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and consequently no teacher can act or can think independently; and it is even whispered that it makes a material difference with a man's chances whether he be a believer in Cotton Mather or in Darwin.

If the Boston Brahmins like this condition of petty servitude to school directors, I am perfectly willing they shall fold their arms with all due meekness and gratitude, leaving the work of reformation to outside barbarians. They get better salaries than we do out West, and consequently are conservative.

Until there is a reform in these defective points of our school system, it seems to me there can be no marked and permanent improvement in our public schools as a whole. There will be individual schools that, under superior teachers, will attain a high degree of excellence; but the general average of the schools can not be raised much higher than it is, because the system neither encourages independent thought nor tolerates progress.

Puttering in conventions over the little details of teaching arithmetic, grammar, and geography, will avail nothing. Men are wanted. to shape legislation, to dig out the debris, and with strong and rough hands to lay the superstructure of a better system of American school supervision and school teaching..

There are some men and women engaged in public school service who make teaching a life-work, who understand their business, and who are earnestly devoted to their work, and the rights and privileges of this class demand a careful consideration. There are only a few States that have any system of professional examinations by which a public school teacher can secure a professional life diploma, and thereafter be exempted from the humiliation of periodic examinations by petty school officials, just emerging from babyhood of official ignorance of the whole subject of education.

And even if a life certificate can be secured in a few States, such as Illinois, Ohio, Iowa, or California, it is of no legal value outside of the particular State in which it is granted. California is the only State that recognizes by law the State diplomas and certificates of other States, by placing them on an equal footing with her own. Were I, after twenty years of continous service as a teacher, as State Superintendent, and as Deputy City Superintendent of San Francisco, holding in my possession dozens of defunct certificates, and a life diploma of the State of California, were I to go back to my native town, and seek employment in my native State by teaching the little "Deestrict School" that I went to when a barefoot boy, I should have to " pass examination" to determine my fitness to teach a little squad of boys and girls to read and write. The school law of New Hampshire not only fails to recognize the educational diplomas of mushroom States like California; but, with true Puritan stubbornness, neglects to provide her own sons, who pick up education enough to become teachers, with any kind of a State document which they can carry with them to the State where they go to earn a living.

It would be the same were I to go "looking out for a school" in Maine, or Vermont, or Massachusetts, or Rhode Island, or Connecticut, or any State in the Union except my own adopted State.

Were my esteemed personal friend Mr. Philbrick, the Superintendent of the Public Schools of Boston, crowned with the wellearned honors of twenty-five years of educational labor, to lose his position at the next annual election, and in consequence, were to emigrate to California, to teach school to earn a living, he would have to pass a rigid written examination, before he could draw a dollar of the school fund for teaching the smallest school, in the roughest mining camp in the State. Massachusetts has provided no means of giving her educational veterans a certificate of publicschool service.

No State in the Union, except California, recognizes by law the normal school diplomas of other States. In fact, many of the States fail to recognize by law the diplomas given to the graduates of their own normal schools.

There ought to be, in every State, a State Board of Examination, made up exclusively of professional teachers, including the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, having power to issue life diplomas to experienced teachers of the highest rank, and certificates. of lower grades to younger teachers, of lower rank; these diplomas and certificates to be issued only upon actual examination in writing, and the record of examination to be indorsed upon the certificates. There ought, also, to be a system of broad and liberal legislation in all the States, by means of which a professional teacher holding & diploma or certificate in one State, should be guaranteed a legal recognition in all the other States.

It is true that this need is more felt in the newer Western and Pacific States than in the older ones. For instance, in California, our teachers are drawn from every other State in the Union. These teachers must pass a written examination in our State, before they can engage in teaching. This requisition often keeps them waiting for several months after their arrival. Occasionally a teacher comes bringing a State certificate or normal school diploma, which is at once recognized under our liberal school law.

But most of the States have failed to provide for any system of State certificates, by means of which their teachers can carry with them, when they emigrate, any written evidence of professional fitness.

If the older States do not feel the local need of some provision of this kind, they owe a duty to their educated sons and daughters, who seek a wider field of action in the newer States. They owe a duty to the cause of National American Education.

In addition to a State system of examination as a means of protecting the public schools against charlatans, ignoramuses, and humbugs generally, it is indispensable that every State have an efficient system of city, county, and township boards of examination.

These boards ought to be made up of each city, county, or town superintendent, together with from three to five professional teachers, themselves holders of high-grade certificates. They should have power to issue, on actual written examinations, certificates of different grades, valid for periods of time ranging from two to ten years, according to grade.

These boards ought to be paid a reasonable sum for their work, otherwise it will not be well done. They ought to be made up exclusively of practical teachers, for the same reason that only lawyers. can legally examine law students applying for admission to the bar, that only physicians examine medical students, and that only clergymen pass on the fitness of theological students to enter the ministry. By combining a system of State, city, county, and town examinations, together with inter-state legislation, something might be done to raise the standard of public school teaching.

It is a matter of surprise that so little has already been done in this direction. It can only be accounted for by the fact that nine tenths of the men and women engaged in keeping school are intending and expecting to get out of the business as soon as they can. Otherwise, they would never submit to the humiliation of successive examinations by petty officials, who often know little or nothing about education, but who delight in a brief official importance.

