Excerpt from Shall We Have School Supervision in the Rural Districts? He must quicken pupils as well as teachers, and to do this he must be a clean, attractive, and forceful character, who appeals to the buoyancy and ambition of youth. He must be a worker. He must be an intelligent friend of true sport. He must be a scholar; he must know the literature of the schools; he must be specially proficient in educational history, and pedagogical theory and method; and he must keep up with progress in the organization and work of schools in other districts, in other states, and in other countries. He must have a share in educational meetings in the State and nation to the end that he may possibly contribute to their potential strength, and certainly to the end that he may get from them the aids which will help him to do the most for his own schools. Withal, he must be a sane and balanced character, who is familiar with affairs, who is neither an eccentric nor a bombast, who can move among the people on at least equal terms, to whom teachers may be naturally disposed to look for guidance, and to whose judgment and influence parents may be glad to submit the future of their children. One can not be all this, nor any appreciable part of it, unless he is a balanced character and is a student of it; nor unless he has had experience at it. He must have judgment and discrimination. He must be able to resist, as well as to do. He can not fill this place and divide his time and thought with any other business. He can have no other interest which will take his time, or his thought, or which will warp his judgment, for the place demands all the thought, and all the force, of an all-around man or woman who has become an expert in the organization and administration of schools. What such an one can do for the schools can not be fully described; indeed, it can hardly be appreciated by one not familiar with the complex educational activities of the country. But that is what we mean by school supervision. No such supervision in the farming districts Such supervision has developed very rapidly in the cities of the State in the last forty or fifty years. It is this that has made for the quite uniform excellence of the city schools. It is this, at least, that has made the schools notably good in the cities where the best superintendents have been long continued. 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.