“Our third criticism is that the teacher appears to do too little; her share in the lesson is at a minimum; the new ideas do not come from her, her influence is indirect. Here, again, the American would say, so much the better. The democratic ideal is undoubtedly one cause for the existence and the popularity of the recitation method. The teacher and the pupils are very much on a level. She is not teaching them; she acts rather as chairman of the meeting, the object of which is to ascertain whether they have studied for themselves in a text-book, and what they think about the material they have been studying. Clearly, then, the master is the text-book, and here we strike on a vital peculiarity of American education. Its aim has been intellectually the mastery of books; with us education has always been very much more, always and everywhere, a personal relation. The children learn from the master or mistress with or without the aid of a book.” “The rise of the method can be explained from historical causes; in the old ungraded rural school of America, meeting perhaps only for a few months in the year, taught, it may be, by a woman in the summer, and a man in the winter, there could be no classification or organization. Each pupil worked through an authorized text-book, much as in the old Scottish rural school, when a plowman might come back for a couple of months to rub up his arithmetic or English in the book if he did not finish before leaving school. The teacher went around and helped individual pupils over difficulties, or heard them ‘recite’ the lesson they had each learnt, while the others went on with their own tasks. Then when the schools came to be graded, a number of pupils at about the same stage could recite together out of the book, and so the recitation method developed, evolved by the American genius for invention to fit the necessities of the position. Among these conditions was the absence of a body of experienced and skilled teachers; much of the work was done by all sorts of people, many with very scanty qualifications, who would ‘teach school’ for a few months to earn enough to go on with some other occupation. Such people could not be in the true sense of the word teachers; they could ‘conduct recitations’ and engage in the friendly questioning and discussion as an equal, which the American method implies. When first-rate, highly qualified, skilled teachers come to play on this instrument they bring forth from it a wonderful result.