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Patten, New Basis of Civilization, 220 pages (Macmillan).
Giddings, Elements of Sociology, 353 pages (Macmillan).
American Journal of Sociology.

BOOKS HELPFUL TO TEACHERS IN RECOMMENDING SUITABLE READING TO HIGH-SCHOOL PUPILS

Hewins, Books for Boys and Girls, 56 pages (American Library Association, 34 Newbury Street, Boston).

Children's Reading: A Catalogue Compiled for the Home Libraries and Reading Clubs, Conducted by the Children's Department of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburg, 110 pages (American Library Association, 34 Newbury Street, Boston).

Field, Fingerposts to Children's Reading, 276 pages (A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago). Colby, Literature and Life in School, 229 pages (Houghton Mifflin Co.).

Griswold, A Descriptive List of Books for the Young, large 8vo, 175 pages (W. M. Gris-
wold, publisher, Cambridge, Mass.).
Hanna, "One Hundred Books of Unqualified Value for High-School Students to Read”–
published in the 1899 volume of the Proceedings of the National Educational Associa-
tion, pp. 486, 487. This list is also included in a separate volume of eighty pages,
known as Report of the Committee on the Relation of Public Libraries to the Public
Schools, published by the National Educational Association, Winona, Minn.

Hall, "Youth," chap. viii, pp. 141-206, Biographies of Youth (Appleton).
Aldrich, Story of a Bad Boy (Houghton, Mifflin & Co.).

Bashkirtseff, Marie, Journal of a Young Artist (Rand, McNally & Co., Chicago).
Howells, William D., Heroines of Fiction, 2 vols., 513 pages (Harper & Bros.).
Richardson, Choice of Books (David McKay, Philadelphia).

EDUCATIONAL PERIODICALS

The School Review (especially devoted to secondary education) should be read regularly. The Educational Review.

The Pedagogical Seminary.

Education.

The Manual Training Magazine, Peoria, Ill.

PAPERS ON THE PROFESSIONAL PREPARATION OF

HIGH-SCHOOL TEACHERS

I

H. M. BARRETT, PRINCIPAL OF HIGH SCHOOL, PUEBLO, COLO.

1. It might be inferred from the subject of this paper that the professional preparation of the high-school teacher is not always satisfactory. I shall not object to the inference. Rather, I shall try, first, to furnish a bill of particulars in the complaint against the high-school teacher's professional training; second, I shall mention some of the reasons why this training is not all that it should be; and finally, if I can, I shall point out how the high-school teacher may secure the proper professional preparation.

The faults in the professional preparation of the high-school teacher may be grouped under three heads: First, although the high-school teacher has sufficient education, broadly speaking, he does not know how to teach. It is not long since it was assumed that anybody with a college diploma was fit to teach in a high school; and if he had taken high rank in his college classes then any high school was lucky to get him. The superintendent and principal,

at least, have long since been made to realize by abundant experience that a good student is not always a good teacher. In the light of this experience they have been chary about giving a try-out to the unseasoned graduate, if one may borrow a football phrase, and they have tried to insist when they could on successful experience in other high schools as evidence of ability to teach.

2. The second item in the bill is that the teacher who has anticipated his work and has undertaken to prepare for it has frequently devoted himself almost exclusively to the study of a single branch. He has gone in for science, or has taken everything in advanced mathematics that his college offered, or has spent considerable time in the study of Anglo-Saxon, has attended with enthusiasm all the classes in literature, and has devoted himself assiduously to the work in theme-writing and in the composition of sonnets. Thus prepared for his special work in high school, he comes to teach boys and girls to do the same thing that he has done. The specialist has studied not wisely but too well. If he be a science man he feels that he ought not to have to correct English in the notebooks of his pupils-and indeed he ought not; but when the need exists, as it does now and then, he cannot agree that every teacher should be an English teacher before he is anything else.

