The supreme purpose of supervision is the improvement of the quality of instruction. Before the days of supervision, the responsibility for establishing or maintaining standards of instruction fell entirely upon the individual teacher. Many schools today, especially in rural communities or villages, have no supervision. The instruction in the classrooms is just as efficient or just as inefficient as the several teachers make it. There are also hundreds of city schoolrooms in which there is practically no supervision of instruction, the teacher being a law unto herself. If we turn back to the beginnings of elementary instruction in this country, we find that the outstanding feature was the gross inefficiency of the teachers. The training of small children, far from being considered a serious business, was carried on in addition to the regular activities of life. Pupils of tender age attended the dame school. This was a school kept in the kitchen of some dame, who, for a consideration, initiated small children into the mysteries of the three R's while attending to her household duties. In England at the same period similar schools kept by men. In 1581 Edmund Coote published a textbook which was highly recommended to tailors, cobblers, shopkeepers, and the like on the ground that it was so arranged that any person could hear the children recite their lessons without in any way interfering with the pursuit of his trade. Such conditions inevitable before the days of teacher-training and before we had an educational philosophy, psychology, or technique of method. Of those days it might be said that, if there any good teachers, they were born, not made. The first important step in improving instruction was the introduction of textbooks. To the inefficient, untrained teacher a text498