By common consent the teachers of the United States would choose Massachusetts as the State possessing the most interesting educational history. Even though each teacher should express his first preference for his own State, there would be found great unanimity in the second choice.

Upon close examination it appears to the student of education that each State has something unique, some phase of development better represented than can be found elsewhere. In the history of education, as in that of other provinces, it is not merely the invention of good methods that profits us, but the discovery of the bad effects that follow from the use of methods not good. The demonstration of the evils incident to a certain course of study or practice in school administration is a permanent contribution to the science of pedagogy. All methods and appliances which are accounted good have, it is true, their limits, beyond which they are useless, if not . . .