As was my custom wherever I went, I asked permission to visit and inspect some of the schools of this place. The superintendent of schools for Cincinnati was so good as to take me over the largest graded school in the city. We spent in it three hours. There were present about 600 children. The school was divided into six grades. In New York and most other places two of the grades would have belonged to the Grammar School. We began at the bottom and worked up to the top. They teach reading, as is generally now done in America, phonetically. This they think an easier method. They are not at all ambitious in their reading books, because they do not aim at conveying knowledge of things through the medium of reading lessons, but content themselves with creating the habit of reading correctly, and with attention to the meaning of what is read; and this is more likely to be secured, if the book consists of little interesting stories, than would be the case if it contained solid information. What in the upper grades they write to-day, is what they remember of an object lesson given on the previous day. This trains them to remember, to think, and to compose. There is no writing from copies, which children generally get through as quickly as they can, without any attention or thought. Singing is carefully taught, and so is elementary drawing, particularly in connection with the construction of maps. They begin the study of Geography, with the geography of the school-room, which is the North, the East, the South, and the West side: and then they go on to what is beyond. The geography of the United States is taught carefully. It often struck me in America that the geography of the rest of the world was almost ignored. In these schools the reading was very good, and from the readiness and correctness of their answers, it was evident that they were in the habit of attending to what they were reading, and that they completely mastered its meaning. It is not to be expected that children, when they leave school, will keep up their reading, if they have not been taught to read with facility, and so far to understand what they read as to take an interest in it.