JOHN MACDONALD, editor Western School Journal, Topeka, Kan.-I do not agree with Superintendent Emerson when he says our schools are deteriorating. Our schools are better than they were years ago; they are better today than they were yesterday; they will be better tomorrow than they are today. Let us pray for Brother Emerson.

SUPERINTENDENT EMERSON (in closing).- Superintendent Hatch is not as much of a martyr as he represented himself to be. While it is true that the general subject was changed, it is also true that he was notified of the change at least a month before this meeting. I feel warranted in saying that very few, if any, of those who are on the program began the preparation of their papers more than a month before the meeting. In reply to Mr. MacDonald, I simply wish to reaffirm the statements I made in my paper, contrasting the present and past conditions of the public-school work done in this country.

THE IDEAL NORMAL SCHOOL

WILLIAM H. PAYNE, PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF TEACHING, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR, MICH.

I foresee that the term "typical normal school," or "the normal school of the future," will best indicate my treatment of the subject which has been assigned me. I do not propose to set up a normal school in Utopia, certainly not within the space of thirty minutes. The school that is to be is the school that is, of course with modifications. Human institutions acquire a momentum which carries them forward, oftentimes without regard to rhyme or reason. Institutions also obey the law of growth. They emerge from one stage of growth and gradually pass into a new and more advanced stage. Humanity as a whole is to have a better future, but this better future is to be an evolution out of a relatively good past. A sudden break with tradition is seldom justifiable. We may be quite sure that any policy that has had the long sanction of the wise and the good has a large measure of truth in it. An idiot or a madınan may destroy, but only wisdom and prudence can build. What we need, to use Mr. Spencer's happy phrase, is "to take stock of our progress," to try our work by some rational standard, and to introduce needed revisions and amendments.

In order to simplify this discussion, I shall limit my treatment to one type of the normal school, to what may be called the prevalent type, namely, the state normal school. It is no part of my purpose to discuss either the schools which lie below this plane or those which lie above it. We sometimes make substantial progress by judicious and prudent retreat. In our haste to grasp the new we sometimes lose our hold on the old and the true. I have been much struck with this sentence from John Morley's account of Diderot and the Encyclopædists: "Alas," he says, "it is one of the discouragements of the student of history that he

done."

"The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be

often finds highly civilized remarks made one or two or twenty centuries ago which are just as useful and just as little heeded now as they were when they were made." During the period from 1839 to the present time the type of the American normal school has radically changed, or, rather, there has been a change in the center of interest. Possibly this displacement has not been wise. Possibly it may be prudent to return to an abandoned ideal.

The law of a piece of mechanism is the product which is to issue from it. If the product must be modified, some special modification must be introduced into the mechanism. The governing law of a school is a clear conception of what its pupils should be. The normal school stands in this case. By observation and prophecy we determine what a teacher should be, and then we organize the forces necessary for realizing this conception. It is simply a case of adapting means to ends. Obviously, in the minds of those who mold public opinion there has been a change in the conception of what a teacher should be, and as a result there has been a corresponding change in the policy of our normal schools. If we can agree as to the required attainments of the teacher, we shall hardly disagree as to the means for producing these attainments. But there is room for sane and honest disagreement. Just now we are passing thru the period of discussion in which disagreements and differences are inevitable and pardonable.

I shall not waste time by dwelling on details. In such discussions we should move only along main lines, not losing ourselves in by-ways. If we find our way along the highways of our science, we shall economize both effort and speed.

It is doing but deserved justice to our normal schools to state that their fortunes are being directed by the best educational talent of the day, by men who are alive to the spirit of the age, and who have the gift of serious and solid thinking. In no other department of educational enterprise is there a keener search for truth or a more determined effort in the line of substantial improvement.

Following the line of procedure already indicated, I shall venture to state some opinions as to the qualifications and attainments needed by the ideal teacher, and shall suggest what seems to me the rational means of securing these endowments. I prefer to speak in the potential, or in the interrogative, mode, but if I sometimes resort to the indicative, it is not that I would dogmatize, but that I may give expression to an honest opinion. To discuss this large subject within the prescribed limit, my treatment must needs be fragmentary and incomplete.

The capital fact, the one that antedates all others in importance, is this The teacher should be an artist rather than artisan. An instance

of what I have called the displacement of interest is the movement from

2 Diderot, p. 185.

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scholarship to technique. Is it not a false analogy which likens the art of teaching, which deals with spirit, to the mechanic arts, which deal with matter? Training" is a term of sinister import, as it seems to put the emphasis on sleight of hand and to suggest limited acquirements and endowments. It is freely admitted that in school administration there must be some degree of mechanism, but it is a gross error to regard the school simply as a piece of cunning machinery. If it is a machine at all, it is a machine animated, inspired, and directed by spirit, the spirit of him or her who teaches. Is it not absurd to think that teachers are to learn their art by methods analogous to those that prevail in mills and shops? The shop deals with the matter that is uniform in quality, and it aims at products that are uniform in style and finish. The school, on the contrary, deals with impalpable spirit, multiform in its manifestations, and necessarily and properly multiform and variable in its transformations. Is there a truer conception of teaching than that it is a process of induction, a process by which plastic spirit is molded and fashioned by a master-spirit richly endowed with the finer qualities of mind and heart? In the last analysis it is not the linguist, or the scientist, or the specialist of any sort that educates, but the man or the woman inspired by scholarship and culture. In illustration of what I mean, I will repeat for the hundredth time the saying, attributed to President Garfield, that the real essentials of a college are an impressible boy on one end of a bench and a Mark Hopkins on the other. It is the net personality of the teacher that educates, and schools that profess to educate teachers should preserve this net personality rather than allow it to be broken up into disjecta membra. Mere specialists are a nenace to a school in which teachers are to be educated for high and efficient service. A specialist may instruct, but he cannot educate, as education implies what is wholesome, that is, wholeness. If the specialist must needs be, his destructive work must be offset by culture subjects, such as literature and history, which appeal to the whole man, and tend to preserve his essential integrity. Ultimate analysis destroys a work of art as an educating instrument. It is a desecration to dissect a piece of literary art by grammatical and linguistic analysis. I shall not be misunderstood when I say that the scientific treatment of a subject, that is, its analysis into its molecules, and then the inspection and evaluation of its fragments, destroys it for purposes of education proper. This so-called scientific process which is now in vogue is very like the application of a microscope to a painting. It resolves a masterpiece into shreds of canvas and patches of paint. All this amounts to saying that studies of the culture type should have a large place in a school whose aim is the education of teachers.

