Excerpt from Fourth Annual Report of the Vermont Board of Education: With the Report of the Secretary Made to the Board, September 1860 Teachers were hired, and teachers were paid. Scholars went to the school in the morning and returned home at night. But whether the work intend ed had been done, or not; whether the instruction sought had been obtained or not, few or none could tell. There was no practicable way of knowing. Few persons can, and-none will, enter into the gratuitous work of constant visitation of schools. It is no easy thing even for a man of intelligence and leisure, to find out very much about the school where his own children go, by personal inspection and inquiry. H e can ascertain something about the discipline and spirit of the school. He can obtain a general notion of the faithfulness and qualifications of the teacher; but the punctuality of at tendance, the habitual deportment and the daily progress of even his own children will remain, for the most part. Matters more of conjecture than of knowledge. The facts, with reference to the district as a whole, must, of course, be very inadequately understood. Extend the view over a town. Ship and the confusion becomes hopeless. Take in the whole commonwealth and the confusion is worse confounded; the reign of chaos and old night seems come agam. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.