The objection, therefore, has no foundation either in fact or in reason. There is moreover another consideration not to be overlooked. In this matter of education, it is after all but a small part which the school does for a child. The main part of the child's education always takes place at home. The teacher is at best only an aid to the parent, supplementing the influences of the home and the street. The child is taking lessons continually from the father and mother, whether they mean it or not. Every teacher knows how much more rapidly a child improves at school, whose parents are well educated, and how difficult it is to teach a child who at home lives in an atmosphere of profound ignorance. The mind of the one whose home is a region of darkness and intellectual torpor, will be dwarfed and distorted, no matter what the efforts of its teachers. The mind of the one, on the contrary, whose home is the abode of intellectual light, warmth, and sunshine, will have a corresponding growth and expansion at school. There is a continual unconscious tuition, good or bad, received from the very atmosphere of the family. Besides this, there is a great deal of direct, active duty to be performed by the parent in the education of the child. No matter how good the school, or how faithful the teacher, there always remains much to be done by the parent, even in regard to the school duties. The parent must see that lessons are prepared, that the child is properly provided with books, that the meal times and the other arrangements of the household are such as to help forward the child's studies. There are a hundred things which the father and mother can do to help or to hinder the work of the school. A child, whose parents give proper home supervision over his studies, will, other things being equal, make twice the progress of one whose parents give the matter no attention. The community, therefore, in establishing common schools, does by no means take the whole matter of education out of the hands of the parent. On the contrary, it still leaves with him the most important and necessary of the duties connected with the education of his children, while it gives him aids for the performance of the remaining duties, which no private means can ordinarily supply.