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institution, such as is always possible for a university or a college, and decidedly limits its influence and power in the very field that it endeavors to successfully reach and occupy.

4. The normal schools are generally conducted on the notion that the training department is the only center of all complete and perfect efforts, and that all other lines of work and development carried on by the school must contribute to its prominence and glory. Now, such a conception exaggerates greatly the actual possible service of the training department, and also specially belittles the service that the other departments are qualified to perform in the development and training of a teacher. There are special benefits to be gained from personal contact with all superior teachers in the class-room. Such benefit is just as effective in developing the power of the teacher in training as the training school, because the actual and powerful teaching of a branch of knowledge has a great and direct influence as an effective example upon a would-be teacher. If the students getting ready for a teacher's career got nothing from a normal school except professional instruction and technical training, it is quite certain that the majority of them would mentally perish from the monotony of the effort, and would find it necessary to decline to continue such unpalatable work. A true student comes to a school to get into contact with great personalities in the teachers and great ideas in the subjects taught, more than to obtain technical instruction or special methods of teaching and managing. The greatest thing about all schools is their spirit and the superiority of their environment over the ordinary experience of the student, and it is folly to expect a right preparation for any career without the benefits of a mental diet that is agreeable, attractive, and wholesome. To confine a growing life to the technical and the professional alone, to the extent that it is frequently practiced, is contrary to science and also to common-sense.

5. The normal schools are commonly conducted, maintained, and supported on a cheap plan. They are treated as if they were to be small. and insignificant schools, very meagerly equipped, cheaply directed, and taught by persons of narrow experience and education. The theory of their management seems to be that they need less apparatus, less libraries, less laboratories, and less specialization in their instruction than would ordinarily be expected of colleges and universities. This fact is assumed. as correct and true by the people of a commonwealth, by the legislatures, who decide destinies in public affairs by making laws, and also by the boards of trustees and faculties selected to manage and develop these schools. The preparation of a public-school teacher is thus assumed to be a very easy and simple work, and the expense is therefore inferred to be very small indeed. To secure a good patronage of students under these uninviting circumstances, tuition is made free, and special efforts are put forth to gather in "from the highways and the hedges" large num

bers of those who are supposed not to be qualified for much of a career, thinking that possibly they can in some way be induced to be elementary teachers for the common school, such teachers as can eke out an existence at the small salaries generally paid for this work. This condition is unfortunate and unfavorable. It certainly requires decided native ability, in addition to training, to make a teacher. The right kind of normal schools can therefore never be cheaply conducted schools, as they must have the most elaborate equipment, the largest working libraries, the most perfect facilities, the most distinguished and original teachers, if they are to be fully able to meet the exigencies placed upon them in solving educational problems.

6. The normal schools are, as a rule, weak in the personnel of their faculties. This is due to many reasons, but chiefly to the economic conditions that are required by the small salaries paid and by the unfavorable conditions imposed, when compared with other higher lines of teaching. Teachers in normal schools are commonly selected because they possess a peculiar kind of skill, even if they lack special personality, marked scholarship, or other decided attainments or experience. These conditions have improved somewhat in the past ten years, but nevertheless there is still so much room for positive improvement in these respects that it should never be forgotten that even normal schools depend entirely for their prestige, for their greatness, and for their usefulness upon the character, the efficiency, and the greatness of the individual members in their faculties. Some things are useful and important, others are imperative and desirable, but a faculty is the one factor of the school whose superiority, excellence, and greatness are always an absolute necessity, whatever else may have been provided or planned.

Normal schools are, and of a right ought to be, great public institutions, because they have such a great province and are rightly expected to perform a great public service in a great way. The unusualness of these problems demands that normal schools be conducted on large plans, that they claim their right to the things that civilization stands ready to give when the demand is rightly understood, and that they thus possess their heritage and have the facilities that are commensurate to their needs. With this outlook there will soon be the advent of a new era, and the next decade will see magnificent public institutions of the highest and best type substituted for what are today commonly denominated as very ordinary schools.

DISCUSSION

L. SEELEY, professor of pedagogy, State Normal School, Trenton, N. J.- The statement of this rather long title seems to admit that there is a great deal of opposition and criticism of our normal schools, and that there is justification of the same owing to defects in the normal schools themselves. Now I do not know of any considerable opposition to

these institutions. I know that legislatures liberally provide for them, that the number of students in them is rapidly increasing, and that their graduates were never in so great demand. There will always be critics; nor is this an unfortunate circumstance. Just and wise criticism acts as a corrective, and stimulates to better things. Let us examine some of these criticisms of our work, and wherein they are well taken, and strive to benefit by them.

