ecific standards that he kept continually in mind, the progress toward
which he constantly watched. And last, but by no means least, he carried
with him wherever he went an atmosphere of breezy good nature and
cheerfulness, for he had mastered the first principle in the art of both
supervision and teaching; he had learned that the best way to promote
growth in either pupils or teachers is neither to let them do as they
please nor to force them to do as you please, but to get them to please
to do what you please to have them do.

I instance this superintendent as one type of efficiency in supervision.
He was efficient, not simply because he had a system that scrutinized
every least detail of his pupils' growth, but because that scrutiny
really insured growth. He obtained the results that he desired, and he
obtained uniformly good results from a large number of young, untrained
teachers. We have all heard of the superintendent who boasted that he
could tell by looking at his watch just what any pupil in any classroom
was doing at just that moment. Surely here system was not lacking. But
the boast did not strike the vital point. It is not what the pupil is
doing that is fundamentally important, but what he is gaining from his
activity or inactivity; what he is gaining in the way of habits, in the
way of knowledge, in the way of standards and ideals and prejudices, all
of which are to govern his future conduct. The superintendent whom I
have described had the qualities of balance and perspective that enabled
him to see both the woods and the trees. And let me add that he taught
regularly in his own central high school, and that practically all of
his supervision was accomplished after school hours and on Saturdays.

But my chief reason for choosing his work as a type is that it
represents a successful effort to supervise that part of school work
which is most difficult and irksome to supervise; namely, the formation
of habits. Whatever one's ideals of education may be, it still remains
true that habit building is the most important duty of the elementary
school, and that the efficiency of habit building can be tested in no
other way than by the means that he employed; namely, the careful
comparison of results at successive stages of the process.

II

The essence of a true habit is its purely automatic character. Reaction
must follow upon the stimulus instantaneously, without thought,
reflection, or judgment. One has no