full endorsement to the former recommendation by the passage of the high-school law. To its partial endorsement of the latter I have elsewhere referred.

As soon as other duties, and a full previous consideration of the task would allow, I prepared a circular setting forth the purpose and character of the high-school law, with such comments upon its provisions as would render them easily intelligible, and with what appeared to be judicious courses of instruction for the schools contemplated.

As this circular was not ready for distribution until August, and as the law was not generally known and understood throughout the State previously, no schools could be in operation under its provisions until September, or later. Hence it is impossible to embrace in the present report any statistics of the number, character, work, and cost of these schools. Full information respecting them will be given in my next report.

I am enabled to say, however, that the law has met with very general favor, and that there is reason to believe it will, in due time. accomplish all that its projectors and friends have anticipated. I herewith present the circular, above referred to, and follow it with brief reports from the county superintendents respecting its popularity, and its applicability to the needs of their respective localities.

HIGH-SCHOOL CIRCULAR.

OFFICE OF SUPT. OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION,

MADISON, August 8, 1875.

To school officers and the friends of education in Wisconsin: Dr. Ryerson, for thirty years past the distinguished and successful chief superintendent of public instruction of the province of Ontario, Canada, recently said, in substance, of the American public school-system, that in the cities and larger villages it gives admirable results, the schools there being among the best in the world: but that in giving nothing better to rural neighborhoods than the present ungraded district schools it is there deserving of no praise. The results there accomplished, he asserts, are "far below and short of the State appropriations made and the machinery employed for the sound education of the people." Yet he maintains that the rural parts of the State are "the peculiar field of a national schoollaw and system."

Hon. Newton Bateman, of Illinois, says in his last biennial report: "Leaving out of view the many exceptional cases, it may be broadly affirmed that the educational facilities afforded in the cities and towns, as a whole, are so superior to those afforded in the country districts, as a whole, as to make it easier to contrast than to compare them."

An intelligent writer, in a recent number of the Illinois Schoolmaster, says: "It is a sad comment on the intelligence of the age that the status of the district schools of to-day is but little better than that of twenty years ago."

When some eighteen months ago the writer of this had just been elected to the office he holds, a legal friend incidentally, but with some earnestness, saip to him: "I hope you will turn your chief attention to the school-house at the cross-roads."

The poor character and the scanty amount of the instruction in "the school-house at the cross-roads," have long been known and deplored by intelligent American educators. The short-comings of that school, scarcely less forcibly indicated by the suggestive advice of the lawyer, who was in no sense an educational man, than by the direct testimony of some of the most experienced and wisest of educational men, are a source of constant concern to those entrusted with school supervision.

Nay, the State itself acknowledges the failure, and seeks by various means a remedy. It provides costly Normal Schools, and numerous institutes for the better qualification of teachers. It establishes a system of examinations and licenses by which it is supposed the incompetent will be debarred from a work they are unqualified to perform. These things it does chiefly in the interest of country schools. Cities and towns will generally afford good educational facilities without the aid of the supervising machinery of the State. The chief defects of the country schools are the following:

1. The teachers are unqualified. They are generally youthful, of very slender intellectual attainments, inexperienced, and untrained.

2. The schools are ungraded. There are consequently so many studies and classes that even the most accomplished teachers would labor under serious disadvantages from want of time.

3. The course of instruction is so limited that it is not sufficient for the desires and needs of very many of the brighter and more advanced pupils.

It is not a reproach to the teachers of country schools that they

are young and unqualified. The schools do not offer them inducements to more than temporary, casual, and inefficient work.

It is not wholly a reproach to the country districts that inducements to higher qualifications are not offered by the schools. Country districts generally have a scanty population and limited means for providing good educational facilities.

It is chiefly a reproach to the State system that it has taken no means to remove the suprising inequality of educational privileges enjoyed by those in different localities, and especially by the many in the country, and the few in cities and towns.

Not merely in strictly rural districts, but in many villages-even those which may number their inhabitants by the thousand-the schools fall below a reasonable standard in both the character and extent of the instruction they afford. Even here the teachers are poorly paid, are often inefficient, and are perpetually changing. The course of instruction is so limited that it does not meet the demands of all the pupils. Many of these must go from home to obtain not only the preparation that shall fit them for college, but even that which shall fairly qualify them for certain business avoations.

