Part 10 (1/2)

Again, we are co to appreciate as never before the i into it purpose andso that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also of engendering in hio the discipline that is essential for ain the refor us the waste of ti to fix habits that are only weakly motivated

All this is a vastly differentthe drill processes, under thethat is worth while enerally agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,--for it subverts a basic principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any other force can alter or reverse To teach the child that the things in life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach hiives us no examples of worthy achievele and effort,--at the price of doing things that le upward from defeat Every man who has really found himself in the work of life has paid the price of sacrifice for his success And whenever we atteive our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts and skills that have lifted civilized e ancestors, we le and effort and self-denial

Let ation in the psychology of learning The habit that was being learned in this experiment was skill in the use of the typewriter The writer describes the process in the folloords:

”In the early stages of learning, our subjects were all very much interested in the work Their wholeThey were always anxious to take up the work anew each day Their general attitude and the resultant sensations constituted a pleasant feeling tone, which had a helpful reactionary effect upon the work Continued practice, however, brought a change In place of the spontaneous, rapt attention of the beginning stages, attention tended, at certain definite stages of advance of ust, took the place of the for becas now present in consciousness exerted an ever-restraining effect on the work As an expert skill was approached, however, the learners'

attitude and ain took a keen interest in the work Their whole feeling tone once htful and pleasant The expert typistso thoroughly enjoyed the writing that it was as pleasant as the spontaneous play activities of a child But in the course of developing this permanent interest in the work, there were es in the practice as a whole, when the asassumed the role of a very monotonous task Our records showed that at such tiress in learning typewriting was ood and had an attitude of interest toward the work”[18]

Who has not experienced that feeling of hopelessness and despair that co process of acquiring skill in a co to put every ite how hopeless it all see then is the ha novel that we have placed on our bedside table, the happy co in the next rooreen fields and the open road; how seductive is that siren call of change and diversion,--that evil spirit of procrastination! How feeble, too, are the efforts that we ress in our art, we are only ists tell us that thistime is an essential in the mastery of any complicated art Somewhere, deep down in the nervous system, subtle processes are at work, and when finally interest dawns,--when finally hope returns to us, and life again becoles reap their reward

The psychologists call thehs of despond” would be a far better designation

The progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pass through these sloughs of despond,--to set his face resolutely to the task and persevere It would be the idlest folly to lead children to believe that success or achieveained in any otherprocess

ButIt means the development of purpose, of aness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose oalof those conditions that th and virility andovercome obstacles and won in spite of handicaps,--it is in this consciousness of conquest that th have their source The victory that really strengthens one is not the victory that has coainst the background of effort and struggle It is because this subjective contrast is so absolutely essential to the consciousness of power,--it is for this reason that the ”sloughs of despond” still have their function in our new attitude toward drill

But do not mistake me: I have no sympathy with that educational ”stand-pattism” that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build solid and cohways across them wherever it is possible to do so I have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves the placing of artificial barriers in the learner's path But if I build highways across the morasses, it is only that youth ion and cole is absolutely necessary

You ree Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ the story of Gwendolen Harleth Gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose childhood drill and discipline had found no place In early woh fa about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to music, for which she had so She sought out her old Gerht do to turn this taste and this training to financial account Klesy of skill:

”Any great achieverowth

Whenever an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice Genius, at first, is littleand acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect Your o like a watch,--true, true, true, to a hair

This is the work of the springtime of life before the habits have been formed”

And I can for in education no better than by paraphrasing Klesram To increase in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show theain, how persistence and effort and concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their own childish experiences the illustrations that will force this lesson horeat achievements, those illustrations which will inspire the the Pole, or Wilbur Wright perfecting the aeroplane, or Morse struggling through long years of hopelessness and discourageraph,--to show the only in degree and not in kind from those which characterize every achieve as it is dohs of despond no less morasses, perhaps, but to rowth and development: this is the task of our drill work as I view it As the prophecy of Isaiah has it: ”Precept must be upon precept; precept upon precept; line upon line; line upon line; here a little and there a little” And if we can succeed in giving our pupils this vision,--if we can reveal the deeper le and effort and self-denial and sacrifice shi+ning out through the little details of the day's work,--we are ourselves achieving sohest triuet his pupils to see, in the sly trivial affairs of everyday life, the operation of fundamental and eternal principles

