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may be its excellence in theory, is a dangerous method of approach to put into the hands of an untrained teacher and is a matter of confusion to the child. The data is too complicated. Thus let us suppose that southern New England has been chosen as a human-use region. This may be done with all correctness. But the child asks "why"-as children do. Were I to reduce to simplicity the reasons for this choice for the child mind I should, I am afraid, be forced to come back to the question of natural endowments of the region. Why not start with natural endowments? Be our method inductive or deductive the data which is of a nature that can be given the young is the same in either case.

I cannot show much sympathy with the plea that physiographic regions smack too much of the geological. They should, just as the human use to which the region is put smacks of economics. The most fundamental facts in American history are physiographic and climatic. If this is granted, should we then use physiographic or climatic lines as the basis of natural regions? To discuss the human geography of the United States on a climatic basis, especially with youngsters, would be to no definite end. Ordinarily the climatic division is too large and not definite enough to serve the purpose. Again it is difficult always to use both physiography and climate in making up the divisions, though at times

and in places this is possible. I am still oldfashioned enough to believe that the physiographic division, because of its definiteness, size, and importance, is the logical basis of a study of human divisions by the young. My conviction is that more progress can be made in grade-school geography by teaching the simplest and most fundamental facts; then one may go into economics and sociology as far as the mettle of the class permits. It may sound treasonable, but geologic factors stand as a straightforward class of influences whose direct action upon human kind forms a most teachable subject for the child. Don't strain the child's mind; build it up.

Some authors of textbooks for the grades have ignored the regional methods, and this is unfortunate. Others have taken up the subject in a manner which is too advanced and which deprives the child of simple, logical processes of thinking, which is poor pedagogy. There are other authors, who by one means or another-we welcome the variety-have maintained in the foreground the fundamental facts which the child needs in order to build up simply his mental pictures. Some day we shall come to see virtues in a method which will dominate all textbooks, so great will be its excellence. I am willing to prophesy that the final method for teaching grade-school geography will be the simplest, the one that stresses the fundamentals.

Keep Saying It. Here is a good example. Miss Ottilia M. Frisch is Commissioner of Schools of Saginaw County, Michigan. The letter head of the office shows the names of the assistant, the clerk, the traveling nurse, the club leader and the attendance officer. That is democratic as well as convenient. But balancing this, on the right hand corner of the sheet is printed:

The future of the Republic depends upon the character of its citizenship. We are not building permanently unless the youth of the land are made fully acquainted with the meaning of American citizenship.

-THOS R. MARSHALL.

Isn't that a good idea? It is a repeated reminder of the main purpose of the schools, a sort of light, preventing too easy a digression into the mists of scholarship.

VITALITY IN COLLEGE COURSES FOR TEACHERS

JAMES L. MURSELL

[The need of live teachers, the failure of their college course to develop their abilities, constructive suggestions for improving the output of collegiate courses in education, constitute this contribution of the Professor of Education in Lawrence College, Appleton, Wisconsin.]

N NEARLY every college campus in the United States the perennial issue between method and content in the training of teachers is very much alive. And it is likely to remain so until some solution is worked out that will be a good deal more intelligent and constructive than any now in clear sight. Certainly no one can refuse to admit that the training of teachers is one of the major functions of the college of liberal arts. The teaching profession attracts, for a time at least, a larger share of college graduates than any other single vocation. It is not at all uncommon to find more than fifty per cent of senior classes more or less actively trying for positions in the public schools. They all know that to be eligible they must measure up to professional standards set by the State and other agencies. And this means registration in a goodly number of courses in the Department of Education.

So the question of pedagogical training is a very cogent one for the college of liberal arts. And it is often formulated and debated in an unfortunate way. The Department of Education is apt to be put in the position of being a thief of the students' time and energies. How much time shall young people preparing to teach be required or allowed to take from the academic studies, and particularly their majors, to devote to specific professional preparation? It is in this rather provocative way that the question is usually raised.

Now nothing in the world is to be gained by attacking the matter in a polemic spirit. Of course, as long as human nature remains human nature, it will be tempting to do just this. On the one hand we have the teacher

of academic subjects, with high and vital ideals of scholarship, who bitterly begrudges the demands of state departments of public instruction and accrediting agencies generally, and who is apt to respond to any and every demand for an increase in pedagogical requirements with nothing more edifying than irritation. On the other hand, the teacher of education can easily think up a good many stinging and not always very worthy taunts about college graduates who ruin a series of high-school classes before they get started as effective teachers. Furthermore, he has the feeling of being backed up by a formidable constituency of public-school men, and of being in line with administrative tendencies; and all this is apt to make him a little less considerate and a little more dogmatic than he need be.

