he captain of the teaching corps. Directly under his
control are the mainsprings of the school's life and activity,--the
classroom teachers. It is coming to be a maxim in the city systems that
the supervisor has not only the power to mold the school to the form of
his own ideals, but that he can, if he is skillful, turn weak teachers
into strong teachers and make out of most unpromising material, an
efficient, homogeneous school staff. I believe that this is coming to be
considered the prime criterion of effective school supervision,--not
what skill the supervisor may show in testing results, or in keeping his
pupils up to a given standard, or in choosing his teachers skillfully,
but rather the success with which he is able to take the teaching
material that is at his hand, and train it into efficiency.

A former Commissioner of Education for one of our new insular
possessions once told me that he had come to divide supervisors into two
classes,--(1) those who knew good teaching when they saw it, and (2)
those who could make poor teachers into good teachers. Of these two
types, he said, the latter were infinitely more valuable to pioneer work
in education than the former, and he named two or three city systems
from which he had selected the supervisors who could do this sort of
thing,--for there is no limit to this process of training, and the
superintendent who can train supervisors is just as important as the
supervisor who can train teachers.

It would take a volume adequately to treat the various problems that
this conception of the supervisor's function involves. I can do no more
at present than indicate what seems to me the most pressing present need
in this direction. I have found that sometimes the supervisors who
insist most strenuously that their teachers secure the cooeperation of
their pupils are among the very last to secure for themselves the
cooeperation of their teachers.

And to this important end, it seems to me that we have an important
suggestion in the present condition of the classroom teacher as I have
attempted to describe it. As a type, the classroom teacher needs just
now some adequate appreciation and recognition of the work that she is
doing. If the lay public is unable adequately to judge the teacher's
work, there is all the more reason that she should look to her
supervisor for that recognition of technical skill, for that
commendation of good work, which can come only from a fellow-craft