dividual. Ascertain, (by other
means however than formal examination,) to what stage his education has
advanced, and deliberately consider what objects you can reasonably
expect to effect for him, while he remains under your care. You cannot
indeed always form your plans to suit, so exactly, your general views in
regard to the school and to individuals, as you could wish. But these
general views will, in a thousand cases, modify your plans, or affect in
a greater or less degree, all your arrangements. They will keep you to a
steady purpose, and your work will go on far more systematically and
regularly, than it would, if, as in fact many teachers do, you were to
come headlong into your school, take things just as you find them, and
carry them forward at random, without end or aim.

This survey of your field being made, you are prepared to commence
definite operations, and the great difficulty, in carrying your plans
into effect, is, how to act more efficiently on _the greatest numbers at
a time_. The whole business of public instruction, if it goes on at all,
must go on by the teacher's skill in multiplying his power, by acting on
_numbers at once_. In most books on education, we are taught, almost
exclusively, how to operate on the _individual_. It is the error into
which theoretic writers almost always fall. We meet, in every
periodical, and in every treatise, and in fact, in almost every
conversation on the subject, with remarks, which sound very well by the
fire-side, but they are totally inefficient and useless in school, from
their being apparently based upon the supposition, that the teacher has
but _one_ pupil to attend to at a time. The great question in the
management of schools, is not, how you can take _one_ scholar, and lead
him forward, most rapidly, in a prescribed course, but how you can
classify and arrange _numbers_, comprising every possible variety, both
as to knowledge and capacity, so as to carry them all forward
effectually together.

The extent to which a teacher may multiply his power, by acting on
numbers at a time, is very great. In order to estimate it, we must
consider carefully what it is, when carried to the greatest extent, to
which it is capable of being carried, under the most favorable
circumstances. Now it is possible for a teacher to speak so as to be
easily heard by three hundred persons, and three hundred pupils can be
easily so seated, as to see his illustrations or diagrams. Now