Creed of a Schoolmaster

I

WHAT we call education is to-day in a state of transition and confusion — not, however, because of a lack of prophets. Experts rush hither and thither to conferences, elucidating theories which, if applied to existing problems, would, according to their proponents, rehabilitate our chaotic society. Questionnaires are solemnly prepared and as solemnly filled out. Statistics are requested, collected, codified, and correlated with a perseverance which would be encouraging if it were not so monotonous. Meanwhile bewildered parents have their choice among widely advertised panaceas, each of which is advocated by a sponsor who looks with only faintly disguised hostility upon all his rival theorists. One intelligent gentleman assures me on Monday that the study of Latin is the foundation of all genuine culture. Another, equally dogmatic, informs me on Tuesday that the attempt to master Latin grammar is a waste of precious hours because the highway to wisdom is indubitably paved by the sciences. To these doctrinaires it is fitting to reply in the spirit, if not the actual words, of Dr. Samuel Johnson, who, when Boswell asked him provocatively what subject children should be taught first, answered, ‘Sir, it is no matter what you teach them first, any more than what leg you shall put into your breeches first. Sir, you may stand disputing which is best to put in first, but in the meantime your breech is bare. Sir, while you are considering which of two things you should teach your child first, another child has learned them both.’

One trouble with the situation is that too much emphasis is being laid on systems. Many educators are ambitious to standardize methods and achieve a national uniformity by training children like privates in an immense army. Everybody recalls the story — probably apocryphal — of the French Minister of Education who boasted that, at precisely twenty-one minutes after ten o’clock on the morning of Thursday, January 17, four hundred thousand French boys and girls were answering the same question on the causes of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. If such homogeneity could be attained in the United States, conditions might temporarily be simplified; but the ultimate results would be less pleasing. Processes may be too highly extolled. Routine may be too much glorified. Our educational renaissance, when or if it comes, will not be fathered by a formula.

It would be preposterous, no doubt, to maintain that courses of study and schedules of work are not important. It makes a vast difference to a boy’s future whether he majors in languages or in the sciences. Clearly it would have been criminal to drill Thomas Babington Macaulay as a mathematician or Woodrow Wilson as an electrical engineer. But what is taught to a lad is not so important as who teaches it. We have been worrying too much about methods and too little about men. The right kind of teacher will triumph over any system and make the dullest subject seem significant. As for pedagogical procedure, I am certain that, to paraphrase Kipling,

Headmasters are always in quest of good teachers. Unfortunately, the measuring of success in teaching by any scale of inquisitive tests is, despite some incorrigible optimists, virtually impossible. If you manufacture stockings, any would-be purchaser can examine the hosiery for appearance and durability. If you perfect a new type of razor, the public can try its efficiency. But who can accurately determine the responsibility for the product sent out by teachers? Who knows how much the pupil has contributed and how much the instructor? Some students would have done well no matter who presided in the classroom. Others could not have learned anything, anywhere, from anybody. Teachers have to be judged in part by what their pupils do on examinations, but even more by general impressions, as we estimate statesmen or musicians. After a man has taught for ten years, his acquaintances usually can tell whether he is succeeding. The real truth should be sought from those who have sat under him.

In the long run, schools and colleges win and retain prestige chiefly through their teachers. Such professors as Sumner at Yale, Perry at Williams, Garman at Amherst, and James at Harvard have been more valuable to their institutions than vast stadiums or rows of buildings. We have been living through an era when every kindergarten and university has been concentrating on brick and mortar, on libraries and dining halls and laboratories. All this is very well, and the nation is the better for it. But these luxuries are not indispensable. No matter what his surroundings may be or what facilities may be provided by generous trustees, Mr. Wackford Squeers is bound to do damage to his pupils. It is equally certain that Saunderson of Oundle will make an army barracks seem a home of learning. In education, what is needed most is men.

II

If this is true, it may be worth while trying to ascertain the qualities which make for success in teaching — not specious or ephemeral success, but enduring distinction. During many years of exposure to the instruction and friendship of teachers, I have discovered that the ablest of them are often strikingly dissimilar in personal traits. Some are rigid disciplinarians; others seem to care very little about order. Some are dreamy; others are practical, even worldly. Some are lively and talkative; others are quiet and reticent. Some arc always well dressed; others are careless and slovenly in their appearance. When a group of them assemble, they represent many types and inheritances and racial backgrounds. They include radicals and conservatives, poor and rich, the humble and the proud.

Seldom, even in the army, does any mere mortal enjoy more complete domination over his fellows than does the teacher — at least in a preparatory school. His authority may be brief, but it is not little. He may, if the whim strikes him, make or mar another’s career. By a decision entirely arbitrary and often not subject to appeal, he can turn a keen-minded freshman into a sulky, resentful sophomore. On the other hand, he may, under propitious circumstances, stimulate in a few of his pupils a yearning

Wielding such power, a teacher ought never to forget his responsibility. He must be worthy of wielding the magisterial sceptre.

In no occupation, furthermore, can a bully, a bigot, or an idler do more harm than in schoolmastering. Parents will take the utmost pains to investigate the professional record of the dentist or the surgeon on whom they rely for the rectification of their child’s physical defects, but are far less concerned about the specialists who are to have his mind and soul under their charge. An incompetent assistant in a hospital soon gets a letter of dismissal, but a misfit in teaching may spend his days in making the pursuit of knowledge duller and duller. It is difficult for a headmaster to get rid of an inefficient instructor, especially if the instructor has once settled down in his job. Thus it is that in many schools teachers who are notoriously incapable still draw salaries and spread evil around them.

