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Show Hi H THE MEETING OF MANY B TEACHERS. AU REVOIR the schoolmistress; and may the schoolmaster be H abroad in the land. For a week HBL they have been here in such numbers Hi!, as to perceptibly slow down e prog- H ross of evory appreciative man wend- jHr ing hig way in Main street. The man Hi teachers have, impeded his maroh by Betting in hie way; and the women teachers have arrested his advance by the womanly charm of them, and the very good clothes in which they were drest. Experts, like President Mills, of Ogden, say the teachers made as good a record in study as they do in the street. It may have seemed there were a good many of them. There will be five times the number when the public pub-lic school teacher getB her just dues. The average class fo'r teachers at A3sembly Hall on one of the biggest sessioiis of the week was thirty-two pupils. That is more than throe times as many as any teacher should have. No matter what may be the pay of the teacher; no matter how perfectly the grading may be; no matter how oiled and frictionles3 may be the machinery by which boys and girls are caught and crammed with data no living woman can do either them or herself justice with more than ten. Give her that number, and the children chil-dren will really learn. Simply "passing" "pass-ing" will not content them. They will have som,o chance to understand the why of things they now are required to swallow whole and that without a pleasing lubrication. When that time of smaller classes shall come every child will discover something of the work which nature intended him to do, and there will be less loss of time in the too-brief years that follow school. The boy instinctively instinctive-ly aware of the significance and logic of figures will not bo crucified on the cross of art or of literature; and that one that knows grammar at a glance will never be driven into trade. Little by little we of America are going to free ourselves from the fetish of our present public school system. It will not be an abandonment of education, edu-cation, but a better road to learning. And one of the chlefest details in that forward march will be emancipation of the teacher. No man or woman that ever lived can properly care for moro than ten children. No child gets tho chance to which he Is entitled when he divides one teacher among thirty or forty or fifty ether pupils. And the bigger tho school the less will be tho portion of benefit to any one pupil. And there are scores of teachers in Utah and in every other state with upward of half a hundred children on her rolls. They say that a woman gets tho 'school ma'am look" after teaching ten yeans. The wonder is that she looks at all. The wonder Is that we ourselves our-selves don't take one last look at her, and then lay her in all gontlenoss away to the tender nercios of the more kindly worms. The wonder is that she doesn't go plum crazy, and with a bare bodkin reduce the number num-ber of her charges till they get clown to the gize of a group whloh she can handle with benefit to horself and ad-vantage ad-vantage to the child. There is coming a revolution in these matters; and when that fair day shall dawn, little of tho timber now usod in the structure of our old school economy and method will bo available in the new. The departure will be as complete as was that when the wooden ships of which the younger nation was proud resigned tho seas to the better material of metal; and its motive power of wind for the surer service of steam. |