ence between a worthless
and an excellent teacher. It is often the ten or fifteen dollars a month
additional which secures the prize teacher; and so I should make the
difference in salary a secondary consideration; for, after all, the
difference amounts to very little in the taxation on the whole
community.

=A Question of Teachers.=--The question of teachers is the real problem
in education, from the primary school to the great universities. It is
the poor teaching of poor teachers everywhere that sets at naught the
processes of education; and when the American people, and especially the
rural people, realize that this is the heart and center of their
problem, and when they realize also that the difference, financially,
between a poor teacher and a good one is so small, they will rise to the
occasion and proceed to a correct solution of their problem.

CHAPTER VIII

THE THREE INSEPARABLES

In the preceding chapter we discussed the type of person that should be
in evidence everywhere in the teaching profession. Such a type is
absolutely necessary to the attainment of genuine success. In rural
schools this type is by no means too common, and in the whole field of
elementary and higher education it is much more rare than it should be.
Because of the frequent appearance of the opposite type in colleges and
in other schools, the teacher and the professor have been often
caricatured to their discredit. There is usually some truth underlying a
caricature; a cartoon would lack point if it did not possess a
substratum of fact.

=The "Mode."=--Now, there is often in the public mind this poorer type
of teacher; and when an idea or an ideal, however low, becomes once
established, it is changed only with difficulty. The commonplace
individual, the mediocre type of man or of woman, is by many regarded as
a fairly typical representative of what the teacher usually is; or, as
the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than the
average. The "mode" in any class of objects or of individuals is the
one that occurs oftenest, the one most frequently met with. And so this
inactive, nondescript sort of person is often thought of as the typical
teacher. He has no very high standing either financially or socially,
and so has no great influence on the individuals around him or on the
community in general. This conception has become so well established in
the public mind, and is so frequently met with, that all teach