SI'ATE OR MUNICIPAL SUPERVISION OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS. 183 
"i 
wh 
d 
fe 
© 
SUPERVISION OF PRIVATE SCHOOLS BY THE STATE 
OR MUNICIPAL AUTHORITIES.* 
BY REV. JAMES C. MACKENZIE, PH.D., HEAD MASTER OF THE 
LAWRENCEVILLE SCHOOL. NEW JERSEY. 
ar 
Ni 
le 
ir 
nN 
1e 
AT 
1e 
10 
al 
od 
1T 
0 
9 
:L 
if 
Al 
ie 
D2 
4 
if 
Ix our zeal for the advancement of public school education it is to be 
eared that we have ignored two facts: first, that in increasingly large 
numbers everywhere, save in New England, our more prosperous citizens 
nave been sending their children not to the public schools, but to schools 
ind academies essentially private ; and, second, that up to this hour no 
organized movement has been made looking to the systematizing and 
supervising of these private and endowed schools, in which some two mill- 
‘on American boys and girls are being educated. Change but a word 
nere and there, and what Horace Mann said of public school education 
ifty years ago is true of a large part of American education to-day : 
«These schools are so many distinct, independent communities, each 
being governed by its own habits, traditions, and local customs. There 
is no common superintending power over them ; there is no bond of 
yrotherhood or family between them. The teachers are, as it were, 
smbedded each in his own district, and they are yet to be excavated and 
brought together, and to be established, each as a polished pillar of a holy 
temple. As the system is now administered, if any improvement in prin- 
ciples or modes of teaching is discovered by talent or accident in one 
school, instead of being published to the world it dies with the discoverer. 
No means exist for multiplying new truths, or even for preserving old 
ones.” And that corypheus of our educational reform goes on to ask : 
“Do we not need some new and living institution, some animate organ- 
zation, which shall at least embody and diffuse all that is now known, 
ind thereby save every year hundreds of children from being sacrificed to 
>xperiments which have been a hundred times exploded ?” We ask fur- 
‘her : Must each generation of secondary schoolmasters, laying no tribute 
apon capitalized experience, begin its fortunes anew and exhaust all 
sossible errors before arriving at the soundest principles of schoolwork ? 
Happily, America is the last of the highly civilized nations to give 
attention to this large department of the teaching work. Our friends 
here from Germany, France, Russia, and Sweden will tell us what state 
supervision has done for higher education in each of these countries, and 
representatives of the British schools will, from the mixed practice in 
vogue in the United Kingdom, further irradiate the subject from their 
soint of view. 
* The term ** private schools,’ as used in this paper, includes all schools not under the state control— 
..¢., endowed and proprietary schools,