Part 4 (1/2)

Statements like these are very apt to be misconstrued or misinterpreted unless one is very careful to define one's position; and, after what I have said, I should do myself an injustice if I did not make certain that my position is clear I believe in experimentation in education I believe in experimental schools But I should wish these schools to be interpreted as experiments and not as models, and I should wish that the failure of an experirace, and not with the unscientific attitude ofexcuses The trouble with an experireat mass of teachers, it becomes a model school, and the principles that it represents are applied _ad libitum_ by thousands of teachers who assume that they have heard the last word in educational theory

No one is hts of children than I ahly convinced that soft-heartedness acco the irls throughout this country No one adhtedness of Judge Lindsey, and yet when Judge Lindsey's overnht, of the contingent factor; nae Lindsey's leniency is based upon authority, and that if Judge Lindsey or anybody else attempted to be lenient when he had no power to be otherwise than lenient, his ”bluff” would be called in short order If you will give to teachers and principals the sae, you reat trouble in the school is simply this: that just in the proportion that leniency is demanded, authority is taken away fro ith regard toof affection for the science of psychology I have every faith in the value of psychological principles in the interpretation of educational phenoy is a very young science, and that its data are not yet so well organized that it is safe to draw fro more than tentative hypotheses which must meet their final test in the crucible of practice Soy will become a predictive science, just as mathematics and physics and chey, are predictive sciences to-day Meanti us a point of view, in clarifying our ideas, and in rationalizing the truths that eical principles are strongly enough established even now to for the , soer principles of attention

Successful educational practice is and must be in accord with these indisputable tenets But the bane of education to-day is in the pseudo-science, the ”half-baked” psychology, that is lauded from the house-tops by untrained enthusiasts, turned fro houses, and foisted upon the hungry teaching public through the ever-presentcircle, the teachers' institute, the summer school, and I am very sorry to admit (for I think that I represent both institutions in a way) sometimes by the normal schools and universities

Most of the doctrines that are turning our practice topsy-turvy have absolutely no support froists The doctrine of spontaneity and its attendant _laissez-faire_ dogood psychology The radical extreme to which some educators would push the doctrine of interest when theyfor which he fails to find a need in his own life,--this doctrine can find no support in good psychology The doctrine that the preadolescent child should understand thoroughly every process that he is expected to reduce to habit before that process is -established principles which ell understood by the Greeks and the Hebreenty-five hundred years ago, and to which Mother Nature herself gives the lie in the instincts of imitation and repetition It is conceivable that these radical doctrines were justified as her education, but, even granting this, their function is fulfilled when the reform that they exploited has been accomplished That time has come and, as palpable untruths, they should either be ated to oblivion

III

It is safe to say that forer a characteristic feature of the typical A since I have heard any rote learning in a schoolroo if it is not al would not be at all a bad thing in preadolescent education We ridicule the meet that Chinese education has done so that no other systeun to do in the sah a period of time compared hich the entire history of Greece and Rome is but an episode We may ridicule the formalism of Hebrew education, and yet the schools of rabbis have preserved intact the racial integrity of the Jewish people during the two thousand years that have elapsed since their geographical unity was destroyed I a theto adame may not have been worth the candle; but I a for children to reduce to verbal fors that are now never learned in such a way as toimpression upon the memory; and our criticism of oriental for as with the content of learning,--not soby heart as with the character of the h forer a distinctive feature of American education, formalism is the point from which education is most frequently attacked,--and this is the chief source of my dissatisfaction with the present-day critics of our elereat many cases, they have set up a man of straw and de him, they have incidentally knocked the props fro hi with the conviction that what he has been doing for his pupils is entirely without value, that his life of service has been a failure, that the lessons of his own experience are not to be trusted, nor the verdicts of his own intelligence respected Go to any of the great su teachers, hundreds of faithful, conscientious men and women who could tell you if they would (and some of them will) of the muddle in which their minds are left after some of the lectures to which they have listened Why should they fail to be depressed? The whole weight of acadeainst them The entirethem with relentless force into paths that see If it is true, as I think it is, that some of the proposals of modern education are an attempt to square the circle, it is certainly true that the classroo at the pressure points in this procedure

We hear expressed on every side a great deal of sympathy for the child as the victim of our educational syste in the world It is one of the basic hus in human life But why limit our sympathy to the child, especially to-day when he is about as happy and as fortunate an individual as anybody has ever been in all history Why not let a little of it go out to the teacher of this child?

