ers, and I suppose
that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause
of the pit. But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause
of education a vast amount of harm. I know a principal who won ephemeral
fame by introducing into his school a form of the Japanese jiu-jitsu
physical exercises. When I visited that school, I was led to believe
that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the American people. Whole
classes of girls and boys were marched to the large basement to be put
through their paces for the delectation of visitors. The newspapers took
it up and heralded it as another indication that the formalism of the
public school was gradually breaking down. Visitors came by the
hundreds, and my friend basked in the limelight of public adulation
while his colleagues turned green with envy and set themselves to
devising some means for turning attention in their direction.

And yet, there are some principals who move on in the even tenor of
their ways, year after year, while all these currents and
countercurrents are seething and eddying around them. They hold fast to
that which they know is good until that which they know is better can be
found. They believe in the things that they do, so the chances are
greatly increased that they will do them well. They refuse to be bullied
or sneered at or laughed out of court because they do not take up with
every fancy that catches the popular mind. They have their own
professional standards as to what constitutes competent
schoolmanship,--their own standards gained from their own specialized
experience. And somehow I cannot help thinking that just now that is the
type of supervisor that we need and the type that ought to be
encouraged. If I were talking to Chinese teachers, I might preach
another sort of gospel, but American education to-day needs less
turmoil, less distraction, fewer sweeping changes. It needs to settle
itself, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is trying
to do. And it needs, above all, to rise to a consciousness of itself as
an institution manned by intelligent individuals who are perfectly
competent themselves to set up craft standard and ideals.

IV
[Transcriber's note: This is a typographical error in
the original, and should read "V"]

But in whatever way the supervisor may utilize the opportunity that his
position presents, his second great problem will come up for solution.
The supervisor is t