I. NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF TEACHERS.

AN ADDRESS TO THE CONVENTION OF TEACHERS OF THE UNITED STATES, HELD IN PHILADELPHIA, august 27, 1857, FOR THE PURPOSE OF FORMING A NATIONAL ORGANIZATION OF THEIR PROFESSION.

BY WILLIAM RUSSELL,

[Editor of American Journal of Education, 1826-8.]

FELLOW TEACHERS :-We are met on a great occasion. For the first time in the history of our country, the teachers of youth have assembled as a distinct professional body, representing its peculiar relations to all parts of our great national Union of States. The event is a most auspicious one, as regards the intellectual and moral interests of the whole community of which, as citizens, we are members; and, to ourselves, professionally and individually, it opens a view of extended usefulness, in efficient action, such as never yet bas been disclosed to us.

We meet not as merely a company of friends and well wishers to education, one of the great common interests of humanity, in which we are happy to coöperate with philanthropic minds and hearts of every class and calling; but we have at length recognized our peculiar duty to come forward and take our own appropriate place as the immediate agents and appointed organs of whatever measures are best adapted to promote the highest interests of society, by the wider diffusion of whatever benefits are included in the whole range of human culture. In stepping forward to take the professional position now universally accorded to us, we do so in no exclusive or selfish spirit. We are, in fact, only complying with the virtual invitation given us, by all who feel an interest in the advancement of education, to assume, in regular form, the acknowledged responsibilities of our office, as guardians of the mental welfare of the youth of our country, responsible to the whole community for the fidelity and efficiency with which we discharge our trust. The liberal measures recently adopted in so many of our States for the establishment of permanent systems of public education; the generous recognition, now so general, of the value of the teacher's office and his daily labors; the warm reception offered to every form of teachers' associations-from those which represent whole States down to the local gatherings in our towns and villages-all intimate the universal readiness of society to welcome the formation of a yet more

extensive professional union of teachers-of one co-extensive with our national interests and relations.

We meet the invitation, not as a mere professional recognition, entitling us to withdraw from the ground which we have hitherto occupied, in common with the friends of education, whether of the learned professions or of other occupations, in the promotion of its interests, and, by an exclusive organization, to cut ourselves off from all communication beyond the limited sphere of a close corporation. It is in no such spirit that we would act. But we do feel that there is a duty devolving on us, as teachers, which we desire to fulfill. We feel that, as a professional body, we are distinctly called on to form a national organization, that we may be the better enabled to meet the continually enlarging demands of our vocation for higher personal attainments in the individual, and for more ample qualifications adequately to fill the daily widening sphere of professional action.

We wish, as teachers, to reap whatever benefits our medical brethren derive from their national association, in opportunities of communication for mutual aid and counsel. We desire to see annually a professional gathering, such as may fairly represent the instructors of every grade of schools and higher institutions, throughout the United States. We hope to see a numerous delegation, at such meetings, from every educating State in the Union, of the men who, in their respective State associations of teachers, are already responding to the manifest demand for distinct appropriate professional action, on the part of those on whom devolves the immediate practical business of instruction.

Teaching is, in our day, an occupation lacking neither honor nor emolument. Those who pursue this employment are in duty bound to recognize the position which is so liberally assigned them. The vocation is well entitled to all the aid and support which an acknowledged professional rank can confer upon it. The personal interest of every individual who pursues the calling, or who means to adopt it, is concerned in every measure which tends to elevate its character or extend its usefulness. Every teacher who respects himself, and whose heart is in his work, will respond, we think, with alacrity to the call which the establishment of such an association as we him for his best efforts in its aid.

propose makes upon

From the formation of a NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF TEACHERS, we expect great NATIONAL BENEFITS:

1. As regards wider and juster views of education, and corresponding methods of instruction.

In a progressive community like ours, amid the vast and rapid developments of science by which our times are characterized, and the universal craving for yet better modes of human culture, to imagine that we have already attained to perfection in our modes of education, would be absurd. The statistics of society proclaim the falsity of such an opinion. The daily records of our race tell too plainly the sad story of our deficiencies and our failures, in the prevalent feeble organizations of body, and the imperfect health, which we still owe to our culpable neglect of proper educational training, by which physical vigor and efficiency might be, in great measure, secured to every human being. The teacher, in our large cities, at least, daily finds himself compelled to limit his intellectual requirements to the condition of many minds incapable of sustaining lengthened or vigorous application, or of retaining the rudimental germs which it is his desire to implant. Of our acknowledged defective moral education, it is unnecessary to speak. Throughout our country, the parent is appealing to the teacher, and the teacher to the parent, for efficient efforts which may bring about a better state of things. Who will venture, in such circumstances, the assertion that we are already perfect?

