4. Parents should visit the schools which their children attend. Without this they can have no very correct idea of the state of things in the schoolroom. Common report concerning the affairs of a school is not always correct. By visiting the school, parents can at once see, if the teacher is honest, the comparative standing of their children. They will become more interested in the objects and business of the school, and — what will be of infinite worth both to teacher and pupils - it will convince them all that the parents have some sense of the importance of the improvement made there. The pupils will be quickened to diligence and the teacher to activity and faithfulness. And is not the rate of purchase very low when the advantage is so great?

5. Parents should promptly and cheerfully supply the required books and apparatus for the school. The teacher cannot work without tools; the parent ought not to expect it. If a parent has any doubt about the propriety of a call for a new book, he should at once see the teacher. Never should he send an uncivil or angry message by the child. An interview of five minutes may put the matter peaceably at rest, and save both parties much unpleasant feeling.

Besides, schoolbooks are now less expensive than formerly. The parent in most cases can better afford to buy a book than to spend his time in talking about it. Often the pupil loses more by a delay of one week than the value of the book many times told, for there is no estimating improvement by dollars and cents. We grant that an oversupply and too frequent changes of schoolbooks are a great and sore evil; but this, at least, is not the fault of the instructor. No good can possibly come of disputing a question with him which has been settled already by the school authorities.

6. Parents should see that their children are decently clothed and cleanly in their persons. This duty belongs mainly to the mother, and her character may be very readily seen as reflected in the persons of her children.

The

teacher has a right to expect of the parents the faithful performance of this duty. He ought not to be insulted with filthiness; and surely he need not be, so long as soft water falls in rich abundance from the heavens, and a pair of scissors and a comb are possessed by every family. He can have no heart to come in contact with pupils who are sometimes so sadly neglected in this particular. This point, however, is so obvious that we need not waste words upon it.

7. Parents are bound to secure the constant attendance of their children. This is no trifling article of their duty. Perhaps there is no one thing to be named which contributes so largely to the perplexities of the teacher and to the injury of our public schools as irregular attendance. Real illness of the child is a good excuse for absence from school; and perhaps we may add, in some instances, illness in the family. But beyond these, it seems to us, there can be no good reason for keeping a scholar from his school. It is discouraging to see for what trifling causes many of the children are kept away.

Frequently it happens that some errand as trifling-if we may be allowed to be specific-as the purchase of a cent's worth of yeast is made the occasion of a half day's absence from school, occasioning thereby an injury to the child's mind which cannot be estimated in dollars and cents. Who can compute the amount of idle habits of study having their foundation in that indifference to education which, for some trifling errand, permits the child to be away from his class and thus practically teaches him to consider his school a very cheap affair?

Every school, if the teacher would lay out his strength to advantage, should be classified. The teacher's mind must act, as far as practicable, upon masses of mind. But irregularity of attendance is most ruinous to classification. A pupil absent one half the time is, to all intents and purposes of the school, absent all the time. One day he is absent,

and, of course, loses all that day's lessons; the next day he is present, but is still deficient in his lessons, because, as he says to his teacher, "I was absent yesterday and, not knowing where to study, I have not studied at all!" Again he is absent-again he is present. The same result follows, and at the week's end he has learned nothing as it should be learned. Such is the effect upon the pupil himself.

But the difficulty is not now half told. He is a member of the school—the teacher must consider him such; and as the parents of such pupils often make fair promises for the future, the teacher feels bound to keep him, if possible, along with his class. To effect this, the class must be often put back on his account, which operates as a severe discouragement to them.

Sometimes the instructor is obliged to devote particular attention to this pupil singly, by which the other pupils are robbed of the proportion of his time which is their due. They are, moreover, obliged to suffer an injury the most unpleasant of all. For when pupils who are always at their posts have learned their lessons well, it is cruel in the last degree that they should be deprived of the pleasure of showing their faithfulness the pleasure of a good recitation.

Nor is this all. The teacher, the unthought-of teacher, is not made of iron or brass. His patience being so frequently, so thoughtlessly, and so unnecessarily taxed and his best efforts being so ill-requited, he must, unless he is superhuman, relax his exertions. He will find it next to impossible for a series of weeks or months, after having labored faithfully without success, to maintain his interest and his efficiency under all the discouraging circumstances of the case. As soon as his spirits flag, the whole school will imperceptibly catch the feeling, and they are all sufferers. This is not an extreme case. It is not a fancy picture. It is not speculation. It is history! And I am sorry to be obliged to add, it is the exact history of most of our public schools!

Can any wonder, then, that we earnestly urge that parents should cooperate with the teacher in this particular? And shall it ever be that for some trifling errand which, by early rising, may be as well done long before school hours, or for some pretext originating in the imbecility or lack of forethought of our children's natural guardians - must it ever be that the teacher's life shall be a life of perplexity, and the design of our public school system shall be so far frustrated?

What has been said of irregular attendance will apply with equal force to want of punctuality to the hour of opening the school. The reasons for tardiness are often more futile, if possible, than those for entire absence. The effects upon the school are nearly the same; for the current proverb, "better late than never," will hardly hold in this case. But the effects of tardiness are more disastrous upon the child. He is allowed to be his own teacher of a most deleterious lesson. Let it never be forgotten that it is just as easy to be strictly punctual as otherwise, and the parent who will not lay the foundation of a habit so valuable in a child, when it can be done without cost, deserves not the privilege of being a parent. He betrays his trust! He injures his own child!

8. Parents should be slow to condemn the teacher for supposed faults. This is a point upon which many are apt to act wrongly. Too often is it the case that a teacher is tried and publicly condemned without even a hearing. Some troublesome, precocious youth, who has received, it may be very justly, some proportionate reward for his deeds, determines upon revenge. He immediately tells his story to any who will hear it. If his parents are inconsiderate and encourage him to go on, he is tempted to overreach the truth on the one hand, and to stop short of it on the other, till he succeeds in having the combustible material around him lighted into a flame. Such a fire is seldom kindled without most severely scathing somebody, and it sometimes

happens that those most burned are they who apply the match and fan the flames.

The truth is, few parents are capable of judging at the first blush upon the merits of a case which they have not witnessed. They have strong partialities in favor of the complainant. Then, too, they have but very inadequate views of the difficulties. the untold and untellable difficulties with which the teacher must daily contend.

We undertake to say that parents often expect more of a teacher than he can possibly accomplish. They expect him to advance their children in learning, without making proper allowance for the difference of abilities which his pupils possess. Every parent wishes his son to be foremost in improvement, and he expects it, because he wishes it. At the same time, he expects the school to be a perfect pattern of good order, because in his family, where perhaps he has but one child, he has never known an insurmountable difficulty. He forgets that probably fifty other parents are expecting for their children as much as he for his, and that the teacher is laboring with a laudable ambition to do faithfully all that can be expected of him with some three or four score of individuals whose tempers and capacities and habits are as different as their countenances.

In judging of the teacher's government, the parent commonly compares it with his own family discipline, because the family is the only community with which he is acquainted that is at all analogous to the school. He forgets, perhaps, his own recent fits of impatience even among his little circle of some half a dozen, and he wonders at the unrestrained and unrestrainable temper of the schoolmaster who, it is said, was not quite self-possessed in his school of a hundred.

But the analogy does not hold between the family and the school. The parent has authority in the premises from which, to all intents, there is no appeal; and the children know it. He has several rooms at his command for solitary confinement or for private reproof and reasoning. More