Craftsmanship in Teaching Part 10

Again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of motivating our drill work,--of not only reading into it purpose and meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also of engendering in him the _desire_ to form the habits,--to undergo the discipline that is essential for mastery. Here again the reform movement has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated.

All this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while may be acquired without effort. I think that educators are generally 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 him a lie.

Human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not been made at the price of struggle and effort,--at the price of doing things that men did not want to do. Every great truth has had to struggle 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 attempt to give our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts and skills that have lifted civilized man above the plane of his savage ancestors, we must expect from them struggle and effort and self-denial.

Let me quote a paragraph from the report of a recent investigation 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 following words:

"In the early stages of learning, our subjects were all very much interested in the work. Their whole mind seemed to be spontaneously held by the writing. They were always anxious to take up the work anew each day. Their general att.i.tude and the resultant sensations const.i.tuted 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 advancement, to wander away from the work. A general feeling of monotony, which at times a.s.sumed the form of utter disgust, took the place of the former pleasant sensations and feelings. The writing became a disagreeable task. The unpleasant feelings now present in consciousness exerted an ever-restraining effect on the work. As an expert skill was approached, however, the learners'

att.i.tude and mood changed again. They again took a keen interest in the work. Their whole feeling tone once more became favorable, and the movements delightful and pleasant. The expert typist ... so 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 many periods in nearly every test, many days, as well as stages in the practice as a whole, when the work was much disliked, periods when the learning a.s.sumed the role of a very monotonous task. Our records showed that at such times as these no progress was made.

Rapid progress in learning typewriting was made only when the learners were feeling good and had an att.i.tude of interest toward the work."[18]

Who has not experienced that feeling of hopelessness and despair that comes at these successive levels of the long process of acquiring skill in a complicated art? How desperately we struggle on--striving to put every item of energy that we can command into our work, and yet feeling how hopeless it all seems. How tempting then is the hammock on the porch, the fascinating novel that we have placed on our bedside table, the happy company of friends that are talking and laughing in the next room; or how we long for the green 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 make under these conditions! We are not making progress in our art, we are only marking time. And yet the psychologists tell us that this marking time 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 becomes worth while,--these heartbreaking struggles reap their reward.

The psychologists call them "plateaus of growth," but some one has said that "sloughs of despond" would be a far better designation.

The progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pa.s.s 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 achievement or even pa.s.sing ability can be gained in any other manner. And this is the danger in the sugar-coating process.

But motivation does not mean sugar-coating. It means the development of purpose, of ambition, of incentive. It means the development of the willingness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose may be realized, in order that the goal may be attained. It means the creating of those conditions that make for strength and virility and moral fiber,--for it is in the consciousness of having overcome obstacles and won in spite of handicaps,--it is in this consciousness of conquest that mental strength and moral strength have their source. The victory that really strengthens one is not the victory that has come easily, but the victory that stands out sharp and clear against 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 att.i.tude 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 comfortable highways 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 mora.s.ses, it is only that youth may the more readily traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where struggle is absolutely necessary.

You remember in George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ the story of Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen was a b.u.t.terfly of society, a young woman in whose childhood drill and discipline had found no place. In early womanhood, she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources. In casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some slight training. She sought out her old German music teacher, Klesmer, and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to financial account. Klesmer's reply sums up in a nutsh.e.l.l the psychology of skill:

"Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth.

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 little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cup and b.a.l.l.s, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles, your whole frame, must go 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 formulate my own conception of the work of habit building in education no better than by paraphrasing Klesmer's epigram. To increase in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their own childish experiences the ill.u.s.trations that will force this lesson home; to supplement, from the stories of great achievements, those ill.u.s.trations which will inspire them to effort; to lead them to see that Peary conquering the Pole, or Wilbur Wright perfecting the aeroplane, or Morse struggling through long years of hopelessness and discouragement to give the world the electric telegraph,--to show them that these men went through experiences differing only in degree and not in kind from those which characterize every achievement, no matter how small, so long as it is dominated by a unitary purpose; to make the inevitable sloughs of despond no less mora.s.ses, perhaps, but to make their conquest add a permanent increment to growth 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 meaning of struggle and effort and self-denial and sacrifice shining out through the little details of the day's work,--we are ourselves achieving something that is richly worth while; for the highest triumph of the teacher's art is to get his pupils to see, in the small and seemingly trivial affairs of everyday life, the operation of fundamental and eternal principles.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: An address before the Kansas State Teachers' a.s.sociation, Topeka, October 20, 1910.]