It is urged against this plan of competitive, professional examinations in writing, that "percentages" represent mere scholarship, and fail to gauge the power to discipline, the tact to manage, and the skill to teach.

This may be true to some extent, but it is also certain that, while some good scholars may fail when submitted to the final test of the school-room, no ignorant teacher can possibly make a good teacher under any circumstances. There is a grade of scholarship below which no man or woman is fitted to make a trial of teaching. Above this standard, some will succeed and some will fail. So it is with graduates of the law schools, the divinity schools, and the medical schools.

It may be urged that boards of examination will show favoritism in issuing certificates to friends. So they will, unless the people elect incorruptible school officers, and appoint incorruptible teachers. The best laws ever framed, and the best systems ever devised, are never binding on corrupt or incapable executive officers.

It may be urged that the diploma of a college ought to be taken as a valid certificate of fitness to teach. Now a college-bred young man may or may not be qualified to teach. I have known many young men coming to California, with flying colors and fresh diplomas, who ignominiously failed to secure a certificate to teach even the lowest grade country school, on an examination in arithmetic, grammar, geography, history, reading, and spelling, so elementary in its character, that to a pupil of average attainment in the second grade of an ordinary grammar school, it would have been mere play. They not only showed no "fitness to teach," but they exhibited a most lamentable ignorance of the very elements required to be taught in every common school. They might have been brilliant in the dead languages, but they misspelled their mother tongue, they murdered English, and they couldn't cipher. There can be no safe and sure test, except actual examination.

I do not deny that the hobby of written examinations may be ridden to death. It has been wickedly said by somebody-doubtless some luckless examinee-that the leading object of many examina

tions is to give the examiners a chance to show off their own attainments. I have seen many sets of questions that seemed to be fossil curiosities, picked up during a life-long search after abnormal things -"tough sums" in arithmetic and algebra, the product of some mathematician run to seed; gleanings of the tag ends of the countless rules, and notes and exceptions, and annotations and explanations, and illustrations and idioms, of Lindley Murray, that great grammarian who wrote bad English, and made sad the hearts of unnumbered generations of school boys and school girls; twisted elliptical sentences to be parsed according to Smith, or Brown, or Greene, or Wells, or Weld, or Sanborn, or Kerl, or Hart, or Clark, or Quackenbos, or Bullion, or Pinneo, or Nokes, or Stokes, or Niles, or Stiles, or Thompson, or Pickwick; unheard-of words of crooked orthography, the gnarled growth of centuries of changes of the English tongue, strung together like onions, in a way that would have brought tears to the eyes of old Webster himself, that dear old philological bush-ranger, who fought orthography on his own hook, in defiance of all usage, and of all laws of linguistic warfare; questions in geography on zig-zag boundaries, on the length of all the rivers of all the world, from the Amazon down to the trout-brooks that we fished in when boys; on the distance of the classic towns of "You Bet" and "Red Dog," in California, from Nijni Novogorod and the sources of the Nile; on the direction of Brandy Gulch and Whisky Cañon from Ujiji and Petropaulovski; questions in history requiring the year and the day of the month of the settlement of every State in the Union, supplemented by senseless interrogatories on historical myths known only in our school text-books; impracticable questions on theory and practice of teaching, about what ought to be done under impossible conditions; questions about elements of penmanship that even such accomplished penmen as Greeley, or Choate, or Napoleon Bonaparte, couldn't answer; questions on Sanscrit roots no Brahmin ever heard of; questions on the constitution that would have floored the "Great Expounder;" questions on physiology that would puzzle Darwin; questions on natural philosophy at which Huxley or Tyndall would be dumb; questions which showed the examiner to be "stick, stark, staring mad," and which no sane man could answer. But a practical system of examinations presupposes a common-sense style of conducting them.

In conclusion, I submit the following propositions for the consideration of teachers, and educators, and legislators:

1. A comprehensive system of State, city, county, and town Boards of Examination.

2. Boards of Examination to be made up of State, city, county, or town superintendents, together with a limited number of professional teachers, appointed in the manner best suited to the school systems of the different States.

3. A graded series of teachers' certificates, from life diplomas down to temporary certificates, valid for one year, granted on actual examination only.

4. Examinations to be conducted in writing, and the percentages obtained in each study to be indorsed on the certificates.

5. A legal recognition by each State of the professional certificates issued in other States.

6. A provision for the legal recognition, by Boards of Examination in each State, of the normal school diplomas issued by the normal schools of other States and other countries.

7. A determined and combined effort to shape legislation so as to secure longer terms of office to State, city, county, and town superintendents, to members of Boards of Education, and to school trustees, thereby securing some degree of uniform progress in educational management.

8. A war of independence, to be waged against the outrageous system of the annual election of teachers, a plan which reduces them below the level of the holder of the smallest post-office in the gift of a victorious political party.

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* The Oral Examination may be conducted at any time, by taking each appli

cant separately.

I. GENERAL QUESTIONS.

1. Name, age, birthplace.

2. Where educated.

3. Experience in teaching.

4. What certificate, if any.

5. Are you an applicant for a State certificate?

2. SPELLING.

I. DICTATION PARAGRAPH.

[50 Credits. Three Credits off for each misspelled word, or misplaced capital.] Had the Plantagenets, as at one time seemed likely, succeeded in uniting all France under their government, it is probable that England would never have had an independent existence. The noble language of Milton and Burke would have remained a

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