I. LACK OF SCHOLARSHIP OF NORMAL GRADUATES

Perhaps the most vital and most often heard criticism of the normal school is that its product shows too little scholarship. Let us admit that the fundamental necessity in the equipment of the teacher is scholarship. You may secure a "knack" of doing things in the schoolroom whereby there is an apparent temporary success; you may lay stress upon "methods" by which instruction seems to be well imparted; you may acquire skill in manipulating the external evidences of the teacher's work and I do not depreciate the value of all these - but if there is a lack of scholastic attainment there can be no permanent success. Too many of our normal schools, by the admission of poorly prepared students, by too short a course, by depending upon a veneering process to cover up defects, are sending out teachers ignorant of the subject-matter.

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This condition is being slowly corrected, and we have every reason to be encouraged. When we compare our rate of progress with that of other countries, the picture is not altogether dark. Our first normal school was founded in 1839, that of France in 1684 and that of Germany in 1697. Thus these two countries have a century and a half the start of us, and yet a comparison of the work of our best normal schools with that of the elementary normal schools of France and the teachers' seminary of Germany would show a result of which we do not need to be ashamed. The trouble is the difference between our best and our average normal school is very great, and we are comparing our best with their average. Our early normal schools were mere academic institutions, and, without materially lengthening their course, we have added the recently demanded professional training, thus weakening the academic work. The obvious remedy is a higher standard of admission, or a lengthening of the course, or both. That higher standards of admission are now possible is shown by Dr. Harris' latest report. The increase in students in our secondary schools from 1890 to 1900 was 95.98 per cent., while the increase in the number of secondary schools for the same period was 138 per cent. Commissioner Harris very hopefully says:

The increase in the number of high schools and in the number of students enrolled in them is something phenomenal. It would seem as if the people of all cities and villages had determined to provide high-school accommodations for their children. More than this, there is now a movement to furnish accommodations for all qualified children in county high schools where the population is too sparse and the wealth too small to provide town high schools,1

When the standard of admission is fixed at the completion of a full high-school course, as has already been reached in some parts of the land, this defect should disappear, and to remove this is the first and imperative duty of our normal schools.

2. LACK OF CLOSE RELATIONSHIP WITH THE SCHOOLS FOR WHICH THEY PREPARE TEACHERS

Our normal schools take too little account of the schools for which they prepare teachers. Of course we cannot expect to come as close to our clientage as the German and French normal schools do, where each normal school supplies teachers for a limited territory; but we might study our mutual interests far better than we do. How often trustees employ local teachers with but little fitness in preference to normal graduates, even on the same terms! Prejudice may be a factor, but why should there be prejudice? The truth is we fail to prepare our graduates to meet peculiar local conditions, and the trustee will have none of them. He thinks that they are full of new-fangled notions, 1 Report of Commissioner of Education, 1899-1900, p. liv.

curious methods, and high-spun theories; but he could stand these things if the teacher had been trained to a sympathetic comprehension of the needs of his community, as the German country schoolmaster is. The normal school must be the leader, the pioneer of educational thought and practice; but it must not go too fast, else it will prejudice the community and defeat its purpose. This is no old-fogyism; it is common-sense.

Our American people are progressive in education as well as in everything else; but they have been suspicious of the normal school because of its lack of close touch with the common school.

I am warned that I have exhausted the space allowed me, and can only state a third effect, without discussing it.

3. LACK OF CIRCUMSCRIBED AIM

The high school prepares for college or for life. The college aims to fit for broader citizenship and lays the foundations for a professional career. The university specializes along different lines, seeking to give definite mastery of some particular field of human thought and human endeavor. Modern civilization is so complex, the division of labor so great, and the requirements of each calling so multifarious that no one can be expected to master other callings than his own.

The normal school is intended to prepare teachers, but there are many kinds of teachers, and the aim is not definite enough. The normal school attempts to make kindergartners, primary, grammar and high school teachers, assistants and principals, grade teachers and district-school teachers under the same course of study, in the same time, with the same instruction, in the same classes.

Has not the time come when there must be a greater differentiation in the work of our normal schools?

This work has already begun by the establishment of chairs of pedagogy in colleges, by the founding of teachers' and normal colleges, and by organizing classes for kindergartners in some schools. But this does not reach the great mass of our common-school teachers, who also must in some way receive special training for special work. This will necessitate a reconstruction of our normal-school scheme, whereby there may be at least two grades of normal schools, somewhat after the pattern of France.

