=Possibilities.=—­It would be a comparatively simple matter to compute in days and weeks the time lost during the year by the thirty-minute teacher, and then estimate the many things that the pupils could accomplish in that time.  If the thirty-minute teacher could be transformed into a ten-minute teacher, the children could have three more hours each day for play, and that would be far better for them than the ordeal of sitting there in the class, the unwilling witnesses, or victims, of the time-wasting process.  Or they might read a book in the two hundred minutes and that would be more enjoyable, and the number of books thus read in the course of a year would aggregate quite a library.  Or, again, they might take some additional studies and so make great gains in mental achievements in their twelve years of school life.  Or they might learn to work with their hands and so achieve self-reliance, self-support, and self-respect.

=Conservation.=—­In a word, there is no higher type of conservation than the conservation of childhood, in terms of time and interest.  The two hundred minutes a day are a vital factor in the life of the child and must be regarded as highly valuable.  The teacher, therefore, who subtracts this time from the child’s life is assuming a responsibility not to be lightly esteemed.  She takes from him his most valuable possession and one which she can never return, try as she may.  Worst of all, she purloins this element of time clandestinely, albeit seductively, in the guise of friendship.  The child does not know that he is the victim of unfair treatment until it is too late to set up any defense.  He is made to think that that is the natural and, therefore, only way of school, and that he must take things as they come if he is to prove himself a good soldier.  So he musters what heroism he can and tries to smile while the teacher despoils him of the minutes he might better be employing in play, in reading, or in work.

=The teacher’s complacency.=—­This would seem a severe indictment if it were incapable of proof, but having been proved by incontrovertible evidence its severity cannot be mitigated.  We can only grieve that the facts are as they are and ardently hope for a speedy change.  The chief obstacle in the way of improvement is the complacency of the teacher.  Habits tend to persist, and if she has contracted the habit of much speaking, she thinks her volubility should be accounted a virtue and wonders that the children do not applaud the bromidic platitudes which have been uttered in the same form and in the same tones a hundred times.  She is so intoxicated with her own verbosity that she can neither listen to the sounds of her own voice nor analyze her own utterances.  While her neighbor is teaching she is talking, and then with sublime nonchalance she ascribes the retardation of her pupils to their own dullness and never, in any least degree, to her own unprofitable use of their time.