The Common-school system, _as a system_, is certainly admirable. But some _minutiæ_ of its administration may be censured. Teachers are often tasked with too many pupils. I saw a young woman of twenty, toiling in the sway of fifty-two noisy urchins, with twenty of whom I am quite sure my hands would have been over-full: and it was said to be no unusual case. Then, _Webster's spelling book_ is in frequent use. There are half a dozen better ones. And the barbarous usage, of making a child go on to spell in five or six syllables, before he is allowed the refreshment of reading--instead of teaching him to read as soon as he can spell in three letters, and then carrying on the two processes together, to their mutual acceleration--is still kept up, as in our _old-field_ schools.--A usage about as worthy of this enlightened age, as the old rule, of whipping a boy for miscalling a word, or for not crossing a _t_. I was glad to see Warren Colburn's books--his Intellectual Arithmetic particularly--in pretty general use. His merit is, not so much that he has smoothed the road to that child-perplexing branch of knowledge (though in that respect he has entitled himself to every child's gratitude), as that he has rendered the study an improving exercise to the mind--a strengthener and quickener of the reasoning faculty; and has disclosed the _rationalia_ of many processes of calculation, as mysterious before to the young mind as so many feats of jugglery. A pervading fault in the management of the common-schools, is a _false economy_; shewn, in choosing teachers less by their proper qualifications, than by their cheapness. In Connecticut, more especially, this wretched mistake seems to prevail; as a curious fact, told me in Providence, strikingly illustrates. Of the many who go forth from the University there, and from several good Academies in the state of Rhode Island, to find employment as teachers in the adjoining states, few or none, it was said, found it in Connecticut: owing to the niggardly wages paid there. The man for their money, is he who _asks the least_.