and earnest manner, attempted to solve the problem of rural school
supervision. They have merely let things drift along as they would, not
fully realizing the problem or else trusting to time to come to their
aid. Micawber-like, they are waiting for "something to turn up." But
such problems will not solve themselves.

=City Supervision.=--Compare the supervision described above with that
which is usually found in cities. There we usually find a general
superintendent and assistant superintendents; there are high school
principals and a principal at the head of every grade building; there is
also a supervisor of manual training, of domestic science, of music, of
drawing, and possibly of other subjects. When we consider, too, that the
teachers in the city are all close at hand and that the supervisor or
superintendent may drop into any room at any time with scarcely a
minute's notice, we see the difference between city supervision and
country supervision. Add to this the fact that cities attract the strong
teachers--the professionally trained teachers, the output of the
professional schools--and we can see again how effective supervision
becomes in the city as compared with that in the country. In the country
we find only one superintendent for a county often as large as some of
the older states, and the possibility of visiting each school only about
once a year. Here also are the teachers who are not professionalized, as
a rule, and who, therefore, need supervision most.

=The Purpose of Supervision.=--The main purpose of supervision is to
bring teachers up to a required standard of excellence in their work and
to keep them there. It is always the easiest plan to dismiss a teacher
who is found deficient, but this is cutting the knot rather than untying
it. Efficient and intelligent supervision proceeds along the line of
building such a teacher up, of making her strong where she is weak, of
giving her initiative where she lacks it, of inculcating good methods
where she is pursuing poor ones, of inducing her to come out of her
shell where she is backward and diffident. In other words, the great
work of the supervisor is to elicit from teachers their most active and
hearty response in all positive directions. It should be understood by
teachers--and they should know that the superintendent or supervisor
indorses the idea--that it is always better to go ahead and blunder than
to stand still for fear of blundering; and so, i