Education of Teachers

“Teaching is a spiritual art and classifies with music, poetry and oratory, rather than with the mechanic arts, the arts that deal with matter and its fixed and uniform relations. As teaching has to do with spirit, methods of teaching should not be fixed and invariable, but flexible and fluid, adapted to the modes and phases of variable spirit. In all intelligent and effective teaching, principles, rather than rules, should be held at a premium. Versatile teaching will draw its methods from prolific principles and will reflect the personality of the teacher who uses them. When methods become uniform, teaching becomes mechanical and wooden.

Teachers should be educated rather than trained, education pointing to versatility and freedom, training to uniformity and mechanism, A teacher’s education should be of the liberal type. The teacher himself should first of all be a scholar in spirit and attainment, and his strictly professional studies should also be of the liberal type. Teaching is a beneficent vocation and the highest motive of the teacher is the love of doing good. To be humane in spirit and benevolent in act is to possess the highest qualifications for the vocation of teaching. The basis of good order and wholesome discipline is the respect and affection which the young have for their benefactors. As a school is an organization, there must be a certain amount of mechanism in school administration; but when a love for the mechanical has become the prevalent spirit, the higher life of the school will be destroyed. Where masses of children are to be taught by a comparatively small number of teachers, too much reliance is placed on the mechanics of school administration, and there is many a school system, highly organized as a machine, which provokes the inquiry: Can these dry bones live?” — Extract from Author’s Preface