Why not plan a little for her coe the children of our alien population

It is her strength that is lifting bodily each generation to the ever-advancing race levels Her work must be the main source of the inspiration that will impel the race to further advancement And yet when these half-ather at their institutes, when they attend the summer schools, when they take up their professional journals, what do they hear and read? Criticisms of their work Denunciations of their ence Aspersions cast upon their sincerity, their patience, and their loyalty to their superiors This, led with some mawkish sentimentalism that passes under the naht con of honest and heartfelt appreciation, a note of syives fifteen e professors; but the eleh to die in harness must look forward to the alnificent buildings and luxurious furnishi+ngs, but not one cent do they offer for teachers' pensions

What a blot upon Western civilization is this treatment of the teachers in our lower schools These people are doing the work that even the savage races universally consider to be of the highest type Benighted China places her teachers second only to the literati the profession the highest caste in the social scale The Jews intrusted the education of their children to their Rabbis, the most learned and the most honored of their race It is only Western civilization--it is allo-Saxon civilization--that denies to the teacher a station in life befitting his importance as a social servant

IV

But what has all this to do with school supervision? As I view it, the supervisor of schools as the overseer and director of the educational process, is just now confronted with two great problems The first of these is to keep a clear head in the present muddled condition of educational theory From the very fact of his position, the supervisor must be a leader, whether he will or not It is a maxim of our profession that the principal is the school In our city systeiven ale In him is vested the ultimate responsibility for instruction, for discipline, for the care and condition of the material property He may be a despot if he wishes, benevolent or otherwise

With this power goes a corresponding opportunity His school can stand for soe which will bring hiht to-day, nosolid and enduring, sootten The te as it is to-day for the supervisor to seek the forlory The need was never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content with the ilory of the latter type

I ads in a straightforward, effective ithout fuss or feathers, and I suppose that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause of the pit But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause of education a vast amount of har into his school a form of the japanese jiu-jitsu physical exercises When I visited that school, I was led to believe that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the Airls and boys were h their paces for the delectation of visitors The newspapers took it up and heralded it as another indication that the for down Visitors caht of public adulation while his colleagues turned green with envy and set the attention in their direction

And yet, there are some principals who move on in the even tenor of their ways, year after year, while all these currents and countercurrents are seething and eddying around theood until that which they know is better can be found They believe in the things that they do, so the chances are greatly increased that they will do thehed out of court because they do not take up with every fancy that catches the popular mind They have their own professional standards as to what constitutes coained from their own specialized experience And so that just now that is the type of supervisor that we need and the type that ought to be encouraged If I were talking to Chinese teachers, I ospel, but American education to-day needs less tures It needs to settle itself, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is trying to do And it needs, above all, to rise to a consciousness of itself as an institution ent individuals who are perfectly competent themselves to set up craft standard and ideals

IV [Transcriber's note: This is a typographical error in the original, and should read ”V”]

But in whatever way the supervisor may utilize the opportunity that his position presents, his second great problem will come up for solution

The supervisor is the captain of the teaching corps Directly under his control are the s of the school's life and activity,--the classroo to be a maxim in the city systems that the supervisor has not only the power to mold the school to the form of his own ideals, but that he can, if he is skillful, turn weak teachers into strong teachers and eneous school staff I believe that this is co to be considered the prime criterion of effective school supervision,--not what skill the supervisorhis pupils up to a given standard, or in choosing his teachers skillfully, but rather the success hich he is able to take the teaching material that is at his hand, and train it into efficiency

A former Commissioner of Education for one of our new insular possessions once told me that he had come to divide supervisors into two classes,--(1) those who knew good teaching when they saw it, and (2) those who could ood teachers Of these two types, he said, the latter were infinitely more valuable to pioneer work in education than the former, and he named two or three city systems from which he had selected the supervisors who could do this sort of thing,--for there is no li, and the superintendent who can train supervisors is just as important as the supervisor who can train teachers

It would take a volume adequately to treat the various problems that this conception of the supervisor's function involves I can do no more at present than indicate what see present need in this direction I have found that sometimes the supervisors who insist most strenuously that their teachers secure the cooperation of their pupils are a the very last to secure for themselves the cooperation of their teachers

And to this iestion in the present condition of the classroom teacher as I have attempted to describe it As a type, the classroonition of the work that she is doing If the lay public is unable adequately to judge the teacher's work, there is all the more reason that she should look to her supervisor for that recognition of technical skill, for that coood work, which can come only from a fellow-craftsman, but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of real inspiration than the loudest applause of the crowd

Upon the whole, I believe that the outlook in this direction is encouraging While the teacher may miss in her institutes and in the sueer s and in her consultations with her supervisors And when all has been said, that is the place from which she should look for inspiration The teachers'

must be the nursery of professional ideals It must be a place where the real first-hand workers in education get that sanity of outlook, that professional point of viehich shall fortify the tide of unprofessional interference and dictation which, as I have tried to indicate, constitutes the most serious menace to our educational welfare

And it is in the encourage of the teacher's calling to the plane of craft consciousness, it is in this that the supervisorreward for his work It is through this factor that he can, just noork the greatest good for the schools that he supervises and the community that he serves The h the medium of their teachers, and he can help these pupils in no better way than to give their teachers a justifiable pride in the work that they are doing through his own recognition of its worth and its value, through his own respect for the significance of the lessons that experience teaches the that experience profitable and suggestive And just at the presentthem of the truth that Emerson expresses when he defines the true scholar as the un is only a popgun although the ancient and honored of earth may solemnly affirm it to be the crack of doom