DEPARTMENT OF NORMAL SCHOOLS

SECRETARY'S MINUTES

TUESDAY MORNING, JULY 9, 1907

The Department of Normal Schools met in joint session with the Departments of Secondary and Higher Education for consideration of the topic, "Preparation of HighSchool Teachers."

TUESDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 9, 1907

A joint session was held with the Library Department, the subject being “Instruction in Library Work in Normal Schools."

THURSDAY MORNING, JULY 11, 1907

The Department met in the State Normal School, Los Angeles, Cal. The meeting was called to order by the president, John R. Kirk, of the State Normal School, Kirksville, Mo.

In the absence of Miss May Whitney, of Emporia, Kansas, E. E. Balcomb, of Weatherford, Oklahoma, was appointed secretary.

The opening address by President John R. Kirk, was entitled, “A Statement of the Issues Now Confronting the Normal Schools of the United States."

W. A. Clark, professor of psychology and pedagogy, State Normal School, Kearney, Neb., read a paper on "The Pedagogical Laboratory in the Scientific Study of Education." Discussion was led by Ella Flagg Young, principal of the Chicago Normal School, Chicago, Ill.

President Charles C. Van Liew, State Normal School, Chico, Cal., gave a report of the Committee on Statement of Policy Regarding the Preparation and Qualifications of Teachers of Elementary and High Schools, as follows:

The committe reports in favor of the following recommendations as a statement of policy:

1. That the candidates for admission to normal schools should have a high-school education or its equivalent.

2. That the normal schools should prepare secondary teachers by giving three- and four-year courses to persons who already have high-school education or its equivalent. To do this, they should have academic departments as strong as the colleges and should have a high school as part of the training-school.

3. That the universities and colleges should give full credit to normal-school graduates, year for year, provided they had a high-school education or its equivalent when they entered the normal school.

4. That the public schools should be freed from the domination of the higher institutions. The public schools are schools of the people and each grade or school above should be a receiving school for the one below.

On motion of President J. H. Hill, State Normal School, Emporia, Kansas, this preliminary report of the committee was adopted. The committee was continued with instructions to make a full report at the next annual meeting.

E. E. Balcomb, professor of agriculture, State Normal School, Weatherford, Okla., gave an address on "Agriculture in Normal Schools: Courses of Instruction and Financial Support."

The following resolution was unanimously adopted:

Resolved, That the Department of Normal Schools of the National Educational Association heartily endorses all legitimate efforts to secure national aid for normal schools in preparing teachers for teaching agriculture and manual training.

Report of the Committee on Nominations was as follows:

For President-A. O. Thomas, president, State Normal School, Kearney, Neb. For Vice-President-Morris E. Dailey, president, State Normal School, San José, Cal. For Secretary-Henry G. Williams, dean of State Normal College, Ohio University, Athens, Ohio.

The report of this committee was unanimously adopted and the nominees declared elected.

The department adjourned.

E. E. BALCOMB, Acting Secretary

PAPERS AND DISCUSSIONS

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS

A STATEMENT OF THE ISSUES NOW CONFRONTING THE NORMAL SCHOOLS OF THE UNITED STATES

JOHN R. KIRK, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, KIRKSVILLE, MO.

The most far-reaching movement affecting American education is the organization of the universities. Their tremendous energy and well-marked progress delight us all; but the men managing these institutions are probably not cognizant of the top-heavy condition into which their restless and unreflecting ambition is forcing our school system. They doubtless feel that "education is from the top" and that it should be directed and dominated by those in higher education circles. In many places they have destroyed local initiative. They have reduced many institutions to a state of obsequious servitude. Consciously or unconsciously they undermine the foundations of democracy. They are becoming mighty monopolies.

Their immediate objective point is the high school. This is the instrument thru which to organize and control all other schools. If thru natural expansion high schools should come within reach of all children and the universities should gain control of the high schools, then the so-called "small colleges," the normal schools and the various independent technical schools would cease to have the means of competition and the universities would be all powerful. The man is short sighted who does not see that this is the educational trend in our country.

Hopeful young men, fresh from Ph.D. courses, are being installed into those university offices which have to do with the immediate relations of the universities to the public schools. These young fellows are usually bright and honest, burning with zeal to reform the world; but their horizon is circumscribed by their experiences or by their own recent graduating theses. Most of them are visionary. It is bad for education that men of this type are willing to

assume suddenly such grave responsibilities and wield at once the weapons of warfare in education.

The attendance at the universities is so great that many of them are unable to control their students. The good-hearted, bachelor-like specialists who direct the lecture room and laboratory work in the universities have little or no taste for personal contact with students. Hence their personal influence does not affect the students' conduct.

The administrative department of universities is commonly inaccessible to the student, who thus finds himself not only without restraint but lacking access to any advisers and to the wholesome influence of companionship with older persons of the type of teaching professors.

Conditions in our country are rapidly changing. Youthful persons in large numbers are flocking to institutions of higher learning. The popular doctrine of the free and easy way at the university, the absence of surveillance, "the miniature world," and all such doctrines need overhauling. If the university students were nearly all in graduate work and above the age of adolescence, their needs would be different and the current university doctrines and practices might suffice; but the universities are not merely failing to control their armies of semi-responsible or irresponsible undergraduate students; the dominant sentiment of their faculty men ignores the need of such control. Therefore the direction and control of education by the universities themselves should not be expected to conduce to law and order in the state.

