in finding teachers competent for this work, and no trouble at all in finding any number of men held abundantly qualified to be directors, trustees, managers, and superintendents of such education.
But the system was no sooner entered upon than it began to undergo a series of changes which were, of course, characterized as improvements. There were at first much crudeness, laxity, and irregularity in the schools, and these were to be replaced by better order and closer and more methodical work. The scope of instruction began to widen, and new subjects were introduced. Courses of study were laid out requiring years to complete them. The pupils were classed and graded, and this necessitated the gathering of larger numbers in the same establishment. Lesser schools were absorbed under the policy of expansion. With more diversified study, a complicated system of examinations, markings, and promotions grew up, which required a special apprenticeship of the teachers to work in it. The department of normal schools was instituted to meet the new demands on teachers, and, as the system was regulated by State authority, it was reduced to constantly increasing uniformity in all details of management.
In this way the public schools underwent a radical change, by which what had no existence at first gradually came to be of supreme importance. Liberty on the part of both teacher and pupil disappeared, and they became the passive subjects of inflexible regulation. Rules grew sacred, and there was no sin so great as to be absent from school a day, or not to be promptly on hand at the moment for starting. The officials directed everything, decided what and how much to study, hours of attendance, recesses or no recesses, and put as much or as little pressure as they pleased upon school operations. As a consequence, a gigantic mechanical system was created, the perfection of which consisted in the mechanical element. There are many who think that the system is now essentially perfected, and that, to gain its highest advantages, nothing remains but to augment its resources, and drive it with increasing vigor. Yet experience is disclosing grave difficulties in its working, and difficulties, moreover, which spring out of the alleged perfections of the method. That which characterizes it is the completeness of organization for dealing with pupils in masses; and the vice which is now widely recognized in its operations is, that the individuality of pupils is sacrificed to the perfect working of the mechanical arrangements.
Of course, in the nature of the case, the greater the number of children operated upon, the less is the consideration that can be given to each personality. Children are treated by a plan which implies that they are alike, but the assumption is not true. They are unlike, the differences among them are great; and, when it comes to the processes of education, these differences are fundamental. The fact which is neglected in machine education is the most important fact of the case. The palpable differences in physical aspect by which each is known as an individual extends through the whole nature. Children differ widely in their mental faculties, in their capacity of apprehension and retention, in attitude for different kinds of mental effort, in quickness of perception, in moral sensibility, and power of self-restraint, in organic soundness, and the capability of endurance. To cultivate them all alike is to do violence to those peculiarities which make up the individuality. They can neither be taught m the same way with the same results, nor plied by the same motives with equal effect, nor subjected to the same degree of strain without injurious consequences. Say what we will, there in an undoubted antagonism between the necessities and rights of individual children and the inexorable
