There are then, it must be recollected, three different parties connected with every establishment for education:  the parents of the scholars, the teacher, and the pupils themselves.  Sometimes, as, for example, in a common private school, the parents are not organized, and whatever influence they exert they must exert in their individual capacity.  At other times, as in a common district or town school, they are by law organized, and the school committee chosen for this purpose are their legal representatives.  In other instances, a board of trustees are constituted by the appointment of the founders of the institution, or by the Legislature of a state, to whom is committed the oversight of its concerns, and who are consequently the representatives of the founders and patrons of the school.

There are differences between these various modes of organization which I shall not now stop to examine, as it will be sufficiently correct for my purpose to consider them all as only various ways of organizing the employers in the contract by which the teacher is employed.  The teacher is the agent; the patrons represented in these several ways are the principals.  When, therefore, in the following paragraphs I use the word employers, I mean to be understood to speak of the committee, or the trustees, or the visitors, or the parents themselves, as the case in each particular institution may be; that is, the persons for whose purpose and at whose expense the institution is maintained, or their representatives.

Now there is a very reasonable and almost universally established rule, which teachers are very frequently prone to forget, namely, the employed ought always to be responsible to the employers, and to be under their direction. So obviously reasonable is this rule, and, in fact, so absolutely indispensable in the transaction of all the business of life, that it would be idle to attempt to establish and illustrate it here.  It has, however, limitations, and it is applicable to a much greater extent, in some departments of human labor than in others.  It is applicable to the business of teaching, and though I confess that it is somewhat less absolute and imperious here, still it is obligatory, I believe, to a far greater extent than teachers have been generally willing to admit.

A young lady, I will imagine, wishes to introduce the study of Botany into her school.  The parents or the committee object; they say that they wish the children to confine their attention exclusively to the elementary branches of education.  “It will do them no good,” says the chairman of the committee, “to learn by heart some dozen or two of learned names.  We want them to read well, to write well, and to calculate well, and not to waste their time in studying about pistils, and stamens, and nonsense.”