t\OT\TOt 7, 
 
 Reprinted from the Technology Review, Vol. III., No. 4 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 George H. Ellis, Printer, 272 Congress Street 
 
 1901 
 
UNIVERSITY Or 
 ILLINOIS UBRAKJ 
 
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THE PROFESSION OF TEACHING 
 
 One of the most painful things to the student of educa- 
 tion is the wide difference between the high results of public 
 school teaching which he believes to be practicable and the 
 actual achievements of the usual public school. Theoreti- 
 cally, free public education should be the supreme force in 
 every community : practically, it is not. Theoretically, the 
 extension of such education should be followed by a higher 
 political morality and a deeper sense of social responsibility : 
 practically, it is not. Theoretically, the teacher — spiritual 
 or temporal — - should be honored above all other men : 
 practically, she is not. Who is to blame? In part, the 
 parent, for neglecting to take active interest in the work and 
 standing of public schools ; in part, the community, for giv- 
 ing grudgingly toward education and refusing due support 
 and honor to those who teach ; but, most of all, the teachers 
 themselves and the colleges of arts and sciences, for failing 
 to regard teaching as the most important and honorable of 
 all professions. 
 
 It is, indeed, the exceptional teacher — outside the facul- 
 ties of colleges — who seriously looks upon himself as a 
 professional man. The ordinary schoolmaster has little of 
 the personal weight, of the sense of professional responsi- 
 bility, of what may be called the corporate self-respect of 
 the lawyer, the physician, or the engineer. The traditions 
 of the teaching guild do not yet demand a wide education, 
 a slow and laborious preparation, a careful and humble 
 apprenticeship, such as are required for entrance into the 
 really learned professions. A broad education and the poise 
 of mind which follows it are the vital needs of a great 
 
 p f.OW5 
 
4 
 
 majority of the public school teachers of to-day. They are 
 ceaselessly complaining of a condition of things which is 
 indeed grievous, but which is largely of their own creation. 
 They demand high place without qualifying themselves to 
 hold high place ; they rebel at a not uncommon attitude of 
 contempt or of contemptuous toleration on the part of the 
 public, but do not purge themselves of the elements which 
 excite that contempt ; they accuse the parents and the 
 public of indifference toward their work, but do little to 
 render that work of such quality as to forbid indifference. 
 
 There is no reason — except in negligent custom, in which 
 the majority of teachers and practically all of the colleges 
 acquiesce — why the man or woman who has charge of the 
 mental growth of the child should be satisfied with a train- 
 ing less thorough than that of the physician who cares for 
 his body, the lawyer who manages his property, or the 
 clergyman who ministers to his soul. It is idle to claim, 
 as is sometimes done, that there is no profession for the 
 teacher to study, that the art of teaching comes by nature, 
 and that, if there be a sort of science of education, it will 
 filter out from the errors and successes of experience. 
 The body of the law is but a record of human experiments 
 and mistakes in social order. Medicine itself is but the 
 crystallized result — always recrystallizing — of centuries of 
 empiricism, often disastrous, upon the human constitution. 
 Engineering, founded though it be upon a science so exact 
 as mathematics, is the net result of an infinite number of 
 blundering attempts to solve the problems of matter and 
 of motion. But the fact that these professions and the 
 sciences upon which they rest are always undergoing change, 
 that often the accepted truth of to-day is the proved fallacy 
 of to-morrow, does not lessen their dignity, does not dis- 
 courage their followers from long years of preparation for 
 
 
5 
 
 them, does not justify the men of those professions in work- 
 ing by rule-of-thumb methods and haphazard guesses when 
 it is possible, through study, experimentation, and mutual 
 enlightenment, to work by known laws, in orderly sequence, 
 toward well-defined ends. There is abundant foundation 
 for a science and art of education as elaborate and dignified 
 as that of medicine ; but the science and art will not develop 
 so long as it is regarded as possible and natural to admit 
 half-taught girls and youths, or those who follow teaching 
 only as a temporary means of livelihood, to full fellowship 
 with thoroughly educated, professional teachers. Neither 
 will this science and this art emerge into professional dignity 
 until the colleges and the professional schools define them, 
 co-ordinate the subjects of study upon which they are based, 
 and place the cc Graduate in Education ” upon the high 
 plane of the Doctor of Medicine and the Bachelor of 
 Law. 
 
