upon scientific principles and requiring practice to secure
skill. One of the greatest tasks of the teacher is to _psychologize_ the
subject-matter for his pupils,--that is, so to select, organize, and
present it that the child's mind naturally and easily grasps and
appropriates it. Teaching, when it has become an art, which is to say,
when the teacher has become an artist, is one of the most highly skilled
vocations. It is as much more difficult than medicine as the human mind
is more baffling than the human body; it is as much more difficult than
preaching as the child is harder to comprehend and guide than the adult;
it is as much more difficult than the law as life is more complex than
logic.

Yet, while we require the highest type of preparation for medicine, the
ministry, or the law, we require but little for teaching. We pay
enormous salaries to trained experts to apply the principles of
scientific management to our industries or our business, but we have
been satisfied with inexpert service for the teaching of our children.
We are making fortunes out of the stoppage of waste in our factories,
but allowing enormous waste to continue in our schools. _If we were to
put into practice in teaching the thoroughly demonstrated and accepted
scientific principles of education as we know them, we could beyond
doubt double the educational results attained by our children._

_Teaching in the rural school_

The criticisms just made on our standards of teaching will apply in some
degree to all our schools from the kindergarten to the university; but
they apply more strongly to the rural schools than to any other class.
For the rural schools are the training-ground for young, inexperienced,
and relatively unprepared teachers. Except for the comparatively small
proportion of the town or city teachers who are normal school or college
trained, nearly all have served an apprenticeship in the rural schools.
Thus the rural school, besides its other handicaps, is called upon to
train teachers for the more favored urban schools.

Careful statistical studies[5] have shown that many rural teachers, both
men and women, have had no training beyond that of the elementary
school. And not infrequently this training has taken place in the rural
school of the type in which they themselves take up teaching. The
average schooling of the men teaching in the rural schools of the entire
country is less than two years above the elementary school