Carnegie gives fifteen million dollars to provide pensions for
superannuated college professors; but the elementary teacher who is not
fortunate enough to die in harness must look forward to the almshouse.
The people tax themselves for magnificent buildings and luxurious
furnishings, but not one cent do they offer for teachers' pensions.
What a blot upon Western civilization is this treatment of the teachers
in our lower schools. These people are doing the work that even the
savage races universally consider to be of the highest type. Benighted
China places her teachers second only to the literati themselves in the
place of honor. The Hindus made the teaching profession the highest
caste in the social scale. The Jews intrusted the education of their
children to their Rabbis, the most learned and the most honored of their
race. It is only Western civilization--it is almost only our much-lauded
Anglo-Saxon civilization--that denies to the teacher a station in life
befitting his importance as a social servant.

IV

But what has all this to do with school supervision? As I view it, the
supervisor of schools as the overseer and director of the educational
process, is just now confronted with two great problems. The first of
these is to keep a clear head in the present muddled condition of
educational theory. From the very fact of his position, the supervisor
must be a leader, whether he will or not. It is a maxim of our
profession that the principal is the school. In our city systems the
supervising principal is given almost absolute authority over the school
of which he has charge. In him is vested the ultimate responsibility for
instruction, for discipline, for the care and condition of the material
property. He may be a despot if he wishes, benevolent or otherwise.
With this power goes a corresponding opportunity. His school can stand
for something,--perhaps for something new and strange which will bring
him into the limelight to-day, no matter what its character; perhaps for
something solid and enduring, something that will last long after his
own name has been forgotten. The temptation was never so strong as it is
to-day for the supervisor to seek the former kind of glory. The need was
never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content
with the impersonal glory of the latter type.

I admit that it is a somewhat thankless task to do things in a
straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feath