 Were there, however, no well-defined science and art of 
 education, abundant reason would still remain why the 
 public school-teacher, quite as much as the college pro- 
 fessor, should be soundly and broadly trained in a range 
 of study and thought far beyond the topics that he teaches. 
 For it is the personality of the man, the breadth of his 
 grasp of life, and the atmosphere which he creates and 
 maintains in his school-room that, more than anything else, 
 secure his success in teaching and really develop his pupils. 
 These qualities can be secured, in general, only by a sound 
 and extensive education. 
 
 No teacher has a right to lament the blindness of the 
 public toward the value of his work who has not fitted 
 himself in the highest measure really to be an educator. 
 No body of teachers may honestly cc resolve ” for greater 
 recognition and consideration from others unless they are 
 
6 
 
 themselves doing yeoman work toward raising the stand- 
 ards of preparation and attainment within their own profes- 
 sion. So long as low ideals of school work, routine in- 
 struction, and aimless methods — to say nothing of political 
 interference — are tolerated by the teachers themselves, the 
 schools and those who conduct them will fail of due honor 
 and support, will fall far short of their possible efficiency, 
 and will not take their rightful place as the supreme uplift- 
 ing force of every democratic community. 
 
 If it be deemed necessary that the professions of law and 
 medicine should be governed by the strictest rules, should 
 frame elaborate codes of ethics, should have only the 
 highest and purest aims, purging themselves of all shysters, 
 jerry-builders, and quacks, how infinitely more impor- 
 tant that this profession of teaching, the work of which is 
 greater, higher, nobler than any of those others, should 
 be regarded, too, as a sacred guild into which no traffickers 
 or triflers be allowed to come, concerning whose work none 
 but him who knows should have anything to say, whose sole 
 aim should be to make of every child of the millions under 
 its care the very most that can be made. 
 
 Certain stock arguments are always brought forward 
 against the possibility of such high professional standards. 
 The pitifully poor rewards, the uncertainty of tenure, the 
 often anomalous social position of the teacher, — all these 
 and many similar disadvantages are advanced as reasons 
 why it is not worth while to attempt to raise the present 
 standards of attainment. The hosts of glib pretenders, the 
 arrogance of ignorant school committees, a cheap and noisy 
 commercialism, are, it is said, insurmountable obstacles to 
 the creation of a generally high, fine conception of teaching 
 such as exists among a few devoted, really educated school- 
 masters. A man who adopts the work of teaching must 
 
7 
 
 have, we are told, something of the martyr spirit ; for 
 this profession has in it an element of self-sacrifice which 
 the other high vocations do not demand. Truly, the work 
 of the teacher does involve much sacrifice of self ; but it 
 meets with immediate and tangible reward in the uplifted 
 lives of the children for whom the sacrifice is made. This 
 is a return which even the profession of the clergy rarely 
 sees. Moreover, were the majority of those who teach 
 broadly educated men and women, were there an esprit de 
 corps among them such as is found in every other profes- 
 sion, the petty things of teaching, which now so often 
 overshadow the great things, would disappear and the 
 rewards, both material and insubstantial, would be vastly 
 increased. Rights and privileges would then be eagerly 
 offered where now they are clamored for in vain. 
 
