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of land forms, of the climate of the United States, and dynamical geology in the more advanced courses in the department of geology of Columbia. University.

The minimum requirement should be supplemented by work in economics, geology, and advanced work in physiography.

XVII (special)

WILL THE SAME TRAINING IN THE NORMAL SCHOOL SERVE TO PREPARE THE TEACHER FOR BOTH ELEMEN

TARY AND HIGH-SCHOOL WORK?

JOHN R. KIRK, PRESIDENT OF STATE NORMAL SCHOOL KIRKSVILLE, MO. I. GENERAL STATEMENT

1. It is unwise and wasteful to classify prospective teachers at the beginning of their professional preparation because they all have inherited traits and capabilities which should be the criteria for their differentiation into classes.

2. It requires two or three years of instruction, intermingled with experimentation, to determine what these qualities are.

3. From the nature of the case, two or three years in the normal school or teachers' college should be devoted to such general courses of instruction and experimentation as will reveal to the student what his talents are.

4. The final differentiation into elementary teachers and high-school teachers should probably take place during the fourth year in the normal school and in the teachers' college. Even then it is doubtful whether the two classes of teachers need to be separated very widely. Perhaps 90 per cent. of all the professional or technical instruction and preliminary experience in the preparation of teachers should be common to the two classes under consideration.

5. The most effective and practicable scheme in the preparation of all teachers furnishes academic and professional instruction side by side and in the later periods joins with these some constructive experience in teaching.

II. BASIC FACTS

Professional preparation for all teaching below the college is predetermined by the following facts:

1. Adolescence frequently begins pretty low down in the elementary school period and ends early in the high-school period. It sometimes begins late in the high-school period and continues beyond the time of high-school graduation.

2. As to aptitudes and disposition, children differ among themselves in the elementary school fully as much as they do in the high school.

3. Elementary-school children manifest in some degree practically all the traits and impulses discovered in high-school children.

4. The subjects in the curriculum (whether for elementary schools or high schools) are relatively simple and easy, while the children to be taught (whether in elementary school or high school) are infinitely varied and exceedingly hard to understand and direct.

5. Sound scholarship in the content of the school curriculum is essential. But it constitutes only part of the teachers' burden of thought and study. The paramount problem is the school child.

III. ARGUMENT

Training is a bad word for our purpose. It savors too much of studied imitation, of conscious repetition, and the exaltation of routine. It suggests the substitution of drilling for thinking. It signifies prescriptions and rules dictated by instructors and acquired by would-be teachers. The dog and pony show illustrates what can be done by training. The prospective teacher needs instruction and practice in constructive thinking more than he needs training. He needs frequently to apply and test his knowledge in concrete experience of his own. He needs direction and exercise in the use of his constructive ingenuity. Opportunities for application and test of his knowledge are many and varied. In the great cities the potency of mechanism stifles spontaneity and power of personal reaction. In the country at large there is much opportunity for wholesome professional growth thru practice which is not overdirected. This may be in practice schools, or thru substitute work in schools of villages and small cities, but, best of all, in rural schools.

The typical graduate of the normal school and of the teachers' college goes about his work in too large a degree conscious of rules and prescriptions learned by him while undergoing training. But he should be nearly unconscious of acquired methods. He should attack his work with his energies centered upon the curious, inquisitive, kaleidoscopic group of persons given him to teach or exploit. During his professional preparation his skill in adaptation and his creative imagination need stimulating to the utmost. By effort he should acquire the ability to lose himself in guiding the learner and in adapting knowledge to the use of the learner. There is something in all this infinitely better than the thing we call training.

The curriculum used in educating children is relatively simple and stable; but the children furnish a varying stream of thought and action exceedingly complex and difficult to comprehend. We count out a few hundred facts to be taught in the high school. We classify, tabulate, and label them. We give ample reference to bibliographies. Most of the high-school teachers have spent some years in college learning the contents of the curriculum. We permit them to make diagnoses off hand and administer the medicine with reckless unconcern. Our prescriptions are dealt out chiefly by the rule of cut and try. No one has attempted to classify, measure, and label the children of the high-school classes.

Custom compels the elementary teacher to learn the natural traits of

children and to appeal to the children thru things which are known to them. But custom allows the high-school teacher tolerably free rein to follow his tastes and inclinations. Hence he usually patterns after those who taught him. With somewhat better scholastic acquirements than the elementary teacher has, he is frequently a narrower person, living more within his limited specialties, and teaching subjects, not persons. He is sometimes woefully ignorant of the child to be taught.

We are not likely to make progress, excepting in spots, until some parts of our educational creed are reconstructed. One of them innocently promulgated from the circles of higher education is to the effect that a half-educated person is good enough to teach children up to and including the last day in the elementary school, while a fully educated person is needed to take charge of the child on the next day in school, i. e., the first day in the high school. By this tenet the typical normal school graduate with insufficient academic attainments and much dogma stands for the half-educated person, while the university graduate crammed and surfeited with ill-digested facts and theories acquired in college lecture rooms represents the fully educated person. This creed is convenient and practical. It is more easily lived up to than a better creed would be. It is damaging to all education.

I think we should repudiate these invidious discriminations, for if anyone needs a college education it is the teacher who guides the children thru the varied subjects used in the grammar-school grades. If anyone needs critical and available knowledge of human nature in the uncertain period of childhood and the stormy stages of adolescence it is the teacher of the high-school child.

