One of the greatest difficulties connected with public school music teaching is the inability of some of the grade teachers to teach music. The daily lesson is given by her. The music teacher visits each room once in two, three, or even four weeks. It is not necessarily the grade teacher’s fault if she cannot teach music well, because the training given her in the grade schools and normal school may have been quite inadequate. But teach music she must--as a part of her regular duties. My own observation leads me to believe that a good many grade teachers are capable of doing this work well, that few do it as well as they might do if they were given more training, and that some teach so badly that it results in more harm than good. In any case I am opposed to any transference of the daily lesson from the grade teachers to an expert, not because I think the expert would not do it in some ways better, but because it would mean a very large increase in the expense of our schools and because I believe that only a few grade teachers are incapable under proper training of giving a satisfactory music lesson. Furthermore, I believe in keeping the music lesson as a bond of sympathy between the grade teacher and the children. Singing is an entirely natural art for any human being who begins it in childhood and pursues it through youth. I look forward to the day when we shall all sing. I object to the displacement of the grade teacher in the one function of school life which is intimate, free, and beautiful, in which facts, members, places, events, names are forgotten, and in which the spirit of each child issues forth _under the discipline of beauty_. (I place these words in italics because I am constantly being told that the great thing in the education of children is to give them self-expression; to which I reply that self-expression except under discipline--using the word in its larger sense--has never helped either the individual or the race.) We must look to the normal schools for this improvement in the ability of our teachers to teach music, and the normal schools, in turn, must expect our high schools to send forth their graduates, properly taught in music, so that normal schools will not have to spend time (as they often do now) supplementing the imperfections of the earlier training.