College Teaching Part 3

ANGELL, J. B. _Selected Addresses._ New York, 1912.

a.s.sociation of American Universities. Proceedings of the Annual Conference.

BUTLER, N. M. _Education in the United States._ New York, 1900.

CATTELL, J. M. _University Control._ New York, 1913.

CRAWFORD, W. H. (editor). _The American College._ New York, 1915.

(Papers by Faunce, Sh.o.r.ey, Haskins, Rhees, Thwing, Finley, Few, Sloc.u.m, Meiklejohn, Claxton.)

Cyclopedia of Education, article on "American College." New York, 1911.

DEXTER, E. G. _History of Education in the United States._ New York, 1904.

DRAPER, A. S. _American Education._ Boston, 1909.

FLEXNER, A. _The American College: A Criticism._ General Education Board, New York, 1908.

FOSTER, W. T. _Administration of the College Curriculum._ Boston, 1911.

HARPER, W. R. _The Trend in Higher Education._ Chicago, 1905.

KINGSLEY, C. D. _College Entrance Requirements._ United States Bureau of Education, 1913.

MACLEAN, G. E. _Present Standards of Higher Education in the United States._ United States Bureau of Education, 1913.

National a.s.sociation of State Universities in the United States of America. Annual Transactions and Proceedings.

RISK, R. K. _America at College._ London, 1908.

SNOW, L. F. _College Curriculum in the United States._ New York, 1907.

THWING, C. F. _History of Higher Education in the United States._ New York, 1906.

---- _The American College; What It Is and What It May Become._ New York, 1914.

---- _College Administration._ New York, 1900.

WEST, A. F. _Short Papers on American Liberal Education._ New York, 1907.

Footnotes:

[1] W. T. Foster in N.E.A. Reports, 1915.

II

PROFESSIONAL TRAINING FOR COLLEGE TEACHING

=Introduction=

Were this chapter to be a discussion of schemes of training, now in operation, that had been devised to prepare teachers for colleges, it could not be written, for there are no such schemes. Many elementary and secondary teachers have undergone training for their life work, as investigators have, by a different regimen, of course, for theirs. But if college and university teachers do their work well, it is because they are born with competence for their calling, or were self-taught, or happened to grow into competence accidentally, as a by-product of training for other and partly alien ends, or learned to teach by teaching.

There are able college men, presidents and others, who view this situation with equanimity, if not with satisfaction. Teachers are born, not made, it is said. Can pedagogy furnish better teachers than specialized scholarly training? it is asked. If we train definitely for teaching, we shall diminish scholarship, cramp and warp native teaching faculty, and mechanize our cla.s.s procedure, it is objected.

Had the subject of training for college teaching been discussed, no doubt other objections would have been advanced. But it has not been discussed, as will be seen from the very scant bibliography at the end of the chapter. No plan of training for college teaching is in operation, and no discussion of such a plan can be found. Each of a half-dozen men has argued his individual views, and elicited no reply.

This state of facts notwithstanding, the subject is well worth discussing, and one may even venture to prophesy that in a decade, or at latest two, the subject will have a respectable literature, and enough training plans will be in operation to permit fruitful comparisons.

When specific training is first urged for specialized work, there always is opposition. The outgoing generation remembers the opposition to specialized training for law, medicine, and engineering, to say nothing of farming, school teaching and business. But in spite of obstructive and r.e.t.a.r.ding objections, specialized types of training for specialized types of work have grown in number and favor, and today we are being shown convincingly that nations which have declined to set up the fundamental types of special training find themselves able to make effective only a fraction of their resources. The majority of the personnel in every higher calling has about average native apt.i.tude for it, and it is just the average man who can be improved in competence for any work by training directed to that end rather than to another. This is, of course, true of college teaching.

