Excerpt from A Manual for Use of Superintendents, Principals and School Officials This book is not a philosophical treatise on the American School System. Such books have a valuable place in our educational literature, and a number of excellent books of this nature have recently been written. Some especially valuable books, also, have been written on "The American High School," showing its purpose, place, etc. I can here do no better service to the readers of this handbook than to urge upon them the use of one or more of these more pretentious volumes. Nor is this a book of methods. This field is well covered already, and by authors far better able to write on such a theme. An aspiring superintendent or principal will familiarize himself with such valuable school literature. He cannot best gauge his own work nor best assist his teachers without some knowledge of methods of teaching. he present volume pretends to be no more than its title indicates, a manual for frequent use. As such, however, it is alone in its field. It has grown out of the experiences and observations of the author during twenty years as superintendent of village and city schools in communities ranging in population from three hundred to twelve thousand, and during four years as state inspector of village and city schools. These experiences and observations have been supplemented by frequent conferences with successful superintendents in various sized schools, and by talks with many members of boards of education. The preparation of this volume has been prompted by the testimony of many principals and superintendents that they have no way of knowing what other schools are doing, and therefore no way of gauging the success of their work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.