[Footnote 18: W.F. 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 theme that has been handled and handled until its once-glorious raiment is now quite threadbare; a theme so full of pitfalls and dangers for one who would attempt its discussion that I have hesitated long before making 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 plat.i.tudes and maxims that one might desire. And so I cannot be expected to say anything upon this topic that has not been said before in a far better manner. But, after all, very few of our thoughts--even of those that we consider to be the most original and worth while--are really new to the world. Most of our thoughts have been thought before. They are like dolls that are pa.s.sed on from age to age to be dressed up and decorated to suit the taste or the fashion 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 I may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination. 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 imagination a paragon, 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 manners of a Chesterfield, the courage of a Winkelried, the imagination of a Dante, the eloquence of a Cicero, the wit of a Voltaire, the intuitions of a Shakespeare, the magnetism of a Napoleon, the patriotism of a Washington, the loyalty of a Bismarck, the humanity of a Lincoln, and a hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of some superlative quality, drawn from the historic figure that represented that quality in richest measure.

And so it is with the ideal teacher: he would combine, in the right proportion, all of the good qualities of all of the good teachers that we have ever known or heard of. The ideal teacher is and always must be a creature, not of flesh and blood, but of the imagination, 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 compensation, which rules that unusual growth in one direction must always be counterbalanced by deficient growth in another direction, is the saving principle of human society. That a man should be superlatively good in one single line of effort is the demand of modern life. It is a plat.i.tude to say that this is the age of the specialist. But specialism, while it always means a gain to society, also always means a loss to the individual. Darwin, at the age 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 music, he had found delight in the masterpieces of imaginative 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 him for years,--that every increment of his time and energy was concentrated in a constantly increasing measure upon the unraveling of that great 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 them slip from his grasp. It was the same old story of human progress; the sacrifice of the individual to the race. For Darwin's loss was the world's gain, and if he had not limited himself to one line of effort, and given himself up to that work to the exclusion of everything else, the world might still be waiting for the _Origin of Species_, and the revolution in human thought and human life which followed in the wake of that great 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 complete, we need the formulation of Goethe, who identified genius with the power of concentration: "Who would be great must limit his ambitions; in concentration is shown the Master."

And so the great men of history, from the very fact of their genius, are apt not to correspond with what our ideal of greatness demands. Indeed, our ideal is often more nearly realized in men who fall far short of genius. 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" form. There seems to be a similar allotropy working in human nature. Some men seem to have all the const.i.tuents of genius, 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 who was not a genius, and yet who possessed certain qualities that I should abstract and appropriate if I were to construct in my imagination an ideal teacher. I first met this man five years ago out in the mountain country. I can recall the occasion with the most vivid distinctness. It was a sparkling morning, in middle May. The valley was just beginning to green a little under the influence of the lengthening days, but on the surrounding mountains the snow line still hung low. I had just settled down to my morning's work when word was brought 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 from the evidences of strength and vigor. He had the look of a Westerner,--of a man who had lived much of his life in the open. There was a ruggedness about him, a st.u.r.dy strength that told of many a day's toil along the trail, and many a night's sleep under the stars.

In a few words 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 himself for a teacher. This was not ordinarily a startling request, but hitherto it had been made only by those who were just starting out on the highroad of life. Here was a man advanced in years. He told me that he was sixty-five, and sixty-five in that country meant old age; for the region had but recently been settled, and most of the people were either young or middle-aged. The only old men in the country were the few surviving pioneers,--men who had come in away back in the early days of the mining fever, long before the advent of the railroad. They had trekked across the plains from Omaha, and up through the mountainous pa.s.ses of the Oregon trail; or, a little later, they had come by steamboat from St. Louis up the twelve-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri until their progress had been stopped by the Great Falls in the very foothills of the Rockies. What heroes were these graybeards of the mountains! What possibilities in knowing them, of listening to the recounting of tales of the early days,--of running fights with the Indians on the plains, of ambushments by desperadoes in the mountain pa.s.ses, of the lurid life of the early mining camps, and the desperate deeds of the Vigilantes! And here, before me, was a man of that type.

You could read the main facts of his history in the very lines of his face. And this man--one of that small band whom the whole country united to honor--this man wanted to become a student,--to sit among adolescent boys and girls, listening to the lectures and discussions of instructors who were babes in arms when he was a man of middle life.

But there was no doubt of his determination. With the eagerness of a boy, he outlined his plan to me; and in doing this, he told me the story of his life,--just the barest facts to let me know that he was not a man to do things half-heartedly, or to drop a project until he had carried it through either to a successful issue, or to indisputable defeat.

And what a life that man had lived! He had been a youth of promise, keen of intelligence and quick of wit. He had spent two years at a college in the Middle West back in the early sixties. He had left his course uncompleted to enter the army, and he had followed the fortunes of war through the latter part of the great rebellion. At the close of the war he went West. He farmed in Kansas until the drought and the gra.s.shoppers urged him on. He joined the first surveying party that picked out the line of the transcontinental railroad that was to follow the southern route along the old Santa Fe trail. He carried the chain and worked the transit across the Rockies, across the desert, across the Sierras, until, with his companions, he had--

"led the iron stallions down to drink Through the canons to the waters of the West."