3. Finally, the complaint against the high-school teacher is that, even tho he could teach mathematics, science, English or what not, he cannot teach boys and girls. One principal puts it brutally that the high-school teacher has no sense. This is a hard saying, but there is directness and finality in the sound of it that carry weight. Ordinarily, the statement that a man has no sense is a tolerably sweeping condemnation; but when we examine the meaning of the word "sense" in this connection we find that it signifies about all that makes a man a master in any profession. A man may have the finest university training in medicine, but if he lacks sense he will not succeed as a physician; lack of sense in a lawyer will make a superior knowledge of the law of little value. The fact is that sense, fundamental as the quality appears, and fundamental as it really is, actually implies all that makes one a strong teacher, a great teacher. It may seriously be doubted, whether, after all, sense is not a gift with which one is born, rather than an accomplishment which can be acquired by training. An old professor of mine used to say: "There are some things which, if a man doesn't get before he is four years old, he never gets." I fancy that sense is one of these things. The French, who are polite, call it savoir faire, and so called, it sounds more like something which may be acquired by study and growth.

Most principals are apt to feel that the reason why the student fresh from college fails as a teacher lies in the fact that he unconsciously assumes that high-school boys and girls are young ladies and gentlemen. Technically, so far as age goes, and so far as the name implies nice young people, decently brought up by particular parents, they are young ladies and gentlemen; but mentally, for all the practical purposes of the teacher, they are still boys and girls. They are not at all ready for college methods of instruction. It will

not do for the high-school teacher to give a course of lectures and permit the pupils to take the instruction or leave it as they choose. If they choose to leave it the loss is theirs, true enough; but they must not be allowed to leave it.

The old masters knew their duty in this regard, and they did it—often with groanings on the part of the pupils that could not be uttered. There was at certain crudeness about their methods which would not be tolerated today; caning and flogging were long the effective means of inducing interest in study which the Herbartian doctrine does not approve. Yet the old masters understood their problem well enough, no matter what we may think of their method of solving it. They knew that boys and girls cannot be left to themselves to study or to take the consequences in a life of inefficiency in the vague future. They knew human nature well enough to understand that the doctrine of future punishment, however well founded, is not an efficient cause of present effort with men and women, much less with boys and girls. And in their own primitive way the old masters undertook to supply an immediate substitute for future punishment, unpedagogical, no doubt, but often effective in accomplishing results.

The specialist, too, because he is a specialist, has lost some of the advantages possessed by the old master. If the boy does not do well in his particular subject, the boy to him is a ne'er-do-well. The specialist knows nothing about the pupil except what he sees of him in his own class; and if the pupil fails there he is condemned utterly. The principal who sees this situation often feels that it would be well if the specialist were required to teach more than one subject-well for the pupil and well for the specialist.

4. The limitations of the college graduate and also the limitations of the university-trained specialist are summed up in the indictment that they do not know boys and girls and therefore they do not know how to deal with them. These teachers are too apt to shift upon others the responsibility for a pupil's shortcomings, to throw it back upon the grade teachers, or to attribute it to some lack of rigid discipline in the high school as a whole. Often one hears such teachers lamenting the fate which condemns them to the annoyance of petty discipline, and weakly wishing for a college position. Not till they learn the joy of being alive among boys and girls and of watching them grow under their hands into men and women, can these hope to be high-school teachers in the real sense. Now, they do not realize that it is folly to place responsibility for poor work on other teachers, or, indeed, upon the pupil himself. Here is the pupil with all his imperfections on his head. It is up to the individual teacher to train that pupil to do the work in his class and make a man of him in that work. The grade teacher knows that if any one of her pupils fails in the next higher grade it is a reflection upon her. Much more, however, does she appreciate that if he does not do good work in her grade nobody can be blamed but her. The unsatisfactory pupil is a perpetual problem to her, and there is more joy in her heart over the successful solution of one such problem than over ninety and nine that need no solution. Every time she

solves such a problem she knows that she has proved herself a real teacher; every time she fails to solve such a problem she must feel that she has measurably failed as a teacher. How, then, thro professional preparation, can the high-school teacher fit himself to do the work before him, to assume the responsibility of teaching, not physics, or English, or mathematics, but boys and girls?

5. The high-school teacher ought of course to know the history of education and the history of the development of the secondary schools. It is not quite clear precisely how this is to help him solve particular problems in training boys and girls; but, intelligently used, the knowledge and appreciation of the present in the light of the past should be of real value in giving the teacher breadth of view and grasp of the work as a whole.

