CHAPTER XII

THE TEACHERS' INSTITUTE1

The Function of the Institute. We must assume that our public school service is to be administered, in great part, by young men and women who have made no previous study of the teaching art; and one of the great educational problems of the day is how to promote the professional education of teachers who have entered the public school service with but little or no preparatory training.

I think we may say at the outset that the function of the normal school is to take in hand the training of professional teachers; whereas, the distinctive function of the Institute is to provide some training for non-professional teachers. Those who frequent our normal schools, as a rule, do so with the deliberate intent of making teaching a vocation for a shorter or a longer period; and, at the time when they actually enter upon their duties, they have already learned more or less of their art. The Institute, on the other hand, assumes that very many who are actually teaching, or who propose to teach, have never received a normal school training; and so its special function is to supplement the normal school - to do a little of the work that it should have done, but which it did not have the opportunity of doing.

Military life furnishes an illustration of the distinctive functions of the normal school and the Institute. The professional soldier is educated at West Point; but the exigencies of the country sometimes require the services of large

1 From Payne's Contributions to the Science of Education.

numbers of non-professional soldiers. These volunteers are usually trained for a few days before they see actual service. In camps of instruction they are taught the elements of military tactics, while their training is extended and perfected by active service in the field.

And so we may define an Institute as a normal school with a very short course of study; and we may state its general purpose to be, first, to instruct the prospective, but nonprofessional, teacher in the elements of his art, and thus to give some extension to his knowledge and skill. In this statement I have sought to indicate the primary and main purpose of the Institute. I do not forget that a secondary purpose should be to stimulate and assist teachers who are further advanced in the theory and practice of their art.

Now, for the sake of clearness, let us inquire what knowledge is needed in order to enter upon the work of teaching with fair hopes of success; what are the elements of professional knowledge; and what part of this work the limitations of the Institute will permit it to undertake.

The First Requisite of the Teacher.-1. It is plain that the very first requisite is a competent knowledge of subjects. The teacher must know how to read, spell, and write, and must have some knowledge of arithmetic, grammar, and geography, as the necessary condition of assisting others in the attainment of this knowledge. It is necessary to insist on this requirement, for two reasons: (1) The doctrine is beginning to prevail that teacher and pupil should move on the same plane, both should be tyros and learners, and that the chief point of superiority on the part of the teacher is his greater mental alertness and persistence. Of course, absolutely speaking, the teacher should be a learner; but, relatively, he should be learned. In geography, for example, his scholarship should not be simply a thing in progress, but a fact accomplished. In the work of the school, teacher and pupil are not coördinate elements. And (2) in our day there is such insistence on method,

as distinguished from scholarship, that we are in danger of underestimating the importance of high scholastic attainments. In the earlier day scholarship was everything, method almost nothing; and the natural recoil from this error has induced an exaggerated belief in method as some substitute for scholarship. I think it cannot be too much insisted on that a school of a given grade should have for its teacher one who has been educated in a school of a higher grade.

The Second Requisite. After scholarship, the thing of next importance is method. Two teachers of equal attainments may stand to each other in real force as ten to one, the difference being due to high and low qualities of method. I use this term to cover all the processes of the schoolroom, -organization, government, and instruction. Many have not observed the fact that improvement in methods of teaching has been as real, and, perhaps, as rapid, as improvement in the processes of agriculture or of manufacture. There is scarcely a greater difference between gathering grain with a cradle and with a reaper than between the alphabetic and the word method. There is not a single method in schoolroom practice that has not suffered marked revision and improvement within the last twenty-five years. Now, what the Institute is to insist on is, that all teachers under training shall be taught the very best current method of doing the various work of the school.

The Teacher's "Conversion."- So far we have been dealing with the matter and the method of the teacher's outfit; the body, so to speak, of his professional self. But this body must be animated and inspired by a spirit. I am now speaking of something that cannot be articulately described, but of something of which we are all conscious when we think of a real teacher and his work. Grant to the painter his palette, his brushes, his paints, and the formal rules of his art; but, with only these things, he is merely a mechanic. What will transform this mechanic into an artist? Fair SCH. INT. & DUT.-16

ideals, a divine sense of beauty, and a conception of the possibilities of art. It is only under the domination of this spirit that the artist becomes a creator. Now, what I wish to say is that, by some means, a spirit akin to this must be infused into a body of scholars, in order that they may become teachers. There must be some ideal to serve as the goal of one's effort, some sense of the sacredness and grandeur of the teaching office, and a conception of what is possible through the resources of the teacher's art. This change of spirit and of purpose is so marked that, sometimes, in speaking of it, I have ventured to call it conversion.

On more than one occasion I have seen a change of countenance pass over an assembly of teachers as the speaker succeeded in causing his hearers to catch a glimpse of the real nature and the possibilities of the educating art. He who has once ascended a mountain, and thence has surveyed the landscape below, is forever after a changed man. In some real way, but, of course, in a way that cannot be described, so far as spirit is concerned, there has been a transformation, almost a transfiguration. So teachers may be made to survey their work from the summit of a lofty conception; and then, forever after, this work will be done in a new spirit, under a kind of inspiration.

Matter, method, and spirit - these are the three things without. which no work in teaching, even of tolerable excellence, can be done. They must accompany all true teaching; and while they form the minimum of one's professional preparation, they are the permanent endowments of the most accomplished teacher. Other elements may be added, but these are constants.

Instrumental and Professional Knowledge-General knowledge must be regarded by the teacher as instrumental or technical. It is necessary material that he must employ in the practice of his art. But with respect to general scholarship, the teacher cannot be distinguished from the

well-educated man or woman in general; so that while a knowledge of subjects is to the teacher instrumental knowledge, it is not, with strict propriety, professional knowledge. Perhaps we must call it quasi professional; though, considering the practical necessities of the case, instruction in subjects must be regarded as a necessary function of the normal school. What is that knowledge, then, which differentiates the teacher from the scholar which is, with strict propriety, professional knowledge? Method, as described in the last section, is certainly entitled to this designation, but on the ground that it is peculiar knowledge that no one but a teacher must necessarily have. On still higher ground, select portions of psychology are entitled to this designation, for it is chiefly this knowledge that can serve as the rational basis of method. As Mr. Bain says, "The largest chapter in the science of education is psychological."

Psychology, in fact, stands in the same relation to teaching that anatomy does to medicine. The teacher's art is addressed to mind; and if this art is to be rational, if it is to be administered in the scientific or the professional spirit—for these are usually identical the teacher should know much of the philosophy of mind. We must hold, I think, that there is as good a reason why a professional teacher should have an articulate knowledge of psychology as there is why a physician should have such a knowledge of physiology. That Professor H-, for example, should know the interdependence of sensation, perception, imagination, memory, and judgment, is just as essential as that Doctor Y should know the interdependence of lungs, stomach, liver, and brain. There is much of psychology that is merely curious or of general interest, having but very remote and indirect bearings upon the practice of the teacher's art; but there is other matter, of much smaller volume, that is vitally and constantly related to every process of instruction. Some of this knowledge should certainly be communicated to teachers through the agency of the Institute. I hear it said