You can not,
indeed, always form your plans to suit so exactly your general views in
regard to the school and to individuals as you could wish. But these
general views will, in a thousand cases, modify your plans, or affect in
a greater or less degree all your arrangements. They will keep you to a
steady purpose, and your work will go on far more systematically and
regularly than it would do if, as in fact many teachers do, you were to
come headlong into your school, take things just as you find them, and
carry them forward at random without end or aim.
This survey of your field being made, you are prepared to commence
definite operations, and the great difficulty in carrying your plans
into effect is how to act more efficiently on _the greatest numbers at a
time._ The whole business of public instruction, if it goes on at all,
must go on by the teacher's skill in multiplying his power, by acting on
_numbers at once._ In most books on education we are taught, almost
exclusively, how to operate on the _individual_. It is the error into
which theoretic writers almost always fall. We meet in every periodical,
and in every treatise, and, in fact, in almost every conversation on the
subject, with remarks which sound very well by the fireside, but they
are totally inefficient and useless in school, from their being
apparently based upon the supposition that the teacher has but _one_
pupil to attend to at a time.
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