=How the college teacher has been and is trained=

In early days in this country the great majority of college teachers were clergymen, trained in most cases abroad. Later bookish graduates came to be the chief source of supply, their appointment in their own colleges, and infrequently in others, following close upon their graduation. Well into the third quarter of last century college faculties were selected almost exclusively from these two types, representatives of the former decreasing and of the latter increasing in relative number. Neither type was specifically trained for teaching in colleges or elsewhere.

With the founding and developing of Johns Hopkins University a new era in higher education opened in this country. The paucity of exact scholarship came to be known, and the country's need of scholarship to be appreciated. In colleges grown from English seedlings we sought to implant grafts from German universities. Independent colleges and colleges within universities, while still called upon by American traditions and needs to prepare their students for enlightened living by means of a broadening and liberating training, came to be manned preponderatingly by narrowly specialized investigators, withdrawn from everyday life, with concentrated interests focused upon subjects or parts of subjects, rather than upon students. Little thought was, or is yet, given to the preparation of college teachers for their duties as teachers, and that little rested, and still in large measure rests, satisfied with the a.s.sumption that by some unexplained and it may be inexplicable transfer of competence a man closeted and intensively trained to search for truth in books and laboratories emerges after three or more years well equipped for divining and developing the mental processes and interests of freshmen.

Once fairly examined, this a.s.sumption lacks plausibility. "We consider the Ph.D. a scholar's degree and not a teacher's degree," says the dean of one of our leading graduate schools, and yet preparation for this scholar's degree has been and is practically the only formal preparation open to college teachers in this country.

=Equipment needed by college teachers=

It goes without saying that scholarship is one of the basal needs of college teachers, a scholarship that keeps alive, and is human and contagious. But it should be remembered that there are several kinds of scholarship, and it is pertinent to ask what kind college teachers need. Should they, for instance, model themselves on the broad shrewdness and alluring scholarly mellowness of James Russell Lowell or on the untiring encyclopedic exact.i.tude and minuteness of Von Helmholz? Or is there an even better ideal or ideals _for them_? I would suggest that the teacher's knowledge of his subject should, essentially, be of a kind that would keep him in intellectual sympathy with the undeveloped minds of his students, and this means chiefly two things. The more points of contact of his knowledge with the past experience and future plans of his students the teacher has at his command, the better teacher he will be; for he can use them, not as resting places, but as points of departure for the development of phases of his subject outside the students' experience. And secondly, the teacher should see his subject entire, with its parts, as rich in number and detail as possible, each in its proper place within the whole. For the students' knowledge of the subject is vague and general; he is trying to place it, and many other new things, in some kind of a coherent setting; in fact, he is in college largely for the very purpose of working out some sort of rudimentary scheme of things.

The duty of the college teacher is to help him in this quite as much as to teach him a particular subject. And, besides, each particular subject can be best taught if advantage is taken of every opportunity to attach it to the only knowledge of it the student has, vague and general though it be. Highly specialized and dehumanized knowledge is not as useful for the college teacher as broad and vital knowledge, which is, of course, much harder to acquire. Even in the case of "disciplinary" subjects, there is no gain in concealing the human bearings. The teacher should be trained to seize opportunities in the cla.s.sroom and out to help the student, through his subject and his maturer life experience, to see the bearing of what he is learning on the life about him and on the life he is to lead. This is the college teacher's richest opportunity and the opportunity that tries him most shrewdly. If he is to rise to it, his entire equipment, native and acquired, must come into play.

What else does the teacher need? So that he may select the best and continue to improve them, he needs a knowledge of the different methods and aims in the teaching of his subject, and, so far as possible, of the results attained by each. Too much of college teaching is a blind groping, chartless and without compa.s.s. Instead of expecting each inexperienced teacher to start afresh, he should set out armed with the epitomized and digested teaching experience of those that have gone before him.

Finally, the teacher needs a sympathetic and expert understanding of the thinking and feeling of college students. This should be his controlling interest. The teacher, his interest in his subject, and in all else except the student, should be instrumental, not final. Every available strand of continuity between studenthood and teacherhood should thereafter be preserved.