And when this task was accomplished, he followed the lure of the gold through the California placers; eastward again over the mountains to the booming Nevada camp, where the Comstock lode was already turning out the wealth that was to build a half-dozen colossal fortunes. He "prospected"

through this country, with varying success, living the life of the camps,--rich in its experiences, vivid in its coloring, calling forth every item of energy and courage and hardihood that a man could command.

Then word came by that mysterious wireless and keyless telegraphy of the mountains and the desert,--word that back to the eastward, ore deposits of untold wealth had been discovered. So eastward once more, with the stampede of the miners, he turned his face. He was successful at the outset in this new region. He quickly acc.u.mulated a fortune; he lost it and ama.s.sed another; lost that and still gained a third. Five successive fortunes he made successively, and successively he lost them. But during this time he had become a man of power and influence in the community.

He married and raised a family and saw his children comfortably settled.

But when his last fortune was swept away, the old _Wanderl.u.s.t_ again claimed its own. Houses and lands and mortgages and mills and mines had slipped from his grasp. But it mattered little. He had only himself to care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his saddlebow, he set his face westward. Along the ridges of the high Rockies, through Wyoming and Montana, he wandered, ever on the lookout for the glint of gold in the white quartz. Little by little he moved westward, picking up a sufficient living, until he found himself one winter shut in by the snows in a remote valley on the upper waters of the Gallatin River. He stopped one night at a lonely ranch house. In the course of the evening his host told him of a catastrophe that had befallen the widely scattered inhabitants of that remote valley. The teacher of the district school had fallen sick, and there was little likelihood of their getting another until spring.

That is a true catastrophe to the ranchers of the high valleys cut off from every line of communication with the outer world. For the opportunities of education are highly valued in that part of the West.

They are reckoned with bread and horses and cattle and sheep, as among the necessities of life. The children were crying for school, and their parents could not satisfy that peculiar kind of hunger. But here was the relief. This wanderer who had arrived in their midst was a man of parts.

He was lettered; he was educated. Would he do them the favor of teaching their children until the snow had melted away from the ridges, and his cayuse could pick the trail through the canons?

Now school-keeping was farthest from this man's thoughts. But the needs of little children were very near to his heart. He accepted the offer, and entered the log schoolhouse as the district schoolmaster, while a handful of pupils, numbering all the children of the community who could ride a broncho, came five, ten, and even fifteen miles daily, through the winter's snows and storms and cruel cold, to pick up the crumbs of learning that had lain so long untouched.

What happened in that lonely little school, far off on the Gallatin bench, I never rightly discovered. But when spring opened up, the master sold his cayuse and his pick and his rifle and the other implements of his trade. With the earnings of the winter he made his way to the school that the state had established for the training of teachers; and I count it as one of the privileges of my life that I was the first official of that school to listen to his story and to welcome him to the vocation that he had chosen to follow.

And yet, when I looked at his face, drawn into lines of strength by years of battle with the elements; when I looked at the clear, blue eyes, that told of a far cleaner life than is lived by one in a thousand of those that hold the frontiers of civilization; when I caught an expression about the mouth that told of an innate humanity far beyond the power of worldly losses or misfortunes to crush and subdue, I could not keep from my lips the words that gave substance to my thought; and the thought was this: that it were far better if we who were supposed to be competent to the task of education should sit reverently at the feet of this man, than that we should presume to instruct him. For knowledge may come from books, and even youth may possess it, but wisdom comes only from experience, and this man had that wisdom in far greater measure than we of books and laboratories and cla.s.srooms could ever hope to have it. He had lived years while we were living days.

I thought of a learned scholar who, through patient labor in ama.s.sing facts, had demonstrated the influence of the frontier in the development of our national ideals; who had pointed out how, at each successive stage of American history, the heroes of the frontier, pushing farther and farther into the wilderness, conquering first the low coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard, then the forested foothills and ridges of the Appalachians, had finally penetrated into the Mississippi Valley, and, subduing that, had followed on westward to the prairies, and then to the great plains, and then clear across the great divide, the alkali deserts, and the Sierras, to California and the Pacific Coast; how these frontiersmen, at every stage of our history, had sent back wave after wave of strength and virility to keep alive the st.u.r.dy ideals of toil and effort and independence,--ideals that would counteract the mellowing and softening and degenerating influences of the hothouse civilization that grew up so rapidly in the successive regions that they left behind.

