavery." But the child in the residential school
knows little of all this, has little occasion to know. Dr. Park Lewis
says: "The added importance of having blind children educated with those
who see is, that they may realize more keenly the real difficulties of
life which are to be met, and which have to be overcome. They will not
always find kindness and courtesy, and they must be prepared to adjust
themselves to the harder conditions when they arise.