This need suggests a capital weakness of the training for the doctorate in philosophy as a preparation for teaching. As it proceeds it shifts the interest from undergraduate student to scholarly specialty, and steadily snaps the ties that bound the budding investigator to his college days. It also explains the greatness of some college teachers and personalities before the eighties. Their degrees in arts were their licenses to teach. They suffered no drastic loss of touch with undergraduate thought and life. In the early years of their teaching this sympathetic and kindly understanding was fresh and strong, and they used it in their cla.s.sroom and wove it into the tissue of their tutorial activities. A discerning observer of college faculties can even today discover in them men and women who entered them by the same door as these great ones of old, irregularly as we would say now,--without the hallmark, and whose good teaching is a surprise to their doctored colleagues. In one inst.i.tution I know of, the best five teachers some years ago were all of this type. The training of college teachers might well, it therefore seems, include an apprenticeship, beginning with, or in exceptional cases before, graduation from college.

=The college legislator and administrator=

But the duties and opportunities of the college teacher do not stop at the door leading from his cla.s.sroom. In addition to dealing directly with students, individually and in groups, and even, if possible, with their families, as he grows in service he becomes, as faculty member and committeeman, a college legislator and administrator. In exercising these important functions he needs the equipment that would aid him to take the central point of view, a background of scholarly knowledge of what education in general and college education in particular are in their methods and in their social functions and purposes. There is too much departmental logrolling, as well as too much beating of the air in faculty meetings, and too many excursions into the blue in faculty legislation and administration arrangements.

The educational views of faculty members greatly need to be steadied, ordered, and appreciably broadened and deepened by a developed and trained habit of thinking educationally under the safeguards of scientific method and on the basis of an adequate supply of facts.

That pedagogy has made but the smallest beginning of gathering and ordering such facts and developing a scientific method in this field is not a valid objection. These tasks are no more difficult than others that have been compared, as _they_ will be, the sooner for being imposed.

It is significant that coincident with sharp and widespread criticism of the American college (justified in part by what college teachers have been made into by their training), appear demands on the part of faculties for more power. In this connection it may be remembered that autocracy is the simplest and easiest form of government, and that history shows that it can at least be made to work with less brains and training than are required for the working of democracy. As American colleges and universities have grown in complexity and responsibility, their faculties have lost power because they did not acquire the larger competence that was the indispensable condition of even reasonably successful democratic control. It is highly desirable that the power of faculties should increase to the point of preponderance. But the added power they will probably acquire will not be retained unless faculty members learn their business much better than they now know it in most inst.i.tutions. Thomas Jefferson, when asked which would come to dominate, the states or the federal government, replied that in the long run each of the opposed pair would prevail in the functions in which it proved the more competent.

=A tentative scheme of training for college teachers=

To outline a scheme of such importance without any experience to examine as a basis is a very bold undertaking, and one that can hope for but partial success. What I shall propose, however, is similar to the proposals of Pitkin (5), Horne (11), and Wolfe (14), my only predecessors in this rash enterprise. The general spirit and purpose of our proposals are the same. But we disagree more or less in details--which is fortunate, as it may encourage discussion of the subject, which is the thing most needed. Indeed, a lively sense of this need has led me to venture some unpopular a.s.sertions. It may also be admitted that the desiderata for teachers mentioned above are not likely to be all insured by any system of training.

The proposal submitted for discussion is that a three-year graduate course be established, its spirit and purpose being to train young men to become _college_ teachers. This course should lead to a doctorate; e.g., to the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, or of Doctor of Philosophy in Teaching, or of Docendi Doctor. What degree is selected is, in the long run, relatively unimportant, provided the course is soundly conducive to its end.

The course might well be divided into three parts, having the approximate relative value in time and effort of two fifths, two fifths, and one fifth. These parts should proceed simultaneously throughout the three years, the first being an apprenticeship--under supervision, of course--in the functions of the college teacher, the second a broad course of study and investigation of the subject to be taught, and the third a course of pedagogical study and investigation.