All of this, so familiar to every college man, is no more than beating the air. After all, we have a serious problem before us, which carries us down to the most fundamental of educational issues. Let us try to determine just what facts and principles are involved in this debate.

1. In the first place, what the college can do in the way of teaching pedagogical method is very limited. If we think of the great function of the collegiate department of education as the teaching of method, then we cannot feel that it is a very well-adapted instrument, or that a student can profitably give it a great deal of his time. Telling inexperienced undergraduate students how to teach will no doubt do some good, but not a great deal. One can give them a few basic ideas, and bring them into touch with some of the best modern suggestions. One certainly feels that they will not go out

absolutely green. They will have some notion of how to set about preparing lessons, how assignments ought to be given, how to grade, and how to handle discipline. This is all to the good, but it can all be given in perhaps a hundred class hours at the most. It is not the slightest use going into elaborate technical detail with undergraduate classes. Minutia may be very interesting to the trained and experienced teacher. But to the inexperienced person, delicate shades of distinction about how to handle projects, the subtler nuances of problem work and assignments, etc., are mere arid scholasticisms. Practice teaching, too, will hardly fill the bill. The classroom situation is not normal. The student-teacher is not in full charge. She may learn to be used to the sound of her own voice, and get rid of some initial embarrassment, and in general get the "feel" of the teaching situation. And though this is undoubtedly an asset, it is not worth great sacrifices of time and cultural values.

The plain fact is that if we want to teach method, nothing short of the German probationary system will do. And this means a very thoroughgoing reorganization of teacher-training. It means that instead of placing such training during the college course, we make the first year, or even the first two years of service, years of active training under special supervision. I cannot pause to discuss such a scheme in all its bearing here. But it is clear that this is the proper system to employ if we are really serious in our proposal to teach methods. The collegiate department can do a little along this line, but not much, simply because it is not dealing with people who are in practical contact with the teaching situation.

2. On the other hand, we have to admit that the purely academic training given at the typical American college until some ten years ago, has failed to turn out graduates who are good teachers. It was once thought that a college degree was a valid passport to teaching. But gradually it began to dawn on public-school people that the average

holder of the A. B. ruined a succession of high-school classes in the course of learning something which it was felt that the college ought to have taught him before letting him go.

Here we have something that strikes at the very roots of higher education, and raises fundamental questions. For it has always been the great assumption of university training that the educated man should be, ipso facto, the successful, or at least the competent teacher. The mediaeval university was a society of teachers and students, a guild of scholars, whose masters at once assumed professorial rights and dignities. And it is noticeable that the average Oxford graduate today, fits in a good deal better into the public-school system of England than does the graduate of an American college into our own high-school system.

Why is this? Sometimes it has been said. that the college student is exposed for four years to the worst possible pedagogical models, so that when he goes out, he carries with him an impossible and inapplicable tradition of teaching. I venture to question this. Perhaps there may be more bad teaching in college than in high school, but the real cause of the difficulty lies much deeper. The real fact seems to be that our whole scheme of higher education has gotten badly out of line. Indeed it is not too much to say that by their very organization, American colleges hold up an entirely false ideal of what constitutes genuine education.

Unlike higher institutions anywhere else in the world, we grant degrees which are supposed to mark definite stages in the acquisition of culture, on the basis of accumulated credits. And how can this amount to anything else than almost overtly encouraging our students to think of education in terms of addition rather than of living growth? Our bachelorship essentially means a little bit of this and a little bit of that and a little bit of the other thing. And nowhere in the whole curriculum is the student definitely led to see the unity of all knowledge. The most careful advice on majors and minors,

and the most subtle planning of sequences and prerequisites cannot do more than mitigate this evil which is embedded in the fundamental system of our collegiate work. It is an absolutely unpedagogical procedure, and it produces unpedagogical results.

For great teaching depends not upon encyclopaedic scholarship, but upon vitalized scholarship. The first-rate, inspiring teacher may perhaps not know a great deal, in one sense, but he will most assuredly see all that he knows in wide relationships, and feel and use it all as a living and growing whole. In a very real and broad sense, every worth-while teacher is a philosopher, philosopher, who integrates his little specialty with the great globus intellectualis, and with life itself. As the Socratic Irony has shown once and forever, the very antithesis of the teacher is not the ignoramus but the pedant. And indeed the literal purport of our high educational organization is that we are trying to turn out compounds of pedantry and smattering, walking encyclopaedias stuffed with unrelated bits and scraps of information.

3. The situation then is this: On the one hand, departments of education none too well situated for the work of teaching method and on the other, a group of academic departments, organized on a plan that is in one most important respect anti-educational. What then is the answer? Surely that we have misconceived the essential purpose of the collegiate department of education if we think that it is primarily to teach method. Rather that department stands for the making conscious and explicit the essential meaning of true culture. Its business is not merely or mainly to lead people to learn about education, as something external to themselves, but rather to interpret the personal significance of becoming educated in such a way as vitally to help along the

process.

