a playground and a
school garden; we may have it all splendidly fenced; the schoolhouse may
have an artistic appearance and may be kept in excellent repair; it may
be well furnished inside with blackboards, seats, library, reference
books, good textbooks, and all else that is needed; it may be
beautifully decorated; it may have twenty or even more pupils, and yet
we may not have a good school. It will not "saw alone"; the one
indispensable factor may still be lacking.

=The Teacher.=--"As is the teacher, so is the school." Mark Hopkins on
the end of a log made a good college, compared with the situation where
the building is good and the teacher poor. The teacher is like the
mainspring in a watch. Without a good teacher there can be no good
school. Live teacher, live school; dead teacher, dead school. The
teacher and the school must be the center of life, of thought, and of
conversation, in a good way, in the neighborhood. The teacher is the
soul of the school; the other things constitute its body. What shall it
profit a community to have a great building and lack a good teacher?

If we were obliged to choose between a good teacher and poor material
conditions and environment on the one hand, and excellent material
conditions and environment and a poor teacher on the other, we should
certainly not hesitate in our choice.

=A Good Rural School.=--Now, if we suppose a really good teacher under
the good conditions described above, we shall have a _good_ rural
school. There is usually better individual work done in such a school
than is possible in a large system of graded schools in a city. In such
a school there is more single-mindedness on the part of pupils and
teacher. These pupils bring to such a school unspoiled minds, minds not
weakened by the attractions and distractions, both day and night, of
city life. In such a school the essentials of a good education are, as a
rule, more often emphasized than in the city. There is probably a truer
perspective of values. Things of the first magnitude are distinguished
from things of the second, fifth, or tenth magnitude. This inability to
distinguish magnitudes is one of the banes of common school education
everywhere--so many things are appraised at the same value.

=The Problem.=--We have tried in this discussion to put before the
reader a fairly accurate picture, on the one hand, of the undesirable
conditions which have too often prevailed, and, on the other, of a rural