Turner's theory that most of what is typical and unique in American inst.i.tutions and ideals owes its existence to the backset of the frontier life found a living exemplar in the man who stood before me on that May morning.

But he would not be discouraged from his purpose. He had made up his mind to complete the course that the school offered; to take up the thread of his education at the point where he had dropped it more than forty years before. He had made up his mind, and it was easy to see that he was not a man to be deterred from a set purpose.

I shall not hide the fact that some of us were skeptical of the outcome.

That a man of sixty-five should have a thirst for learning was not remarkable. But that a man whose life had been spent in scenes of excitement, who had been a.s.sociated with deeds and events that stir the blood when we read of them to-day, a man who had lived almost every moment of his life in the open,--that such a man could settle down to the uneventful life of a student and a teacher, could shut himself up within the four walls of a cla.s.sroom, could find anything to inspire and hold him in the dull presentation of facts or the dry elucidation of theories,--this seemed to be a miracle not to be expected in this realistic age. But, miracle or not, the thing actually happened. He remained nearly four years in the school, earning his living by work that he did in the intervals of study, and doing it so well that, when he graduated, he had not only his education and the diploma which stood for it, but also a bank account.

He lived in a little cabin by himself, for he wished to be where he would not disturb others when he sang or whistled over his work in the small hours of the night. But his meals he took at the college dormitory, where he presided at a table of young women students. Never was a man more popular with the ladies than this weather-beaten patriarch with the girls of his table. No matter how gloomy the day might be, one could always find sunshine from that quarter. No matter how grievous the troubles of work, there was always a bit of cheerful optimism from a man who had tasted almost every joy and sorrow that life had to offer. If one were in a blue funk of dejection because of failure in a cla.s.s, he would lend the sympathy that came from his own rich experience in failures,--not only past but present, for some things that come easy at sixteen come hard at sixty-five, and this man who would accept no favors had to fight his way through "flunks" and "goose-eggs"

like the younger members of the cla.s.s. And even with it all so complete an embodiment of hope and courage and wholesome light-heartedness would be hard to find. He was an optimist because he had learned long since that anything but optimism is a crime; and learning this in early life, optimism had become a deeply seated and ineradicable prejudice in his mind. He could not have been gloomy if he had tried.

And so this man fought his way through science and mathematics and philosophy, slowly but surely, just as he had fought inch by inch and link by link, across the Arizona desert years before. It was a much harder fight, for all the force of lifelong habit, than which there is none other so powerful, was against him from the start. And now came the human temptation to be off on the old trail, to saddle his horse and get a pick and a pan and make off across the western range to the golden land that always lies just under the sunset. How often that turbulent _Wanderl.u.s.t_ seized him, I can only conjecture. But I know the spirit of the wanderer was always strong within him. He could say, with Kipling's _Tramp Royal_:

"It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world, Which you can read and care for just so long, But presently you feel that you will die Unless you get the page you're reading done, An' turn another--likely not so good; But what you're after is to turn them all."

And I knew that he fought that temptation over and over again; for that little experience out on the Gallatin bench had only partially turned his life from the channels of wandering, although it had bereft him of the old desire to seek for gold. Often he outlined to me a well-formulated plan; perhaps he had to tell some one, lest the fever should take too strong a hold upon him, and force his surrender. His plan was this: He would teach a term here and there, gradually working his way westward, always toward the remote corners of the earth into which his roving instinct seemed unerringly to lead him. Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines seemed easy enough to access; surely, he thought, teachers must be needed in all those regions. And when he should have turned these pages, he might have mastered his vocation in a degree sufficient to warrant his attempting an alien soil. Then he would sail away into the South Seas, with New Zealand and Australia as a base. And gradually moving westward through English-speaking settlements and colonies he would finally complete the circuit of the globe.

And the full fruition of that plan might have formed a fitting climax to my tale, were I telling it for the sake of its romance; but my purpose demands a different conclusion. My hero is now princ.i.p.al of schools in a little city of the mountains,--a city so tiny that its name would be unknown to most of you. And I have heard vague rumors that he is rising rapidly in his profession and that the community he serves will not listen to anything but a permanent tenure of his office. All of which seems to indicate to me that he has abandoned, for the while at least, his intention to turn quite all the pages of the world's great book, and is content to live true to the ideal that was born in the log schoolhouse--the conviction that the true life is the life of service, and that the love of wandering and the lure of gold are only siren calls that lead one always toward, but never to, the promised land of dreams that seems to lie just over the western range where the pink sunset stands sharp against the purple shadows.

The ending of my story is prosaic, but everything in this world is prosaic, unless you view it either in the perspective of time or s.p.a.ce, or in the contrasts that bring out the high lights and deepen the shadows.

But if I have left my hero happily married to his profession, the courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more explicit sort than I have yet attempted.