Let us try to see a little more in detail how this can be done.

(a). In the first place, this indicates a very constructive task for the group of historical and comparative courses. The courses in the history of education, in particular, need

vivifying. Too often they consist of little but the dry bones of a pedantic scholarship, simply because they are taught without any clear vision of a constructive program and a constructive message. Properly understood, no subject can be of more thrilling interest than this. To see how culture-the inner and spiritual side of civilization-has developed and grown up step by step, expressing and directing itself through countless institutions, and moulding the human mind into what it is to-day, is surely as enlightening a study as can be imagined. Here the student has a chance to see the secular process of education writ large, and to understand his own school life, and the life of his own mind, in terms of an age-long social development.

(b). The psychological courses fill in yet other aspects of the great panorama. Here we see education working, not on a vast, dramatic, objective scale, but intimately and subjectively. Educational psychology has been taught for many different outcomes, most of which are more or less legitimate in their proper place. But essentially its message is of the impact of educative forces upon the mind of the individual. We are rather apt to lose this essential, dominant note, in masses of detail. The study of learning, the elaboration of the apparatus of testing and measuring, the investigations of the psychology of special subjects, have been carried to such a pitch that we need to return consciously ever and again to fundamentals. All these things, in their manifold complexity must converge on one point, and must teach us one thing, or they lose their life and value. They must give us wiser and wider insight into the essential meaning of education in ourselves and in others. To give a concrete instance: to teach the psychology of high school mathematics merely to give a prospective teacher an armory of tricks is apt to come near being a barren futility. Good, vital teachers are not made in that way. But to teach the subject in order to show how the young mind may be led to grasp and freely use and live with abstract logical entities, how the vast formal mechanism

which most of us find so formidable may be made replete with living values, is to render an incalculable service. It may indeed light up all the technicalities of a specialized mathematics major, and irrigate and vitalize all the student's mental processes, little by little.

(c.) Again, the courses in the administrative field can help along parallel lines. The teacher of school administration, in any of its myriad fields, who can find nothing to teach but dreary detail, ought to lose his job as a corrupter of youth. For any administrative scheme is palpably the embodiment and instrument of ideas and ideals. And half the social struggle is so to rectify our institutions that they will more perfectly and transparently reflect the desires and hopes and aspirations of mankind. Of course there are many things about the general management of school work, and the relation of the schools to legal, financial, and other institutions, that make up a stock of useful knowledge for prospective teachers. But beyond and above all this, the great aim should be a truly philosophic grasp. If this is attained, all the rest will easily follow.

(d.) I have said a good deal in implied criticism of the methods courses, but I should be sorry indeed to see this group vanish from the curriculum of the collegiate education department. Only they should not be regarded as centering merely on the tricks of the trade. Knacks have their importance, and we should not despise them. But we need to let in broader and brighter light, and emphasize the wider perspectives. The "why" of method is always far more important than the "how," for the college student. It is for this that we should drive. The great purpose of the methods course would seem to be to focus a wideranging educational philosophy on the problems of the classroom.

(e.) This whole scheme of work can well be linked together and unified by means of the group of basic courses-principles of education, philosophy of education, and their variants. In general what we have here

outlined-very roughly and imperfectly, it is true is a program of teaching unified and vitalized by a message. Teacher-training thus becomes more than the imparting of skill. Rather it becomes the building up of a certain attitude towards culture and towards life itself.

4. But will such a scheme really work? Is it practical? What are its results and implications? Let us try to examine this point more in detail.

(a.) It is of practical value for the prospective teacher. In fact, outcomes such as have been suggested are of more value to the teacher than all the specialized knacks that it is possible to learn. They make for progress, for the satisfaction of expanding horizons, for professionalism in the truest

sense.

(b.) It gives the department of education a very definite appeal to students who have no intention of entering the teaching profession. By the time fession. By the time anyone has spent sixteen years in the schools, he should surely have been brought consciously face to face, somewhere in his career, with an educational philosophy that will hold water.

(c.) It solves the everlasting antinomy between method and content by elevating the study of education into a general educational stock-taking and self-criticism.

The great work of the collegiate department of education, then, is to lead students actively to reflect about the meaning of education as exemplified in history, in the lives of others, and in their own lives. And such work is doubly important in view of the fragmentation of our college curriculum. It is precisely in teaching the long view, the wider perspective, the unified insight, that our college training is at its weakest. And it would seem that we should not wish to dispense with an agency whose essential witness must always be for the unity of culture. This, indeed, is the very essence of living as opposed to dead culture, and it is above all else what the teacher needs. Only those who already have the light can hope to transmit it.

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