The causes of these deficiencies are to be found partly in a public sentiment that fails to appreciate and demand higher educational facilities, and deems the cost of them too burdensome, and partly in the inexperience of school-boards which are perpetually changing their membership and have no just conception of either their duty or their responsibility. The chief cause here, however, is also in the want of any well organized system by which the activities of these schools can be in common directed and sustained. Local independence is carried to an unwise extreme. The State affords but a very small fractional part of their support, and has almost nothing to say in regard to their courses of study, the qualifications of their teachers, their relations to other schools, and their general management.

Nominally we have a State system of public instruction, but practically this system is a great aggregation of nearly independent local schools, bound together by the gossamer threads of an annual "report" and an annual distribution of a pittance of a few cents to each school child. In the matter of an efficient system, securing the best results from the money expended, several other countries

are in advance of us, not only in respect to the schools of rural neighborhoods, but also the uniformly good character of those in towns and villages.

Again, the defective character of our State system is seen in the absence of a sufficient number of schools preparatory to the State University. The latter has been established at the head of our system for the benefit of the entire State; but the creation and maintenance of local means of preparation for the university have been left to chance. The State has prescribed no preparatory courses of study, and has offered no material aid for the support of such courses. The consequence is that in but very few of the public schools can full preparation for the Freshman classes of the university be had, and the latter is still obliged to do a large amount of preparatory work which is below its legitimate sphere of performance. The graded or high schools of most cities and larger villages have courses which if slightly increased would give the desired preparation; but to accomplish this increase; it is asserted, would add to the already heavy burden of cost for the benefit of only a very small number of pupils. Hence, these schools are usually graded without reference to anything above them, and the few bright and ambitious youth who desire university culture must seek elsewhere, at an age when they most need home influences, the full preparation which should be more safely and inexpensively af forded them at home.

To recapitulate, the defects in the educational system are: first, and chiefly, in the country district schools, where we find the teachers young and inefficient, the subjects of instruction and the classes instructed too numerous, and the absence of the incentives that local schools of higher grade afford; second, in the schools of many villages and cities, where we too frequently find poor instruction in the higher studies, and generally find the course of these studies too limited; and third, in the consequent isolation of the State University from the system of schools beneath it.

The most experienced and thoughtful educational men of the State hold that a remedy for these defects is to be found in a systematic encouragement and guidance of secondary (academic or high-school) instruction.

Let the State make a special appropriation, as is wisely done in some others, for the benefit of high schools, and let these be mulD-SUPT.

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tiplied and rendered more efficient throughout the whole commonwealth. Let their relations to the existing country district schools be such as to relieve, encourage, and strengthen them; and let their relations to the university, on the other hand, be such as to enable it to properly perform its own legitimate, large, and beneficent work in the field of higher culture.

These were the ideas of the framers and supporters of the free high-school law of last winter, a law which, it is hoped, will materially tend to unify and strengthen all the educational forces of the State. To explain the origin, purpose, and character of this law, and to commend it to the intelligent interest of the people of Wisconsin, for whose benefit it was enacted by their chosen representatives, is the chief purpose of this circular.

A perusal of the law herewith given, with such comments as will be likely to render its provisions easily intelligible, will show that its leading purpose is to encourage the establishment of township high schools, and thus to afford to rural neighborhoods the benefit of the higher educational facilities usually found only in cities and some large villages. It is the hope of the friends of this law that very many of the rural townships of the State will avail themselves of the adyantages it offers. Some have already intelligently taken steps to do so, and many others are considering and discussing the propriety of similar action. In order to make clear the wisdom of the township school, its relation to the existing district schools and its influence upon the latter, no more excellent illustration can be found than is embodied in the graphic words of Hon. Newton Bateman, in the last Illinois school-report, to which earnest attention is invited:

AN ILLUSTRATION.

To place in a clear light the indirect influence referred to, in at least one of its manifestations, we will take a familiar case. Here is a rural township divided into six districts, (the average number,) and in each district there is and for years has been one ordinary common school. No one of these six schools is particularly different from or better than the others. In each there is the usual diversity of ages, attainments, and conditions; the usual books and studies, and the multiplication of classes incident to the necessities of the case. For the law admits all the youth in each district between the ages of six and twenty-one years, and during part of the year, at least, nearly all are in attendance. Little fellows who have just touched the line of eligibility, are there, for the first time, with their primers and spelling-books, intent upon mastering the mysteries of the alphabet. There, too, are young men and