 The education of the teacher — whether he is to deal 
 with infants or with collegians — should be as nearly as 
 possible like the best training given to the young physi- 
 cian. He should have, in the first place, a general educa- 
 tion so thorough and well balanced that he may be able to 
 deal wisely, as the physician is called upon to deal, with 
 those problems of character, those perversions of mind and 
 morals, those subtle diseases of the will which no medicine 
 and no surgeon’s knife can reach. Having made himself 
 thus a broad man, a proper counsellor, the young teacher 
 must next, as does the medical student, become familiar 
 with the technical details of his profession, learn what is 
 known of the mental growth and reactive processes of 
 children, study the laws of mental health, the modes of its 
 preservation, the methods of stimulating mind and soul, 
 the effects, good and bad, of association, what one might 
 call, in short, the pathology of childhood and adolescence. 
 More than this, he should make himself, as far as can be 
 
8 
 
 done theoretically, master of the details of the school-room. 
 Next, just as the medical student takes his course in the 
 hospitals, the teacher must secure actual, hard practice in 
 teaching, with pupils of many sorts and conditions. And, 
 finally, throughout his whole professional preparation he 
 must make a careful analytical and philosophical study of 
 the history of education. 
 
 What, beyond anatomy and physiology and laboratory 
 work, is the three or four years’ course of the medical 
 student except a study, under guidance, of the history of 
 medicine, of the record of human experience concerning 
 the treatment of disease, concerning the preservation of 
 health ? When a young worker in the hospitals meets 
 new symptoms, does he guess at the disease which they de- 
 note, does he experiment first with one drug and then with 
 another in the hope that he may hit upon something suited 
 to the emergency? Absurd supposition! Yet that is 
 what teachers are doing every day. A new child comes to 
 them whose moral habit and intellectual reaction indicate 
 disease, or lack of normal susceptibility to education. 
 Immediately the average teacher runs through his small 
 record of experience to ascertain if he has had a pupil of 
 such kind before. Finding in his memory a case having 
 somewhat similar features, he at once decides that the 
 disease is due to the same conditions, and must be treated 
 in a similar way. If, after a few weeks’ trial, it is evident 
 that the treatment is not successful, he tries another moral 
 and intellectual medicine, or, more probably, gives the 
 case up and subjects the pupil to the general routine dis- 
 cipline and mental diet which have been prescribed, in a 
 rule-of-thumb fashion, for the average, normal boy or girl. 
 As a result, his patient dies, — not, unfortunately, in the 
 flesh, but, what is worse, in the spirit ; and one more vie- 
 
9 
 
 tim is added to those slain, with the best intentions, by 
 pedagogical malpractice. 
 
 When the physician, on the contrary, meets obscure 
 J symptoms, he goes at once to his record of othpr men’s 
 
 experience, to his authoritative books, his latest medical 
 
 * journals, his older colleagues. With their help he makes 
 
 diagnosis of the disease and learns the manner of treatment 
 approved by experience and analogy. Or, if the patient is 
 in good health and desires to perpetuate that happy state, 
 the physician, having made careful study of the diet and 
 exercise suited to that man’s condition, gives him proper 
 advice. In the manner of the doctor the good teacher 
 should regard every pupil as a patient, — either as a well 
 one to be kept in health and to be helped to grow to his 
 fullest stature ; or as a sick one, to be physicked and 
 nursed back, if possible, to mental and moral well-being. 
 Every well-trained teacher ought, as a matter of course, 
 thus to individualize and treat his pupils ; his professional 
 instinct should impel him to it ; he should find delight, as 
 the physician does, in the mere act of healing, in the power 
 
 * and influence that his skill has given him. Such a school- 
 
 master, provided he have the teaching enthusiasm, — just as 
 the successful medical man must have the healing fervor, — 
 will never question the wisdom of his choice of a profession ; 
 for he will know that he is doing the best and most endur- 
 ing work which is in the power of any man to do. 
 
 * A thorough education, then, the breadth that follows it, 
 and a professional consciousness and pride are what the 
 public and private schools must demand in their teachers if 
 those schools are to achieve real educational development. 
 