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: An address before the Kansas State Teachers' association, Topeka, October 20, 1910]

[Footnote 18: WF Book, _Journal of Educational Psychology_, vol i, 1910, p 195]

~XII~

THE IDEAL TEACHER[19]

I wish to discuss with you briefly a very commonplace and oft-repeated theme,--a thelorious raiment is now quite threadbare; a theers for one ould atte a choice I know of no other theme that lends itself so readily to a superficial treatment--of no theme upon which one could find so easily at hand all of the proverbs and platitudes and ht desire And so I cannot be expected to say anything upon this topic that has not been said before in a far better hts--even of those that we consider to be the inal and worth while--are really new to the world Most of our thoughts have been thought before They are like dolls that are passed on froe to be dressed up and decorated to suit the taste or the fashi+on or the fancy of each succeeding generation But even a new dress may add a touch of newness to an old doll; and a new phrase or a new setting may, for a moment, rejuvenate an old truth

The topic that I wish to treat is this, ”The Ideal Teacher” And Ithat the ideal teacher is and always ination This is the essential feature of any ideal The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics We take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in ion, the counterpart of which could never exist on earth He would have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their defects and all their inadequacies He would have the e of a Winkelried, the iination of a Dante, the eloquence of a Cicero, the wit of a Voltaire, the intuitions of a Shakespeare, the ton, the loyalty of a Bismarck, the humanity of a Lincoln, and a hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of soure that represented that quality in richest measure

And so it is with the ideal teacher: he would coood qualities of all of the good teachers that we have ever known or heard of The ideal teacher is and always ination, a child of the brain And perhaps it is well that this is true; for, if he existed in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us out of business The relentless law of corowth in one direction rowth in another direction, is the saving principle of huood in one single line of effort is the demand of e of the specialist But specialisain to society, also always e of forty, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one idea Twenty years before, he had been a youth of the most varied and diverse interests He had enjoyed inative literature, he had felt a keen interest in the drama, in poetry, in the fine arts But at forty Darwin quite by accident discovered that these things had not attracted hiy was concentrated in a constantly increasing reat problem to which he had set himself And he lamented bitterly the loss of these other interests; he wondered why he had been so thoughtless as to let theress; the sacrifice of the individual to the race For Darwin's loss was the world's gain, and if he had not liiven hi else, the world in of Species_, and the revolution in huht and hureat book Carlyle defined genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains George Eliot characterized it as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline But to make the definition coenius with the power of concentration: ”Who would be great must limit his ambitions; in concentration is shown the Master”

And so the great enius, are apt not to correspond hat our ideal of greatness demands Indeed, our ideal is often enius When I studied chemistry, the instructor burned a bit of diamond to prove to us that the diamond was, after all, only carbon in an ”allotropic” for in huenius, but they never reach very far above the plane of the commonplace They are like the diamond,--except that they are more like the charcoal

I wish to describe to you a teacher as not a genius, and yet who possessed certain qualities that I should abstract and appropriate if I were to construct in ination an ideal teacher I first o out in the mountain country I can recall the occasion with the , in reen a little under the influence of the lengthening days, but on the surroundinglow I had just settled down to ht that a visitor wished to see me, and a moment later he was shown into the office He was tall and straight, with square shoulders and a deep chest His hair was gray, and a rather long white beard added to the effect of age, but detracted not an iota froor He had the look of a Westerner,--of a man who had lived edness about hi the trail, and ht's sleep under the stars

In a feords he stated the purpose of his visit He simply wished to do what half a hundred others in the course of the year had entered that office for the purpose of doing He wished to enroll as a student in the college and to prepare hi request, but hitherto it had been hroad of life Here was a man advanced in years He told me that he was sixty-five, and sixty-five in that country ion had but recently been settled, and ed The only oldpioneers,-- fever, long before the advent of the railroad They had trekked across the plains froon trail; or, a little later, they had come by steamboat from St Louis up the twelve-hundred-ress had been stopped by the Great Falls in the very foothills of the Rockies What heroes were these graybeards of theto the recounting of tales of the early days,--of running fights with the Indians on the plains, of ambushments by desperadoes in thecailantes! And here, before me, was a man of that type