QUESTIONS FOR CLASS DISCUSSION 1. Show the growing importance of the work of the teacher, as increased political functions are given to the electorate. 2. Explain why it is natural that citizens and parents should not appreciate the full importance of the work of the teacher or school officer. 3. What evidence can you cite that the younger generation understands, better than the older one, the importance of the work of the school? 4. Show the need for different methods of instruction with pupils in the elementary, junior high-school, and senior high-school years, based on their different interests and attitudes and stage of develop ment. 5. Show how interest in the teaching process tends to prevent continuous teaching in the same grade or type of work from becoming "dull and monotonous routine." 6. Show, from a number of occupations, that the largest personal satisfactions and monetary rewards come to those who prepare themselves best for the work they are to do. 7. Show how English, history, geography, and science might be studied in a normal school or teachers college from quite a different point of view than in a cultural college or university. 8. Show the foundational importance for later professional study of such subjects as biology, psychology, and sociology. 9. Bagley, in his volume on School Discipline, gives a composite judgment of one hundred experienced school men on the elements entering into "teaching personality," as follows: 1. Sympathy 2. Personal appearance 3. Address 4. Sincerity 5. Optimism 6. Enthusiasm 7. Scholarship 8. Physical vitality 9. Fairness 10. Reserve or dignity Are these, one by one, personably improvable qualities? What could the teacher-training school do for each? 10. Show that the increasing education and professional training required of teachers has barely kept pace with the increasing complexity of and advances in our national life. 11. Teachers were once apprenticed, and trained in that way; show why this method broke down, and could not be made to serve today. 12. Discuss the statement that the teachers in our schools can make the future what they please. Apply this idea to industrial understanding, world peace, better government, personal hygiene, health, moral worth, and national integrity. EXERCISES AND PROBLEMS 1. On a scale of ten, rank teaching in comparison with other professions — engineering, medicine, law, the ministry, journalism, banking, business management, architecture under the headings of training needed, salary, tenure, time to achieve success, number of failures, promotion, character of the work, pleasantness of associations, public confidence, self-expression, opportunity for service, usefulness of service rendered. Calculate the average of the rankings, and locate the position of the teaching profession. On the basis of your findings, what reasons have led you, or would lead you, to become a teacher? 2. What would be the effect on the teaching profession if the colleges of the United States were to present clearly, to their better students, the unrivaled opportunities for self-expression and social service which the career of the teacher affords? 3. A bill is proposed in the legislature to require that all teachers in the State, after four years from date, shall have been graduated from a four-year high school and had at least two years of professional training in a normal school or teachers college. The representative from your district has indicated that he would like to receive an opinion, pro or con, from those interested. Write a short letter (two pages) to him, giving your reasons why you hope he will favor (or oppose) the passage of the bill. COLLATERAL READING *Almack, J. C., and Lang, A. R. Problems of the Teaching Profession. (335 pp.) Especially chaps I, II, IX, and XV. *Bagley, W. C., and Keith, J. A. H. An Introduction to Teaching, chaps. I and XI. Horne, H. H. The Teacher as Artist. (63 pp.) *Hyde, Wm. DeWitt. The Teacher's Philosophy. (88 pp.) Kandel, I. L. Ed. Twenty-Five Years of American Education. (467 pp.) *Palmer, G. H. The Ideal Teacher. (32 pp.) Perry, A. C. The Status of the Teacher, part II. *Sears, J. B. Classroom Organization and Control, part IV. *Strayer, G. D., and Englehardt, N. H. The Classroom Teacher, chap. in. Strayer, G. D., and Norsworthy, N. How to Teach, chap. I. *Terman, L. M. The Teacher's Health. (137 pp.) Woodley, O. I., and M. V. The Profession of Teaching, chap. I. Interesting books describing the work of a teacher: Field, Jessie. The Corn Lady. A. Flanagan Co., 1911. Martin, G. M. Emmy Lou. Grosset & Dunlap, 1902. Patri, Angelo. A Schoolmaster of the Great City. Macmillan, 1917. Wray, Angelina. Jean Mitchell's School. Public School Publishing Co., 1909. All the above are quite interesting reading, no one is long, and each reveals something of the work and problems of the teacher in a public school. CHAPTER IX A PHILOSOPHY OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROCESS Need for a guiding philosophy. Every successful undertaking is carried on in the light of some guiding theory or philosophy. A business is conducted to make money by providing goods for sale that people want to buy; a manufactory to make and offer a standard product; a railroad to sell good transportation service; a bank to help build up the country by a wise extension of credit; a Y.W.C.A. to provide homelike Christian surroundings for girls; a vice-prevention society to advance the public welfare through the suppression of vice; and an organization of Bolsheviki to hasten the coming of the millennium by abolishing capitalistic government and the rule of the intelligent. In the conduct of each such organization the management works according to a guiding philosophy that outlines its purposes, sets goals, limits the sphere of action, and determines the methods and processes to be employed. The management, too, tries to give to each working member of the organization as clear a conception of these aims and purposes and goals as is possible, and to create in each a somewhat similar theory as to purposes and service. Many workers, under present industrial conditions, fail to develop such a working spirit, but if one's work anywhere or in anything is to be more than mere day labor, one needs some goal or guiding principle toward which one more or less consciously directs his daily efforts. As individuals, too, wholly aside from our work, we each of us have some kind of a philosophy of life and some personal measure of the successes to which we may attain. Education of even a personal kind would have but little meaning without a sound guiding philosophy, while a Statesupported system of public instruction would be purposeless without such. In few types of service, too, is it so important that every worker be possessed of a personal philosophy of the process that is in harmony with the best philosophy for the school. The lack of such a clear and illuminating guide of the educational process may be set down as one of the reasons for the failure to attain success on the part of many teachers. Such a guiding philosophy is largely the outcome of sound knowledge and good professional preparation. Every teacher should, then, early in his or her teaching career, formulate for himself or herself a clear guiding philosophy of the educative process. The place and time for this is during the training period and the earlier years of teaching service. In such courses as the History of Education, Theory of Education, and Principles of Education one studies the educational problem and formulates a working educational philosophy for one's self. In such courses the student learns to grasp intelligently the conception that education is based on the idea of the improvability of the race, and that the teacher stands as the agent of civilization to try to effect such improvement and advancement. The very great importance, too, of State systems of public instruction in such a form of government as ours comes out plainly, and the prospective teacher gradually comes to see that no other class of workers has so much to do with determining the future of our Nation as do the teachers in our public schools. The history of education is the history of the advancing civilization of our race in one of its highest forms; the theory of the school and of the educational process has repeatedly changed as progress has been made. Still more, the best theory of the educational process is always in advance of the popular conception of the place and |