 >3 But these essential things the majority of teachers cannot 
 
 * and will not secure until the colleges and universities not 
 
 only freely, but enthusiastically co-operate with them, until 
 
IO 
 
 it is made not simply possible, but absolutely necessary for 
 every teacher to have been well taught. In failing to 
 recognize their responsibility in this matter, the higher 
 institutions have done the community and themselves un- 
 counted injury : first, by fostering the all too prevalent 
 notion that anybody can teach, thereby impairing the 
 dignity and standing of their own faculties ; secondly, by 
 leaving the preparatory training of their college students 
 practically in the hands of amateurs, thereby vastly dimin- 
 ishing the intellectual and moral efficiency of those young 
 men and women ; and, thirdly, by permitting many boys 
 and girls eminently fitted for collegiate work to be turned 
 aside from all thought of going to college by the dulness 
 and unintelligence of elementary teachers, one of whose 
 chief duties should have been to discover and to encourage 
 those youth who are worth a higher education. On 
 grounds of pure utility, therefore, to say nothing of their 
 moral obligations as leaders of thought and promoters of 
 social good, the colleges ought to make it their chief busi- 
 ness to prepare men and women for this work of teaching, 
 — this work which lies at the fountain-head of their own 
 usefulness as well as of the welfare of society. 
 
 Twenty-five years ago it would have been impossible for 
 a college, even had its faculty perceived the need, to offer a 
 distinctive course for teachers and to rank the graduates of 
 such a course with those in medicine and law. The public, 
 the school managers, the teachers themselves, with rare excep- 
 tions, would have been cold, if not indeed scornful, toward 
 such an exaltation of the schoolmaster. To-day, however, 
 conditions are vastly changed, and increasing numbers of 
 thoughtful men and women perceive that in this direction 
 lies at least a partial solution of the vexed questions of 
 public education. That “ psychological moment,” which 
 
institutions as well as governments must await, has arrived. 
 What would have seemed preposterous a quarter of a 
 century ago is to-day not only natural, but inevitable ; and 
 those colleges which hesitate to meet this demand of the 
 times will fail of a duty and an opportunity. 
 
 Fortunately, the step is not a difficult one. Whether it 
 be a college of arts or one of sciences, the resources are 
 already at hand with which to initiate the real professional 
 training of teachers and from which to build up step by step 
 (as training for all the professions has been tentatively 
 evolved) the established and recognized qualifications of the 
 expert teacher. The colleges of arts have, and the colleges 
 of science should have, their philosophical and historical 
 faculties so organized that the special training of the teacher 
 in those directions can be easily begun and fully, though of 
 course slowly, developed. All college teaching should in 
 these days be so firmly based upon the laboratory principle 
 that the establishment of new research laboratories of 
 psychology and new practice laboratories of methods ought 
 to be a matter of no great difficulty. And, aside from these 
 purely technical facilities, the teacher, were he recognized 
 — as too often he is not — as a serious person striving 
 really to fit himself for a lifelong profession, should have 
 no difficulty in gaining from any good college, whether he 
 pursue the older courses of the classics or the newer re- 
 searches of the sciences, that breadth, poise, and sanity of 
 mind without which an educator, though he be skilled in 
 all the devices of pedagogics and intricacies' of methods, 
 is not fit to have charge of any boy or girl. 
 
 Every year shows increasing dissatisfaction with the re- 
 ults of the public schools, not because those schools are 
 deteriorating, — on the contrary, they are almost everywhere 
 improving, — but because every year there is more general 
 
12 
 
 appreciation of the fact that genuine public education im- 
 plies something more and better than a mere routine of 
 lessons. To this discontent are due that restless experi- 
 menting upon the schools, that loud demand for reforms 
 in school government and for changes in school methods, 
 and that ceaseless arguing over “ content,” “ correlation,” 
 and a hundred other shibboleths of teaching, which seem 
 sometimes to have converted the common schools into 
 mere battle-grounds for theorists. 
 
 None of these earnestly striven for reforms, however, 
 will be permanent in its effects until it is recognized by the 
 public, by the normal schools, by the colleges, and by the 
 teachers themselves, that education, especially in the case 
 of children, is almost wholly a question of personal rela- 
 tions; that it is the teachers, much more than their methods, 
 which make or mar the school. The most perfect organi- 
 zation and most ideal curriculum, in the hands of ignorant, 
 narrow, or indifferent instructors, will become not far from 
 valueless. The most meagre resources, on the contrary, 
 will perform a wonderful work of education if wielded by 
 broad-minded, well-taught men and women who have the 
 teaching zeal. 
 
