CHAPTER VI

THE TEACHER AND TEACHING

THE definition of a profession has in these forty years become enlarged. It has come to include editorship, engineering, and teaching, as well as the calling of the minister, of the lawyer, of the physician. A profession in ideal represents service to the community; in method, self-forgetfulness; in force, a sufficient body of coworkers to demand the loyalty of each other; in condition, a devotion of one's powers to the demands of the calling. A profession also exacts certain tests for admission to its rights and privileges. These conditions are found realized in teaching. The teacher is one of a body of workers numbering more than a half million in the United States. The teacher gives himself wholly to his vocation; the teacher serves the community; the teacher forgets his own advantage. The community demands that certain requirements be met on the part of the teacher before he is allowed to practice his art. These forces and condi

tions have either wrought more largely in the last decades of the last century or the principles out of which they grew have been made more potent. The ideal of human service has always prevailed in the conception of teaching, but this conception has gained in prevalence and force. The social ideal has touched the profession profoundly. The teacher has always been a worker of self-sacrifice and of self-forgetfulness; and his self-abnegation has strengthened in recent years. The number of teachers has so increased that the resulting condition has become sufficient to call out a deep sense of loyalty to and of enthusiasm for the calling which they represent. The work of the teacher is no longer an avocation. It is not carried along with farming or with ministerial duties. The certification of teachers also has come to assume much importance in recent years. The origins of such development of the profession of teaching are found in the normal school.

The normal school is not a product of the last forty years; but its dominance in American education has occurred in that period. The idea of the normal school was derived from Prussia, although the name itself came

from France. The name itself is confined largely to France, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Roumania, and the United States. "Teachers' seminaries" is the more usual word in Germany, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. "Training schools" is used in Austria and the Netherlands; and the term is common in England.

The growth of the number of normal schools in the last two score of years has been greater than the growth in any other form of professional education. Between 1839 and 1850 seven normal schools were founded; in the next decade, twelve; in the decade between 1860 and 1870, fifty-two; and in the five years from 1870 to 1875, sixty-six. From 1875 down to the present time one hundred and thirty-two have been established. Moreover, in addition to this number, two hundred and thirty universities and colleges, four hundred and forty-nine high schools, and two hundred and seventy-two private high schools and academies are offering training courses for teachers.

But the growth in the mere matter of quantitative relationships of normal schools is no more significant than the change in the methods or conditions of teaching. For in the earlier

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time the normal school was largely a model school. It represented training in methods. It was subject to the peril of imitativeness. Slowly and firmly have larger foundations been wrought out. The normal school still uses and exhibits the best methods of teaching, but it is not so inclined to limit its work to the inculcation of methods. It is concerned with principles; it seeks to enlarge and enrich character. It does not forget that personality is the supreme force in both life and service. It tries to quicken professional enthusiasm. It endeavors to enlarge the student's conception of life. Its purpose is to transmute knowledge into wisdom. It desires not to lay a professional harness upon every student, but to give a large power for large service to each. These results it has been able to secure the more adequately by reason of a more just conception of the nature of education and of teaching. The greater maturity, too, of those who enter the normal school has been an aid in securing these conclusions. The professional school for teachers, in common with the other professional schools, has constantly advanced the conditions for admission to its freshman class.

The normal school has not, however, been influenced by the demands for higher standards to the extent to which the schools of law and medicine have been influenced. The school has been continued as a means for training teachers mainly for primary and grammar school work. The college has retained in its classes those who propose to become teachers in high schools, and it has turned over to the graduate school those who wish to limit their teaching to the college itself. Many undergraduate colleges have established a department or chair of education. In some instances the department of education has been made an integral part of the philosophical department. In other instances it has been somewhat allied with this department, and in still others it has assumed an independent place coördinate with economics or history. In other colleges or universities, moreover, it has become an independent school, coördinate with the other professional schools. The tendency of the philosophical department to pass over into the pedagogical has received illustration in Columbia University and the University of Chicago. Such establishments for and in education, whether of the simpler or more