The true policy is to aim at making all the pupils good readers, writers, and calculators, and to consider the other studies of the school important chiefly as practice in turning these arts to useful account.

In other words, the scholars should be taught these arts thoroughly first of all, and in the other studies the main design should be to show them how to use, and interest them in using, the arts they have thus acquired.
A great many teachers feel a much stronger interest in the one or two scholars they may have in Surveying or in Latin than they do in the large classes in the elementary branches which fill the school.

But a moment's reflection will show that such a preference is founded on a very mistaken view.

Leading forward one or two minds from step to step in an advanced study is certainly far inferior in real dignity and importance to opening all the stores of written knowledge to fifty or a hundred.

The man who neglects the interests of his school in these great branches to devote his time to two or three, or half a dozen older scholars, is unjust both to his employers and to himself.
It is the duty, therefore, of every teacher who commences a common district school for a single season to make, when he commences, an estimate of the state of his pupils in reference to these three branches.