But in whatever way the supervisor may utilize the opportunity that his position presents, his second great problem will come up for solution.  The supervisor is the captain of the teaching corps.  Directly under his control are the mainsprings of the school’s life and activity,—­the classroom teachers.  It is coming to be a maxim in the city systems that the supervisor has not only the power to mold the school to the form of his own ideals, but that he can, if he is skillful, turn weak teachers into strong teachers and make out of most unpromising material, an efficient, homogeneous school staff.  I believe that this is coming to be considered the prime criterion of effective school supervision,—­not what skill the supervisor may show in testing results, or in keeping his pupils up to a given standard, or in choosing his teachers skillfully, but rather the success with which he is able to take the teaching material that is at his hand, and train it into efficiency.

A former Commissioner of Education for one of our new insular possessions once told me that he had come to divide supervisors into two classes,—­(1) those who knew good teaching when they saw it, and (2) those who could make poor teachers into good teachers.  Of these two types, he said, the latter were infinitely more valuable to pioneer work in education than the former, and he named two or three city systems from which he had selected the supervisors who could do this sort of thing,—­for there is no limit to this process of training, and the superintendent who can train supervisors is just as important as the supervisor who can train teachers.

It would take a volume adequately to treat the various problems that this conception of the supervisor’s function involves.  I can do no more at present than indicate what seems to me the most pressing present need in this direction.  I have found that sometimes the supervisors who insist most strenuously that their teachers secure the cooeperation of their pupils are among the very last to secure for themselves the cooeperation of their teachers.

And to this important end, it seems to me that we have an important suggestion in the present condition of the classroom teacher as I have attempted to describe it.  As a type, the classroom teacher needs just now some adequate appreciation and recognition of the work that she is doing.  If the lay public is unable adequately to judge the teacher’s work, there is all the more reason that she should look to her supervisor for that recognition of technical skill, for that commendation of good work, which can come only from a fellow-craftsman, but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of real inspiration than the loudest applause of the crowd.