BY W. H. PAYNE Chancellor of the University of Nashville and President of the PREFACE IT may help the reader to interpret the doctrines embodied in the following essays if he has before him a brief synopsis of the writer's opinions on the education of teachers. Every man who has patiently studied the problems of education has formed for himself, little by little, an educational creed, or confession of faith; and it is well on such an occasion as the writing of a book to throw into articulate form the articles of one's faith or belief as they relate to the field of thought traversed by writer and reader. Teaching is a spiritual art and classifies with music, poetry and oratory, rather than with the mechanic arts, the arts that deal with matter and its fixed and uniform relations. As teaching has to do with spirit, methods of teaching should not be fixed and invariable, but flexible and fluid, adapted to the modes and phases of variable spirit. In all intelligent and effective teaching, principles, rather than rules, should be held at a premium. Versatile teaching will draw its methods from prolific principles and will reflect the personality of the teacher who uses them. When methods become uniform, teaching becomes mechanical and wooden. Teachers should be educated rather than trained, education pointing to versatility and freedom, training to uniformity and mechanism. A teacher's education should be of the liberal type. The teacher himself should first of all be a scholar in spirit and attainment, and his strictly professional studies should also be of the liberal type. A teacher's strictly professional education will consist of |