6. Educational psychology ought to have its place in such a course of training. Yet here, too, the value of the study will be general rather than particular; it will be more valuable for the man himself than can be pointed out for specific use in his daily task. An attempt to apply such knowledge narrowly and rigidly will almost certainly make the teacher unpractical and pedantic, and will be attended with ridiculous and even with disastrous results. This suggests the need that the high-school teacher have, as a prerequisite to his special training, the broad and liberal education represented by a four years' college course. Such an education ought to give him the habit of seeing "great things large and little things small," of "seeing life steadily and seeing it whole." If one might particularize in this digression it would be to say that in his college course the teacher ought to get a great deal of practical value out of the pursuit of a thoro-going course in sociology.

7. With this general education to fortify him, it ought to be safe for the future high-school teacher to give some time to the study of pedagogy. Without the general education, there is great danger that the teacher may fall into the error of thinking that pedagogy is the whole thing in education. To the practical teacher, it seems just to exclaim, modifying slightly the familiar phrase of Madame Roland, "Ah pedagogy, how many crimes are committed in thy name!" Pedagogy isn't much of a science as yet. It has in it commonly too many glittering generalities, too many half-truths that the narrowly educated teacher accepts as absolute and comprehensive.

8. It is scarcely necessary to mention as a book which the high-school teacher should include in his course of professional training, Dr. Stanley Hall's great work on Adolescence. No book exists which deals so minutely and so comprehensively with the life in which the high-school teacher works.

9. It is not likely that any educational expert will object to the course of study thus outlined as too extended; if anyone cares to elaborate it the writer of this paper will not seriously object. Yet the element which the writer regards as most important in the proper professional preparation of the highschool teacher has not been mentioned. It is the element of experience. In teaching, quite as much as in any profession, trade, or business, we learn

to do by doing. Nothing can take the place of actual work in the schoolroom. The practice school under supervision will not answer. It is good so far as it goes, but its conditions at best are more or less artificial.

10. Here perhaps might be mentioned the normal school as a training-place for high-school teachers. The normal school would undoubtedly serve to supply some of the common deficiencies in the high-school teacher's training. It should never be accepted as a substitute for the college, for with most highschool pupils who are to continue study after graduating from high school the college is the next step, and the high-school teacher will not do the best for these boys and girls unless he knows intimately what college is. The training furnished by a good normal school as supplementary to the teacher's college course would be quite worth while, for it would bring the teacher closer to the work before him. It is a mistake to suppose, however, that normalschool training can take the place of actual experience. Here, as in the university, conditions are inevitably artificial, though the study of methods as taught in the normal school will be most helpful to the college graduate who intends to teach. But the teacher cannot do his best or develop those qualities and that skill most needed in a teacher while a critic is looking on and taking notes of his faults in manner and method. A brief experience of a few weeks or months in a room of boys and girls somewhat trained to habits of work by others furnishes small opportunity for the use of initiative on the teacher's part. The teacher in the making needs to be confronted by conditions, not theories. Such conditions only will force him to summon to his command those methods and expedients which, so far as they are of real value, are in every teacher matters of personality. Something, though generally very little, the teacher may gain by watching the work of good teachers; very little indeed, unless it be appropriated in a condition of mental and spiritual hunger on the teacher's part, and assimilated and made a part of himself under the healthy normal conditions of real work for which he is actually responsible and which is genuinely his own.

11. In view of these considerations, then, the high-school teacher should have a year or two year's experience in grade schools, where as an actual and responsible teacher he should see growing under his own hand the mental and moral character of a school of boys and girls. In the grades the highschool teacher will have learned intimately and accurately a great deal of the method of thought and of the feelings and motives of the boys and girls which he is to teach in high school. He will have some practical notion of the proper and legitimate use of the word apperception, which without this experience, he might be prone to regard as one of the charm words with which the childstudy priests are wont to cast a spell upon their converts. In the grades, if the teacher is to do anything at all, he must first divest himself of college methods of instruction and meet the boys and girls on their own ground. He must recognize also, because he directs all matters of discipline and study, that he, and he alone, is responsible for all the conditions in his school

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