3. Do you think that, in general, it pays teachers to attend summer schools? Is there danger of one actually losing ground while teaching if he does no special study?

4. In some states even low-grade certificates are renewable for life when once obtained. Do you believe this plan is best for the schools?

5. Does the statement, "Knowledge is power," hold in teaching? Amplify your answer to explain just what you mean.

6. When one is meeting the requirements for teaching is one not adding to one's own education, so that there is no real hardship involved? Do we in general ask more education of our rural teachers than all American citizens should have?

7. Suppose that you are teaching, but have never studied agriculture, and that this subject is now to be added in your school. What course should you pursue? Is there danger of defeating the whole purpose of the new education by allowing unprepared teachers to attempt to teach what they do not know?

8. Suppose a girl expects to teach but two or three years, and then to marry. What should be her attitude toward scholastic preparation?

CHAPTER IX

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING

Knowledge of subject-matter, while the first requisite in the training of the teacher, is not all. It is one thing to possess certain knowledge, and quite another thing to be able to teach it to others. The older supposition was that scholastic training is all that is necessary in order to become a successful teacher. But we have discovered that this is not true. The great specialist is often the poorest teacher. President Butler says that the worst of all teaching is being done in the colleges and universities. The professors are noted scholars, but many of them are not teachers. They are masters of their subjects, but they do not know how to present these subjects to students.

But the possession of knowledge coupled with inability to teach it is not confined to college specialists. The most dismal failure in a certain county in Example of lack of professional a western state noted for its high training scholastic requirements was a rural teacher who held a degree from the justly celebrated university of her state. She began teaching when normal training was not considered essential; she did not know children, nor how to teach them. She seemed to assume that children learn just as she herself learned, and made no effort to meet them on their own level. Finding the elementary branches of the rural school easy for her own

mind to grasp, she failed to understand the difficulties they presented to the minds of her pupils. This woman has now taught for fifteen years, but no two of these years in the same school. She is recognized as a mediocre teacher in some schools, as a failure in others. In no school is she called a success. She has failed and, it is to be feared, always will fail, because she lacks knowledge of children, of method, of school organization and management. The chances are that if this well-educated teacher had at the right time been given proper instruction and help in the practical problems of the schoolroom, she would have developed into an excellent teacher. But she quickly found her poor methods crystallizing into bad schoolroom habits; she early fell into a rut of inefficiency, and has now been too long in that rut to seek a better way. She has lost confidence in herself, and no longer expects success, even with her splendid academic equipment.

This is no argument against thorough scholastic training. Far from it. It rather shows the necessity for adding to one's knowledge of subjectTeaching an art matter the further knowledge of how to teach it. For teaching is an art. It rests on certain scientific principles, and has to be learned, the same as any other art. We say that some persons are "born" teachers; but this only means that they more clearly and easily seize the fundamental principles underlying instruction, and more skilfully put them into practise. But even "born" teachers need to be trained in the principles of their art. For such training will save them from many mistakes; and a teacher's mistakes are always made at the expense of some child's growth and development. His acquisition of skill as a teacher has cost his pupils dear. We do not place tools in the hands of an untrained work

man and set him at work on expensive rosewood and mahogany. We first train him in the use of his tools, so that he will not waste costly material. Yet the rosewood and mahogany are, after all, but wood. If a piece is spoiled it does not so much matter; a few dollars will replace it. But the teacher works, not on material that can be replaced if injured or destroyed, but on lives whose success and happiness depend on the teacher's skill. A mistake made in the education of a child can never be wholly compensated for. "Art is long and time is fleeting." Education-time is all too short at best, and time lost through poor methods or lack of skill on the part of the teacher is irretrievably gone. There can be no making up for the past; the present is too full of its own demands and opportunities. It is more than probable that if teachers were able to put into practise in their instruction the best pedagogical principles now available to them, at least double the educational progress could be made by our children. Think of the time and opportunity that would then be saved! Think of the greater efficiency that would result from our schools, and the greater achievement that would be wrought by our people!

The necessity for training in the art of teaching is now coming to be recognized everywhere. None doubt this Growth of normal necessity except the ignorant. Hence training we find normal schools springing up in every state, while in some states there are more than a score such schools.

A more recent movement has been the development of normal-training courses for rural teachers in the high schools. Arkansas, Maine, New York, Michigan, North Carolina, Vermont, Minnesota, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Virginia and Wisconsin are in the process of developing

systems of normal-training high schools, where the prospective rural teacher can acquire scholastic and professional training at the same time. There is little doubt that the movement will soon spread to other states. Thus the opportunities are multiplying for professional as well as scholastic training, and thousands of teachers will soon hardly need to leave their own homes, and certainly not their own counties, in order to obtain normal preparation for their teaching.

These schools are not all of equal worth to the teacher. There is a great difference in the value of the training The function of the offered in normal schools. In fact normal school some so-called normal schools are little more than schools for additional scholastic training. They seek chiefly to teach the prospective teacher a little more history, to lead him to study a few more literary classics, to enable him to solve more difficult problems in algebra or arithmetic. They ask him to familiarize himself with additional scientific classifications, and to learn still deeper and more technical truths concerning analytical psychology. These things are all abundantly worth while as a part of the academic education of the teacher. But it is not the chief function of the normal school to teach them. The normal school will need, of course, to teach a certain amount of scholastic material. For method and principles can not be separated from the matter to which they apply. The great work of the normal school, however, is to teach how to teach. And all matter taught to prospective teachers in normal schools should be taught them primarily as teachers instead of as learners. If the teacher is ready to take up the work of the normal school, it is not more grammar that he needs to study, but how to teach the grammar he knows. It