His school can stand for something,—­perhaps for something new and strange which will bring him into the limelight to-day, no matter what its character; perhaps for something solid and enduring, something that will last long after his own name has been forgotten.  The temptation was never so strong as it is to-day for the supervisor to seek the former kind of glory.  The need was never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content with the impersonal glory of the latter type.

I admit that it is a somewhat thankless task to do things in a straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feathers, and I suppose that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause of the pit.  But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause of education a vast amount of harm.  I know a principal who won ephemeral fame by introducing into his school a form of the Japanese jiu-jitsu physical exercises.  When I visited that school, I was led to believe that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the American people.  Whole classes of girls and boys were marched to the large basement to be put through their paces for the delectation of visitors.  The newspapers took it up and heralded it as another indication that the formalism of the public school was gradually breaking down.  Visitors came by the hundreds, and my friend basked in the limelight of public adulation while his colleagues turned green with envy and set themselves to devising some means for turning attention in their direction.

And yet, there are some principals who move on in the even tenor of their ways, year after year, while all these currents and countercurrents are seething and eddying around them.  They hold fast to that which they know is good until that which they know is better can be found.  They believe in the things that they do, so the chances are greatly increased that they will do them well.  They refuse to be bullied or sneered at or laughed out of court because they do not take up with every fancy that catches the popular mind.  They have their own professional standards as to what constitutes competent schoolmanship,—­their own standards gained from their own specialized experience.  And somehow I cannot help thinking that just now that is the type of supervisor that we need and the type that ought to be encouraged.  If I were talking to Chinese teachers, I might preach another sort of gospel, but American education to-day needs less turmoil, less distraction, fewer sweeping changes.  It needs to settle itself, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is trying to do.  And it needs, above all, to rise to a consciousness of itself as an institution manned by intelligent individuals who are perfectly competent themselves to set up craft standard and ideals.

IV
   [Transcriber’s note:  This is a typographical error in
   the original, and should read “V”]