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BIBLIOGRAPHY

The bibliography on the American college is almost inexhaustible. The list here given is confined to the best books that have appeared since 1900.

ANGELL, J. B. Selected Addresses. New York, 1912.

Association of American Universities. Proceedings of the Annual Conference.

BUTLER, N. M. Education in the United States. New York, 1900. CATTELL, J. M. University Control. New York, 1913.

CRAWFORD, W. H. (editor). The American College. New York, 1915. (Papers by Faunce, Shorey, Haskins, Rhees, Thwing, Finley, Few, Slocum, Meiklejohn, Claxton.)

66

Cyclopedia of Education, article on American College." New York, 1911.

DEXTER, E. G. History of Education in the United States. New York, 1904.

DRAPER, A. S. American Education. Boston, 1909.

FLEXNER, A. The American College: A Criticism. General Education Board, New York, 1908.

FOSTER, W. T. Administration of the College Curriculum. Boston, 1911.

HARPER, W. R. The Trend in Higher Education. Chicago, 1905. KINGSLEY, C. D. College Entrance Requirements. United States Bureau of Education, 1913.

MACLEAN, G. E. Present Standards of Higher Education in the United States. United States Bureau of Education, 1913. National Association of State Universities in the United States of America. Annual Transactions and Proceedings.

RISK, R. K. America at College. London, 1908.

SNOW, L. F. 1907.

College Curriculum in the United States. New York,

THWING, C. F. History of Higher Education in the United States.
New York, 1906.

The American College; What It Is and What It May Become.
New York, 1914.

College Administration. New York, 1900.

WEST, A. F. Short Papers on American Liberal Education. New York, 1907.

II

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING FOR COLLEGE

TEACHING

ERE this chapter to be a discussion of schemes of Introduction

WERE to of

prepare teachers for colleges, it could not be written, for there are no such schemes. Many elementary and secondary teachers have undergone training for their life work, as investigators have, by a different regimen, of course, for theirs. But if college and university teachers do their work well, it is because they are born with competence for their calling, or were self-taught, or happened to grow into competence accidentally, as a by-product of training for other and partly alien ends, or learned to teach by teaching.

There are able college men, presidents and others, who view this situation with equanimity, if not with satisfaction. Teachers are born, not made, it is said. Can pedagogy furnish better teachers than specialized scholarly training? it is asked. If we train definitely for teaching, we shall diminish scholarship, cramp and warp native teaching faculty, and mechanize our class procedure, it is objected.

Had the subject of training for college teaching been discussed, no doubt other objections would have been advanced. But it has not been discussed, as will be seen from the very scant bibliography at the end of the chapter. No plan of training for college teaching is in operation, and no discussion of such a plan can be found. Each of a half-dozen men has argued his individual views, and elicited no reply.

This state of facts notwithstanding, the subject is well worth discussing, and one may even venture to prophesy that in a decade, or at latest two, the subject will have a respectable literature, and enough training plans will be in operation to permit fruitful comparisons.

How the college teacher

has been and is trained

When specific training is first urged for specialized work, there always is opposition. The outgoing generation remembers the opposition to specialized training for law, medicine, and engineering, to say nothing of farming, school teaching and business. But in spite of obstructive and retarding objections, specialized types of training for specialized types of work have grown in number and favor, and today we are being shown convincingly that nations which have declined to set up the fundamental types of special training find themselves able to make effective only a fraction of their resources. The majority of the personnel in every higher calling has about average native aptitude for it, and it is just the average man who can be improved in competence for any work by training directed to that end rather than to another. This is, of course, true of college teaching.

In early days in this country the great majority of college teachers were clergymen, trained in most cases abroad. Later bookish graduates came to be the chief source of supply, their appointment in their own colleges, and infrequently in others, following close upon their graduation. Well into the third quarter of last century college faculties were selected almost exclusively from these two types, representatives of the former decreasing and of the latter increasing in relative number. Neither type was specifically trained for teaching in colleges or elsewhere.

With the founding and developing of Johns Hopkins University a new era in higher education opened in this country. The paucity of exact scholarship came to be known, and the country's need of scholarship to be appreciated. In colleges grown from English seedlings we sought to implant grafts from German universities. Independent colleges and colleges within universities, while still called upon by American traditions and needs to prepare their students for enlightened living by means of a broadening and liberating training, came to be manned preponderatingly by narrowly specialized investigators, withdrawn from everyday life, with concentrated interests

focused upon subjects or parts of subjects, rather than upon students. Little thought was, or is yet, given to the preparation of college teachers for their duties as teachers, and that little rested, and still in large measure rests, satisfied with the assumption that by some unexplained and it may be inexplicable transfer of competence a man closeted and intensively trained to search for truth in books and laboratories emerges after three or more years well equipped for divining and developing the mental processes and interests of freshmen.

Once fairly examined, this assumption lacks plausibility. "We consider the Ph.D. a scholar's degree and not a teacher's degree," says the dean of one of our leading graduate schools, and yet preparation for this scholar's degree has been and is practically the only formal preparation open to college teachers in this country.

needed by

college

teachers

It goes without saying that scholarship is one of the Equipment basal needs of college teachers, a scholarship that keeps alive, and is human and contagious. But it should be remembered that there are several kinds of scholarship, and it is pertinent to ask what kind college teachers need. Should they, for instance, model themselves on the broad shrewdness and alluring scholarly mellowness of James Russell Lowell or on the untiring encyclopedic exactitude and minuteness of Von Helmholz? Or is there an even better ideal or ideals for them? I would suggest that the teacher's knowledge of his subject should, essentially, be of a kind that would keep him in intellectual sympathy with the undeveloped minds of his students, and this means chiefly two things. The more points of contact of his knowledge with the past experience and future plans of his students the teacher has at his command, the better teacher he will be; for he can use them, not as resting places, but as points of departure for the development of phases of his subject outside the students' experience. And secondly, the teacher should see his subject entire, with its parts, as rich in number and detail as possible, each in its proper place within the whole. For the students' knowledge of

the subject is vague and general; he is trying to place it, and many other new things, in some kind of a coherent setting; in fact, he is in college largely for the very purpose of working out some sort of rudimentary scheme of things. The duty of the college teacher is to help him in this quite as much as to teach him a particular subject. And, besides, each particular subject can be best taught if advantage is taken of every opportunity to attach it to the only knowledge of it the student has, vague and general though it be. Highly specialized and dehumanized knowledge is not as useful for the college teacher as broad and vital knowledge, which is, of course, much harder to acquire. Even in the case of "disciplinary" subjects, there is no gain in concealing the human bearings. The teacher should be trained to seize opportunities in the classroom and out to help the student, through his subject and his maturer life experience, to see the bearing of what he is learning on the life about him and on the life he is to lead. This is the college teacher's richest opportunity and the opportunity that tries him most shrewdly. If he is to rise to it, his entire equipment, native and acquired, must come into play.

What else does the teacher need? So that he may select the best and continue to improve them, he needs a knowledge of the different methods and aims in the teaching of his subject, and, so far as possible, of the results attained by each. Too much of college teaching is a blind groping, chartless and without compass. Instead of expecting each inexperienced teacher to start afresh, he should set out armed with the epitomized and digested teaching experience of those that have gone before him.

Finally, the teacher needs a sympathetic and expert understanding of the thinking and feeling of college students. This should be his controlling interest. The teacher, his interest in his subject, and in all else except the student, should be instrumental, not final. Every available strand of continuity between studenthood and teacherhood should thereafter be preserved.

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