PRESIDENT ALBERT SALISBURY, State Normal School, Whitewater, Wis.-The state normal schools are set for a specific, practical service, to serve their states. The state expects the normal school to take the young people where it finds them, and to hold them as long as it can, and give them all it can. More than this it cannot do. It must give them scholarship, all they will stay for, and first of all in those subjects which they will be called upon to teach. But this is not all that it should give them.

About a generation ago a bogey was invented and set in motion, the bugaboo of methods, "cut-and-dried methods." This bugaboo is now old and second-hand, but seems to have alighted in Dr. Butler's hat. We have been told here today that we should present a few fundamental principles, and then method will take care of itself. But is this true?

I understand method to be systematic procedure according to principles. It is the application of principles. Are young people able to make this application wholly for themselves? Principles are abstractions; they must be reduced to the concrete. We do this by our work in special methods and by the work of the practice school. Can we do it in any other way? What more consistent or logical or profitable thing can the normal school do?

PRESIDENT JOHN W. Cook, Northern Illinois State Normal School, De Kalb, Ill.— I am reminded of a remark which President Lincoln once made when beginning an argument in a lawsuit in reply to the eminent Judge Logan, of Springfield, Ill. It was to the effect that he had so profound an admiration for the intelligence and legal

knowledge of Judge Logan that whenever he found himself unable to accept the opinion of that distinguished attorney he felt somewhat skeptical as to the conclusions of his own judgment, and he could only console himself in the thought that possibly even Judge Logan might make a mistake. I have always listened with interest to anything that Dr. Seerley has had to present, but I am obliged to confess that I cannot adopt his view in this particular instance. And the discussions that have followed have been still less satisfactory. Indeed I have rarely attended the meetings of any of the sections of the National Association in which the work of the institutions for which the section stands has been so unhappily discredited. A stranger who should have dropped into our midst might conclude that he had strayed into a meeting whose central idea was to attack normal schools, rather than to elucidate their methods of work. The references to the Superior Normal School of Paris are interesting and suggestive. But to hold that the American state normal school at its present stage of development has any such function or should attempt any such problems is to make a grave mistake. France is generously equipped with provincial normal schools, and it is to them rather than to the unique institution in Paris that she must look for the preparation of teachers for her elementary schools. Teaching, indeed, cannot be said to have attained the rank of a profession as yet in this country. In no one of the states of the Union has there been any such development of the idea of professional instruction for teachers as to secure well-equipped and thoroly competent schoolmasters for all of the schools. Massachusetts has one good normal school for each thousand of her teachers, but such distressing mortality prevails in this particular department of human activity that even her admirable facilities are inadequate. In no state west of the Alleghanies is it possible, with the facilities at present operative, to furnish an adequate supply of teachers for public schools. Our ambition consequently must be far less lofty than that of the gentleman from Missouri. I am disposed to think that a longer experience in the work which he has undertaken will satisfy him that humbler achievement will do far more for the commonwealth by which he is employed than any Quixotic scheme shaping normal schools after the model of the institution to which he has referred.

I have heard ever since I can remember a good deal of talk about normal-school methods. The impression seems to have prevailed that these institutions were engaged in the manufacture of formal devices with which their pupils were to be stuffed and which were to be retailed regardless of their application in the schools that should unhappily come under their influence. I have not before, however, heard the sentiment expressed by normal-school men. The remarks have also been so utterly inapplicable to the institutions with which I have been acquainted that I have attributed them to the ignorance of their authors. Am I mistaken in my impression that there is a disposition on the part of normal-school men to return to the academic work of the old normal school? Is it because there has been an attempt to construct professional courses and that such an attempt has been unsatisfactory because of the lack of development of pedagogical principles and practices? I sincerely trust that I am in error in this matter, and that the normal school will not abandon the fields of professional investigation and development because the problem of education is found to be difficult. That would indeed be an ignoble surrender. I have no such conception of method as I find coming so trippingly from the tongues of many speakers. The term has a deeper and profounder significance to my mind, and I should rather include under the word "devices" all of that formal machinery which has been so justly condemned in the past. Method is indeed a subject that is worthy of the profoundest investigation, and it is indeed to this deeper and more vital method that the normal school must devote the larger part of its energy. Let the academy exploit the knowledges on their own account, but let the normal school separate itself more and more widely from those institutions whose function is the diffusion of knowledge, and not the technical preparation of men and women for the practice of a distinct and fairly well-defined art.

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