If anyone doubts the failure of the large universities properly to control their students at the present time, he has only to inform himself. His doubts will vanish.

In the last dozen years most of the universities have reversed their policy regarding the professional preparation of teachers. For a long time it was not unusual for the university professor to ridicule the normal school and the content of normal-school education. There were, to be sure, good grounds for criticism. There are yet. But the universities discovered that the people believed in the special preparation of teachers. The change of front came suddenly. Now scarcely any university is without a "school of education" or a "teachers' college" or at least a "department of pedagogy" in actuality or in theory. The institution that can draw to itself the public-school teacher even in summer time is the one having access to the heart of the people. Hence pedagogy, so long ignored and abused, has become a source of popularizing the university.

In some parts of the country the universities have traveling agents called high-school inspectors. Some of these inspectors are men of high type, knowing and sympathizing with the public-school system in its entirety; but no matter how broad-gauged and fair an inspector so constituted may be at the outset, the nature of the case necessarily tends to reduce him, in spite of himself, to a peripatetic functionary whose business is: (1) So to modify the instruction in the high schools as to serve distinctively the purpose of the university

with a view to its enlargement; (2) To control the appointment of high-school teachers; (3) To secure direct contact with members of the high-school graduating classes.

The universities just mentioned usually support teachers' employment bureaus designated as "committees on positions and recommendations." Thru such committees and the inspectors, school boards, and superintendents are indoctrinated as to the discrimination which the university would make among teachers. I think no one should doubt the honest purposes of these committees and agents; but I think they and all other school men should try to discover whither we are drifting and where we are likely to land. I think these men would pattern after foreign countries and I do not believe that European imperialism or any similar system becomes democracy when transplanted to America. All these committees and inspectors become propagandists. They can't help it. They are supported financially and otherwise by large resources. They publish extensively their doctrines. With or without definite purpose they are doing what they can to specialize, cramp, and devitalize the high school; to suppress and supplant the college; and to hamper, restrict, and undermine the normal school, whose chief function they seek to take over into the university. They would leave to the crippled and handicapped normal school only the routine and so-called training which constitute the lowest and poorest part of the professional preparation of teachers. They are full of fine phrases about setting energy free thru training. But training is a term badly overworked and misapplied in educational nomenclature. The dog-and-pony show illustrates training at its high-water mark. Training commonly exhausts energy without setting it free. Training and marking time are too commonly synonymous. Training and education are different processes. Training and the professional preparation of teachers are wide apart.

University men in many quarters proclaim that the normal schools should confine themselves to superficial training-courses of two years' duration with a view to preparing elementary teachers. They are worried lest the normal school should advance a few students sufficiently to make of them, according to current ideals, good high-school teachers. They claim that this would damage elementary schools by withdrawing the energy of the normal school from the restricted services thru which it is supposed to contribute exclusively to the promotion of elementary education. This university creed is fatally weak. Its effect would be to collect and concentrate the ambitious, capable, resourceful, prospective teachers in the university, there to consume their energies in alleged preparation for teaching in high schools. This doctrine is directly detrimental to elementary education. It would send the uncalculating, unambitious, immature and unpromising would-be teachers thru a brief secondary school course and then thru a short-cut professional course into elementary schools.

The influence of some city training-schools is doubtful, if not harmful.

These training-schools are too largely filled with immature high-school girl graduates. The girls have usually had only the child's view of elementary subjects, and at best the adolescent view of secondary-school subjects. In two years these immature, tho well-meaning, young persons are made over and officially stamped as professional elementary teachers. In many state normal schools the procedure is quite similar and equally indefensible.

Some state normal schools advertise themselves as feeders and preparatory schools for the universities. Recently some of the struggling young state normal schools vying with one another had gotten themselves "approved" by numerous universities and were able to show that their graduates could enter the universities with a little advanced standing in the freshman year. It was made very clear that these normal-school graduates could enter universities without being conditioned. Is it not ridiculous that a normal school should be on so low a plane as to bring itself voluntarily into unfavorable comparison with high schools and make itself appear so clearly in the light of an unstable preparatory school?

As for inspection by university inspectors, the independent self-respecting normal school should put the matter on the plane of inter-inspection. The universities need inspection; the inspectors themselves are not beyond some egregious blundering. It looks as if normal schools should say to the universities: "You may inspect us at your pleasure and we will inspect you at our pleasure." One has as much authority for inspection as the other. The matter of advanced standing should be a matter of mutual interest, not of solicitation by one institution and dogmatic authorization by another. Each institution should stand upon an honest and independent basis and say to all the world:

Take our students as we leave them. Start them in subjects at the points where they leave off with us. Test their ability to carry the new or more advanced work. Judge us in this way by our students or we will have our students go where this will be done. In education we are for the open shop.

Several normal schools in the Middle West prepare both academically and pedagogically teachers for all sorts of public schools from kindergarten to high school inclusive. And why shouldn't they do so? The universities are full to overflowing. These normal schools are large. They can offer advanced academic and pedagogical courses without undue expense and without duplication that is in any way harmful to any institution. As to duplication, there is really no subject-matter which is sacred to any particular institution. This is a free country, not a monarchy. Several of these normal schools. have as good laboratories and as good libraries as the best colleges can support. Some of them pay better salaries than the colleges can pay. They have faculty men of the highest attainments, skill, and ambition.

Normal schools of this type are characterized by noticeable masculinity in their student corps. They have teachers' courses and various preparatory courses to which almost any young man with a teacher's certificate can be