 A well-trained teacher ought, of course, to be familiar 
 with pedagogic methods ; but he should be their master, not 
 their slave. Details of organization, method, discipline, 
 curriculum, should be to him simply a means of education, 
 not an end. Yet these things — method, organization, 
 curriculum — 1 loom largest in the training of the average 
 teacher ; and by his skill in handling these tools of teaching, 
 not by his power as a moulder of men, the schoolmaster is 
 too often judged. It is quite generally agreed that the 
 chief function of the college and the university is to give 
 men larger views of life, greater command of themselves. 
 
higher motives of conduct. None needs this wider out- 
 look, this self-command, this ethical motive, more than he 
 who is to develop the minds and characters of children. 
 To neglect, therefore, to reach in the fullest possible de- 
 gree this great body of teachers is for the college to lose its 
 finest opportunity. 
 
 Because the teacher needs and the college can give 
 breadth, outlook, the fundamentals of larger life and activ- 
 ity, those higher institutions should not, in laying out their 
 courses for the professional training of the teacher, address 
 themselves too minutely to questions of method and details 
 of curriculum. They will be at fault, too, if, because of 
 their new interest in elementary and secondary education, 
 they attempt to look too closely into the workings of public 
 school teaching and to influence too directly the develop- 
 ment of methods and curricula therein. Those are ques- 
 tions to be solved by school-teachers, not by college pro- 
 fessors. And the heaviest and most harmful pressure 
 which the college can put upon those who are working out 
 those problems is practically to dictate what shall be taught 
 in the preparatory schools by prescribing fixed requirements 
 for entrance. One of the best results of a fuller awakening 
 of the colleges to their duty in the matter of training 
 teachers will be a simultaneous arousing of them to the fact 
 that they should not ask, from the secondary schools, candi- 
 dates drilled and redrilled in a certain list of studies, but 
 that they should demand young men and women widely, 
 variously, it may be diversely instructed, yet with their 
 individuality developed, with their wills trained, with their 
 minds broadened, and with their characters established. 
 
 To secure such candidates for admission to their courses, 
 the colleges must educate those who are to teach those can- 
 didates. What waste of time in college work, what loss of 
 
H 
 
 effectiveness, what stunting of results, come from the need- 
 less immaturity, the feeble will power, the dulness due to 
 ill preparation of a large proportion of the young men who 
 enter, only those who have to do with colleges can conceive 
 or measure. The remedy, however, lies almost wholly with 
 the colleges themselves. It is for them actively and imme- 
 diately to concern themselves with the character and the 
 education of the men and the women who train those 
 college Freshmen ; it is for them to begin at the beginning 
 by training those who, in the elementary and secondary 
 schools, lay the foundations for the educational work that 
 the college has to do, and who, far more than this, establish 
 the principal foundations of the social and political state. 
 
 To effect this, the colleges, whether of arts or of sciences, 
 ought first to establish a recognized profession of teaching 
 upon the same high and exacting plane as that of the other 
 learned professions ; second, to offer every wise inducement 
 for intending teachers to pursue to the end these profes- 
 sional courses ; third, to give honor and preference to those 
 who have so recognized the dignity of teaching as really to 
 fit themselves to be teachers. And, finally, those colleges 
 should modify the conditions of admission to their Fresh- 
 man classes so that it may be easy for one, otherwise well 
 qualified, to come in though he have not stuffed himself 
 with past examination papers ; but so that it may not be 
 easy for any youth to enter unless he has been truly edu- 
 cated by professional teachers, — by teachers, that is, who 
 have known how to train his mind and body, how to 
 broaden his views, how to strengthen and dignify his 
 character. 
 
 James P. Munroe. 
 
 t