The whole ground of education needs a thorough survey and revision, with a view to much more extensive changes and reforms than have yet been attempted. The cry for more healthful, more invigorating, more inspiring, more effective modes of culture, comes up from all classes of society, on behalf of the young who are its treasured hope. A truer and deeper investigation is everywhere needed in regard to the constitution, the capabilities, and the wants of man, equally in his temporal and his eternal relations.

Adverting thus to the acknowledged need of a renovation in the form and character of education, we would not be understood as desiring the indiscriminate subversion of existing modes of culture, or of the institutions to which we have been so largely indebted for whatever degree of mental attainment has characterized the past, or benefits the present. It belongs to others than teachers to propose those rash and headlong changes, unsanctioned by true philosophy or stable theory, which have demolished without reconstructing, and whose toppling fabrics have served the sole purpose of forming the sepulchral monuments of "zeal without knowledge."

No: one of the surest and best results of a great national association of teachers, will be the careful retention of all unquestionable good residuum gained by the sure filtration of experience; another will be the building up, to yet nobler heights of beneficial.

influence, the high places of all true learning. Room can be made for the cultivation of all invigorating and purifying influences in human development, without the sacrifice of one valuable acquisition; or, rather, with the addition of many, which a more genial nurture will certainly introduce. But it is high time that the broad experience and observation of teachers, the tried servants of humanity, in all the relations of culture, should unite to claim a hearing on the great subject of their daily duties and endeavors; and that their voice should have its weight in the adoption of the successive steps which the ceaseless advances of knowledge will always require at the hands of education. A harmonious coöperation of educational skill with scientific progress and parental interests, may thus be fully secured for the enlargement and fertilizing of the whole field of mental and moral culture.

A professional association, founded on the broad basis which we now contemplate, will necessarily give unity and effect to communications expressing the views and bearing the sanction of such a body; and instructors throughout our country will thus have an opportunity of contributing more widely, and more effectively, to the furtherance of whatever good is embraced in the whole range of education, whether in its immediate or its remotest results.

2. From the establishment of a national society of teachers, we may justly expect a large amount of professional benefit to its members. Fellow teachers! we are not assembled to boast of the dignity of our vocation, or of the intellectual eminence of those who pursue it; but rather, in the spirit of faithful and earnest endeavor, to do what we can to render ourselves, individually and collectively, more worthy of its honors, by becoming more capable of fulfilling its duties.

Contemplating then, in this sober light, the aggregate of such learning and skill as the annual communications of a national reünion of teachers must contribute to our advancement individually, in professional qualifications, we may well congratulate one another on the advantages anticipated as accruing from such occasions. Nor need these advantages be temporary or evanescent. A national association of teachers will necessarily give rise to an appropriate organ of communication between its members themselves, and the community in general. By this means, the fruits of the maturest minds in the ranks of our profession, in the ample discussion of the great primary questions of education, may be daily reaped by the youngest of our corps, while the zeal and enthusiasm, and the ardent aspirations of the youngest, may communicate life and fire to all.

But it is not merely in our professional relations that a national association will benefit us. It will be an invaluable aid to us, as students of the sciences which we teach. We arrogate nothing for our profession, when we say that it includes among its members men of the highest attainments-not to say eminence—in the various departments of science and literature. Their communications with us will be instruction of the highest order, to which it will be a peculiar privilege to listen. If there be any doubt on this point, in any mind, we will verify our assertion by pointing to such men as Agassiz and Guyot, who, in the true spirit of the teacher's vocation, have, for years, so generously dispensed the rich fruits of their own surpassing attainments for the benefit of their fellow teachers, throughout their adopted country. Passing by, however, those luminaries of the upper sphere of science, have we not many in all parts of the Union, who, in comparison of such names, would not be unwilling to be ranked but as among the "lesser lights,” and who have no ambition beyond that of contributing their silent personal endeavor to the advancement of knowledge and to the instruction of youth, yet have minds fraught with untold wealth of acquirement, which they would readily lend for the profit and pleasure of others less amply furnished?

But to return to our strictly professional relations. Education is now studied both as a science and as an art. We have among us already, not only those who, by extensive acquirements, and professional skill, and special study, are amply competent to guide the minds of others in the path of philosophical investigation of the principles of education, and to exhibit, in actual application, the methods of instruction which spring from such principles: we have, already, the products of such minds, nurtured and matured in well endowed and well conducted professional seminaries, established by enlightened legislation, for the express purpose of furnishing such products in the persons of well-trained, capable, enlightened and successful teachers, of both sexes. With the aid of such minds, in addition to that of the many widely known individuals who have made a lifetime's business of education, and daily live amid an atmosphere of grateful feeling, emanating from the surrounding hearts of more than one generation which their labors have enlightened and elevated-with such aid to rely on, can we be accounted rash if we say we feel that we are ready to meet the exigency of our time which calls us to unite, under the sanction of our free political institutions, for the establishment of a professional society dedicated to the effective advancement of education by its own executive agents