School systems, where there are any, seem designed for the special purpose of making the school a machine which should do credit to the individuals who run it. This would be excusable with an actual machine made of wood and metal, but children are not tough enough to be put to such use. Besides, there is better use for them. It is not odd that teachers should look out for themselves and for their own records in the management of schools. If they don’t look out for Number One they will be an exception to all the rest of humanity. Nevertheless, compared with the children, the teachers’ number one as about one to fifty, and their importance should be judged from this standpoint of comparison. School systems of study seem based on the capacity of the stupidest pupils. All the others must crawl because the stupid ones cannot walk. This isn’t right. If armies were trained in that way we never would have any soldiers. Let schools, like regiments, have their awkward squads to be specially trained, so that they may catch up with those who are proficient. What are the branches in which the common schools give elementary instructions? Spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and grammar. The farther from the large city, the surer the student is of getting any instruction beyond those branches during the first six or seven years of a common-school course. He may be qualified by home reading to go into the natural sciences or into mathematics at an early age, but that isn’t part of the system. It seldom pleases the teacher of a graded school to be told of such acquirements of a new pupil. The school exists not to improve the intelligence of the pupil from the standpoint at which the teacher finds it, but to give him such instruction as the teacher is already detailed and instructed by law to give. A boy may forget all he knows of natural science, or algebra, or geometry, in the many years in which he is drilled in elementary studies leading up to the branches which he already understands.