But I shall be told: What kind of schools will those be with bigots, drunken soldiers, expelled scribes, and sextons? And what control can there be over those formless schools? To this I will reply that, in the first place, these teachers, bigots, soldiers, and sextons are not so bad as they are imagined to be. In my school practice I often had to do with pupils from these schools, and some of them could read fluently and write beautifully, and soon abandoned the bad habits which they brought with them from those schools. All of us know peasants who have learned the rudiments in such schools, and it cannot be said that this learning was useless or injurious. In the second place, I will say that teachers of that calibre are especially bad because they are quite abandoned in the backwoods and teach without any aid or instruction, and that now there is not to be found a single one of the old teachers who would not tell you with regret that he does not know the new methods and has himself learned for copper pence, and that many of them, especially the younger church servants, are quite willing to learn the new methods. These teachers ought not to be rejected without further ado as absolutely worthless. There are among them better and worse teachers (and I have seen some very capable ones). They ought to be compared; the better of them ought to be selected, encouraged, brought together with other better teachers, and instructed,--which is quite feasible and precisely the thing in which the duty of the school council is to consist.