A normal school should teach chemistry, but it is not its function to educate chemists; it should also teach language, but it should not aim to produce linguists, etymologists, or philologists. The unwisdom of

this specializing process is seen when each of a half dozen instructors attempts to make a specialist out of the same pupil.

More than once I have tried to reconcile myself to the contention, sometimes made, that geometry in a high school and geometry in a normal school should be taught by methods essentially different. This contention is made, doubtless, partly to differentiate the normal school from the high school, and partly to conform to the dictum of Mr. Spencer that the method of instruction should conform to the method of discovery. Of one thing I think there can be no doubt: a normal school should teach a given subject, as geometry, just as its students should teach it when they in turn become teachers. It is not true that teachers as a class are to be investigators, discoverers, or specialists, but that their function in the main is that of disseminating and distributing. The vice of vivisection lies in the assumption that a long-discovered fact is to be rediscovered for the ten-thousandth time. Perhaps in the distant future we may have normal schools like the famous École Normale Supérieure of Paris, whose function is the education and training of specialists; but we have not yet reached this stage, and the becoming function of our state normal schools is to prepare young men and women for diffusing capitalized knowledge; not for creating a new chemistry, but for teaching the chemistry already created. In saying this I am mindful of the fact that the communication of knowledge is only one aim of the school; but it is one of its principal aims.

In his terse way Alexander Bain declares that one of the needful conditions for learning is the "quiescence of the emotions." A normal school should live in a state of peace. It should ever be in a condition of stable equilibrium. Its function should not be the discovery or even the rediscovery of educational truth. It should have a settled policy and a prevalent doctrine, but it should not be militant or revolutionary. It should not lend itself to doubtful disputations. It should be religious in tone and spirit, but it should not teach a controversial theology. So it should be inspired and guided by a real tho unannounced educational creed; but it should be sheltered from the warring factions of educational doctrinaires. Its purpose is not to recruit the ranks of educational theorists and reformers, or even to recast our educational philosophy. Per se these are legitimate functions, but they lie far above the plane of the normal school, and far beyond the ability of the normal-school student. All this said in the way of reasonable limitation.

In the future toward which the term "ideal" points, our educational philosophers will continue to speak from their high vantage ground, but between them and us who move on a lower plain there should be authorized interpreters who can bring these larger utterances within the comprehension of the ordinary mind. It must have occurred to many who have attempted to comprehend the new pedagogy that a new philosophical

language is in progress of formation, which is almost utterly unintelligible to the lay reader or student.' There is some reason to fear that this new symbolism may invade the normal schools to distress and bewilder their students, and that they will finally issue from their "laboratories" to inflict the new speech on helpless children. In our profession we need another Rousseau to teach the virtue of simplicity and to preach a return to the use of simple, frugal, transparent English. What is to be feared is the downward diffusion of jargon. What is to be desired is the prev alence, in school and out of school, of the beautiful and wholesome English of the New Testament, of the English of De Foe, of Addison, and of Bunyan. In the way of philosophy it should be remembered that the colossal common sense of John Locke expressed itself in terms easily intelligible by the ordinary reader and thinker; it did not attempt to clothe obscure conceptions in obscure symbols. As the normal schools are now dwelling so much on technique, it is to be feared that the new jargon may become sporadic. It should be one of the professional missions of the normal school to insist on the use, in speaking and in writing, of clear idiomatic English. This problem is now complicated by the feeling, far too common, that obscure utterance bespeaks profundity of thought. Philosophical language, as used by some of our writers, easily shades off into congenia! obscurity; but it should be regarded as a mental weakness to make a thought vague by clothing it in unintelligible

terms.2

All instruction should aim at what Macaulay calls "intellectual emancipation," that is, the creation within the pupil of the ability to deal with the problems of life, general and professional, at first hand. In other words, men should be taught to do their own thinking and to come to their own conclusions on all matters coming within their proper province. A Greek proverb says that a mob has no brains, and it is not a bad description of the aim of education to say that it should supply men and women with individual brains. The routine work of the school encourages routine thinking, and this in turn produces teaching that is dreary and wooden. In Carlyle's phrase a teacher should be a live coal rather than a dead cinder, and this simile points to versatility, variety, and originality; and so far as instruction can produce these endowments, they flow from studies and disciplines of the liberal type. I fear it must be said of many normal schools that they do not produce liberal scholarship and the ability to do independent thinking. There is a necessary incompatibility between technique and liberal training; and so long as the

I "Will is actualized in an object which is itself will, and this is a will which wills will. Such an object which is existent in the world as will, whose end and purpose is to secure will, is an institution."

2" There is a well-recognized literary disease which may be called logomania, and which subjects its victims to the irrational influence of words. The intoxication at times becomes complete, and the victim reels under the dominance of the poison, though maintaining a semblance of coherence and occasionally of wisdom."-The Dial.