The Daily Manchester American

Here is a text on which we wish to say a word to parents and those interested in our public schools. It is too often the case, in the first place that Committees make mistakes in the selection of teachers. It frequently happens that teachers have no sympathy with children, no patience with mere playfulness, no prudence in managing their pupils—teachers who work merely for the compensation and are happy only when relieved from the requirements of the school-room.

But on the other hand, it is the first duty of a pupil as it is of a soldier to obey. And it is the imperative duty of the parent to exact obedience to the commands of the teacher, so long as the child is required to attend the school. When the parent condemns the action of a teacher before his children, and believes that the child is wholly in the right and the teacher altogether wrong, or what is worse—what in fact is not only a violation of good order but of legal enactment,—when a parent encourages a child to disobedience, or to resistance, when he says "If I were a pupil I would not stand such treatment," he becomes himself the offender and should suffer the punishment which too frequently falls upon the innocent pupil.

Let us admonish parents not to urge their children to a course of conduct which will result not only in injury to the school, but which will inevitably prove a greater injury to the child.