This kind of preliminary preparation for teaching would do much to solve the vexed question as to how teachers are to grow Training of in their work after they have become settled in their Teachers in profession. Every school should be a center for Work settlement work of the best type, and the life of the teacher should, and, under such conditions of service, would, naturally expand with the growth of the community. The greatest objection to the teacher's profession, at present, is that he is so hopelessly far removed from doing those things that the community is crying out to have done. His usefulness to the state at present is purely hypothetical. He may do some good in the world, but he can rarely claim the output. Righteous men and women do grow up on the earth, but heredity and every form of accident known in human development impudently filch from the schoolmaster the credit of their virtue. When we get down to the root of the matter, we shall find that it is this fact, more than the salary question, more than that of woman rule, more than all other causes combined, that contributes Teacher Must most to drive self-respecting men and women from the teachers' ranks. To go through a long course of training, ostensibly for public service, only to find that the walls of the schoolroom are to bar him forever from the normal activities of a citizen interested in public life is more than self-respecting human beings in this day will tolerate. The schoolmaster's profession is still dominated by educational traditions of the Middle Ages, when the teacher was a monk who kept himself away from the affairs of the world as things unholy, and when the service of the state was chiefly in the care of the soldiers. No such division of function and shifting of responsibility can now exist. The teacher should take a leader's part in the debate of every question that relates to human welfare. It is only by the most active participation in public affairs that he can keep himself in proper training for the task of teaching the people's children. To give himself and the school over solely, or even mostly, to the petty routine of teaching reading, writing, and ciphering, or the mere details of subject-matter, is to devote himself and his institution to work that can be done almost equally well without either the teacher or the school. Promotion of Marking When the teacher becomes a direct participant in the public service, he will then be measured and his place will be established according to the methods and standards that are always employed in determining values in human character. When he is once placed in a position of responsibility toward the community, a responsibility that shows itself in some form that the public can understand, then he will take his place according to the law of moral gravitation. The teacher must have the opportunity and then he must be required to win his way to public recognition as every other citizen must do. The various promotion schemes now in vogue are mostly but weak makeshifts prepared to fit unnatural and archaic conditions. The application of the marking system to the gradation of teachers as a means of fixing salaries has proven itself time and again to be just as vicious in its results as it is when applied to the gradation of pupils. Taking all things into account it possesses but little advantage over a system of grading based upon height, or color of the hair. It is equally factitious and unnatural to base salary or position upon length of service alone, that is, merely upon one's ability to draw his breath; for verily, there be many poor and useless teachers who are leather-lunged. When a physician loses too many patients, he is not deprived of his practice because somebody marks him forty-nine per cent. ; and when a lawyer's practice falls away it is not because someone has graded him sixty-threeit is moral gravitation that gradually lowers these several servants of the public out of sight. We must come to the same thing with the teachers. No amount of politics or pull will make a man employ a physician or a lawyer whom he believes to be untrustworthy. When the responsibility of the teacher's place in the public service is equally well established, no more will politics or pull get votes for the incompetent teacher. Moral gravitation is the thing. If the teaching force were once brought under its sway, it would more quickly and more thoroughly purge the system of incompetents-by exclusion and by general improvement than any system of legislation that could be devised. The one and only chance that a worthless teacher has for staying in the profession is that which Law the Teacher's Opportunity! Mutual and Public is afforded him by some law that was placed on the statute books to exclude him. He merely tricks the law and is thereafter safe. It is a fact of paramount importance which both the public and teachers are apt to overlook, that, in the end, it is of the most vital interest to the teachers themselves that there shall be not only some adequate and fair means of recognizing merit, and of estimating and suitably rewarding actual growing worth, but that there shall be, also, an equally effective plan for barring out those who are unprepared and for purging the school system of incompetent teachers. In the heat of discussion, the public and school authorities sometimes act as though, in their efforts to get rid of incompetent teachers, they cannot count upon the sympathy, much less the active support, of the teaching force. There are teachers, too, whose general behavior may seem to warrant this conclusion. But when in a calm and reasonable frame of mind all parties know that this is not so that at this particular point there is a mutual interest of greatest import. When proper opportunity is given, therefore, the teachers may be fully relied upon to help work out some plan which will make their profession one that is practically self-purifying. If the responsibility for this were placed upon the teachers, it would at once key up the moral tone of the profession an octave above what it is today or what it ever has been. That is the way the responsibility for the character of the professions works in those of law and medicine. The most implacable foes of poor lawyers and physicians are the members of those professions who are reputable and worthy. The lawyers finally determine who shall be members of the bar, and the physicians determine who shall practice medicine. The responsibility for protecting the public against fraud rests practically upon the professions themselves. The teachers are in no wise so peculiar a people that they cannot or will not take care of their profession in a similar manner, when they have a chance to do so. Mistakes and abuses will occur; but these will be many times outweighed by the moral effect upon the teachers of being compelled to assume the responsibility for the character and work of their brethren. What the details of such a plan will be must be left to the gradual processes of evolution to determine. It must be anchored Plan Must in some way, however, to a few fundamental condiEvolve from tions: There must be a constantly rising standard Experience of training, which shall be modified to meet the growing demands of the community. This must be required of teachers before being allowed to enter the profession. The time is ripe for a great advance in this direction. There must be increased opportunities for the school to work out under the direction of the teacher a more intimate relationship with the life of the community. In this way, everyone will be able to get directly at the worth of the teacher. And, finally, there must be a due regard for length of service. The encouraging feature in the present confusion of educational debate is that the teachers are commencing to think. They have been out of proper relation to the public all these long years, and now they are beginning to realize it. If they will hold steadfastly to the main question at issue until their true position is clearly defined in the public mind, most of the petty annoyances that now dog their footsteps will disappear. W. S. J. BOOK REVIEWS School Days of the Fifties: A True Story with Some Untrue Names, of Persons and Places. With an Appendix containing an Autobiographical Sketch of Francis Wayland Parker. By WILLIAM M. GIFFIN. Chicago: A. Flanagan Co. Pp. 137. This little book gives a graphic pen picture of our public schools as Mr. Giffin knew them in his boyhood "in the old stone schoolhouse in northern New York, near the banks of the beautiful St. Lawrence." It is an interesting story, involving incidentally, an analysis of the motives and methods of teachers, good and bad, as teachers were before they had been reached by the transforming power of normal-school training. The book is reminiscent in style and abounds in anecdote and incident which show forth the thoughts and doings of lively boys and girls whose generally belligerent attitude toward teacher and school worked itself out in innumerable pranks. Mr. Giffin throws this picture of his youthful training up strongly against a background of the principles of teaching, and shows that many of the most serious difficulties of his early days might have been avoided if his teachers had been more careful students of childhood and less concerned with the intricacies of dry subject-matter. The autobiographical sketch of Colonel Parker gives an interesting glimpse of the schools at a still earlier period. The book is rich in suggestion and serves more than to amuse; it furnishes to the serious-minded teacher much food for reflection. WILBUR S. JACKMAN |