Most of the normal schools offer limited courses which high-school graduates finish in two years. This custom precludes separation of students with a view to preparing them for different kinds of service, because it is impossible in so short a time to differentiate and test the students sufficiently to determine the kind of teaching to which they are severally adapted. Out of a lot of two-year-old colts a horse-trainer, judging from structure, may select the trotting horse or the roadster or the one to pull the beer wagon; but we cannot so classify prospective teachers. One professor of education in a great university informs me that the girls entering his department have already decided to be high-school teachers. There is an educational caste in his state. He says the graduates of his department would be humiliated were they required to teach in elementary schools; but some of these prospective teachers are by nature and acquired traits adapted to the work of primary teachers and nothing else; others among them are versatile, forceful persons, adapted to the varied life of the grammar-school teacher and wholly unfit for the confining specialties of secondary education. But it requires many months of time to classify these persons and so direct their study and work that no part of their professional lives shall be wasted. It therefore seems clear that a teachers' college or normal school offering such a short cut to professional life as a two

years' course should devote itself to general courses of instruction and practice, leaving final differentiation to be determined after graduation.

But some normal schools offer academic courses covering the college curriculum, about two-thirds of the student's energy being devoted to academic subjects; about one-third, to professional preparation. Such schools offer special courses for the different classes of teachers. But they find that a very large part of all that the elementary teacher should know is needed also by the high-school teacher and vice versa. They find that the high-school teacher should not be ignorant of the phases of life in elementary schools; for it is impossible to guide with certainty the high-school student if the teacher is ignorant of the preliminary stages thru which the student must have come. As an illustration, suppose a would-be teacher detaches himself from ordinary family life for a period of five or six years and isolates himself in university life to delve in knowledge and perchance to write a hundred letters for research material out of which to make a thesis. Will he not certainly get out of sympathy with the ways of child-life? Is it not clear that he will have to serve an expensive apprenticeship in order to reinstate himself in the ideals of child-life? Must he not learn by wasteful experiment to interpret the inherited and acquired qualities in the victims of his empiricism?

The facts seem to show unmistakably the unsoundness of the doctrine that a child may at one time have for his teacher a sensible, practical, resourceful person of meager academic attainments and at another time a teacher of deep scholarship in a few specialties and dense ignorance in more vital things. And surely the typical normal school should stand for better scholarship in its graduates; but the university should remove the strong hand with which it clutches the high-school teaching corps. The normal school should look into and master the requirements of high-school instruction. The university should have a higher conception of the preparation of all teachers. It should be as close to the elementary school as to the high school. The university now stands for knowledge as against processes in teaching. It should go to the very foundations of that knowledge which appertains to the capabilities, inclinations, inheritances, and possibilities of the child and the youth to be taught.

This paper presents no specifics, devices, schemes, or mechanisms for preparing high-school teachers. It seeks to make clear some conceptions of life in education which ought to be wrought into the constitution of every would-be teacher.

The school child from six to twenty is a child thru all his years of schooling. He is the product of forces preceding him. His inheritances and experiences make him what he is. Without knowledge of these potencies his teacher cannot with certainty direct his energies.

We have a somewhat top-heavy high-school curriculum. Higher education provides for that and sends out peripatetic pedagogs to enforce its dicta. The typical high-school teacher lacks sympathy for and insight into the transi

tion period of growing high-school children, too many of whom suffer with mental dyspepsia, being loaded with undigested and indigestible food for the mind. Fresh green graduates in the rôle of teachers are driving out our restless boys from the high schools. Girls being used to the cramping effect of conventionalities, cannot be driven from school by empiricism, tyranny, or routine. Yet they suffer much.

To meet the conditions teachers will have to be so prepared as to know the background below the plane of consciousness in the high-school child and to see how things must look to him. They will have to be capable of worrying over his habits and deeds. They will have to be able to discover the avenues to his consciousness. By instruction and trial they will be obliged to learn how to reach his consciousness thru its content in order to direct energy in the mastery of things outside that content. They have no right to invade classrooms with masses of knowledge all formulated and ready to transfer to the consciousness of the high-school child regardless of his previous knowledge and experience.

Each boy lives in a world of concrete tangible things. These constitute the soil in which to sow. But first they have to be discovered so that we may start the boy from things known to him in his work and play. Conceptions of grammar are nearly impossible to some sensible boys because they have no kindred ideas to compare it with.

This paper, therefore, ventures to suggest some mental states or attitudes with which efficient teachers by instruction or experience grow familiar. These states or attitudes need not be known in any particular form; but their recognition, study, and use become part of the conscious or unconscious habit of every efficient teacher in every school. Among these may be mentioned the following:

1. The non-receptive or unimpressionable state of mind. Students at times do not hear what is said to them. Tho respectful in bodily attitude their minds seem inactive or non-receptive. At other times they are wakeful, attentive, thoughtful, in receptive attitude. Many of them are non-receptive because the only existing avenues to their consciousness are ignored. The inattention of children is usually not their fault. It is just a part of themselves. No two are reached equally well at the same time thru the same avenues to their consciousness. Each child has a mass of concrete personal experiences thru which he hears and sees. He is receptive when approached thru these experiences. When not so approached he is non-receptive. Skilful and sympathetic teachers never proceed without believing that those to be taught are in receptive attitude. And it is for prospective teachers thru instruction. and experiment to gain insight into varied human nature so that they may with certainty secure this attitude even from the most indifferent students.

2. Thru the recitative attitude we secure expression of the simplest kind of mental reaction. This attitude does not imply much thinking. It does not require much. It implies receptivity and just enough of mental reaction

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