The real victims are, of course, the pupils — who always know what is going on. If a teacher is lazy or irritable or stupid, they soon find it out. If he is a blusterer or a coward, a sneak or a sycophant, he cannot long conceal his weakness from their sharp eyes. If he could only hear the conversations which are carried on about him in fraternity houses or around the fireside, he might meditate reform — or suicide. He may deceive himself into imagining that he has avoided detection, but he is compassed about with a cloud of witnesses who may later, when the fear of an ‘F’ has been left behind, disclose all that they have seen. Boys, like men, can never do their best for a master whom they secretly despise.

III

But it is very easy to criticize, and correspondingly difficult to offer constructive comment. It ought to be possible to suggest certain attributes which should contribute to success in the teaching profession. Obviously it is essential that a teacher should be familiar with his subject, whether it be algebra or Spanish literature. Profound scholarship and teaching ability are not necessarily synonymous, as every college graduate is aware. There may be such a thing as knowing too much, so that one is entangled in details and unable to discern tendencies and principles. On the whole, however, the more thorough his preparation, the more extensive his research, the more effective a teacher ought to be; and he must know enough to earn and hold the respect of his students. If he slips too often on dates or has not read an important book, they become suspicious — and suspicion is the herald of contempt.

Once a teacher is caught ‘bluffing,’ his influence with his class is gone. If he confesses frankly that he has not read Ethan Frome or that he never heard of rachitis, he may still keep their regard; but not if he tells them that Edith Wharton wrote Babbitt or that ichthyology is concerned with flowers and trees. Always some bright, bespectacled Rollo consults the encyclopædia and transmits the results gleefully to his mates. To them ignorance is explicable, but sham is not likely to be forgiven.

Sincerity, or trustworthiness, or the gift of inspiring confidence, should be an intrinsic quality in a teacher. He starts with a great advantage over his students — he is older, more experienced, and therefore presumably wiser than they, and they realize it. If they are certain that his motives are honest and that he is trying his level best, they can overlook his mistakes, provided that he does not make too many of them. One of the best classes I ever knew was conducted by a friend of mine who, unexpectedly asked by the headmaster to take over a group of boys in geometry, acknowledged to them that he had almost forgotten the subject, but would promise to keep at least two days ahead of them through the term. They liked his spirit, and everything went smoothly. He had sacrificed his reputation for omniscience, but had risen in their estimation.

Many otherwise brilliant teachers fail because they lack patience. They expect all their pupils to seize the point after the first explanation; they even somewhat resent having to repeat what seems to them a very simple postulate. It is so easy, from a position of superior knowledge or appreciation, to develop unconsciously an attitude verging on superciliousness. Sometimes we are fortunate enough to be taught a lesson ourselves. Once, when I had spent several minutes explaining to a boy the technical construction of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind,’ I spoke to him rather caustically about his failure to apprehend what I had been trying to say. He looked a trifle discomfited, but made no reply. A few days later, I was attempting desperately on a very cold morning to start my car, and the same lad, passing the garage door and observing my futile movements, came in. ‘ Can I help you, sir?' he inquired courteously. Embarrassed, I grunted a noncommittal response; whereupon he lifted the radiator hood, peered into the bowels of the engine, took from his pocket a small screw driver, made one or two motions, and said, ‘I think it’ll go now, sir.’ Sure enough, it did. Then he expounded to me, with the forbearance of a father instructing his child, some mystery of the carburetor which I could not apprehend. Observing my perplexity, he directed my attention to the mechanism itself and, without the slightest trace of annoyance, showed me what had been wrong. He was a better teacher than I had been. To this day, when a boy wrinkles his forehead over the difference between a metaphor and a synecdoche, I remember the carburetor, moderate my wrath, and start again.

Patience is largely the by-product of sympathy, and cannot be long maintained unless a teacher recalls his own boyhood and artless approaches to knowledge. If he is sensible, he will not expect that immature minds will reveal the mentality, the logic, the gift of generalization, the grasp of detail, which appear in maturity. Realizing that the intellectual qualities of adults accrue in the normal continuity of growth, he will neither pity nor disdain those whose perceptions are not so rapid as his own. If he does, he should transfer to another profession where he will be pitted against his equals in age and development. The aversion with which men of the world — bankers, lawyers, and manufacturers — often regard a teacher is due to their detection in him of a dogmatism and complacency unconsciously created in him by daily contact with inferior minds. It is easy for a first-class brain to become annoyed at sluggishness or unresponsiveness in others; but a teacher must learn to forget his own endowments and to put himself in the place of his pupils. This is one of the renunciations to which he should pledge himself when he chooses schoolmastering as a career.

With sympathy belongs tact — the instinct which directs a teacher to use sternness or persuasion, reproof or encouragement. One of the lowest forms of human life is the professorial bully whose temper is not under control. I have known cases where a sensitive youngster, at the mere preliminary rumble of the tyrant’s voice, has shivered with fear. Perhaps there are some types of boys who deserve verbal castigation, just as there are animals that can learn only through a sound beating. But the tongue, always an unruly member, is a dangerous weapon, and a cowardly one when conditions allow the victim no retaliation. If modern psychology has done nothing else, it has revealed how enduring are some of the emotional wounds received in childhood. The teacher with a gift for satirical speech should exercise it, not in his recitation room, but in his home or at his club, where his word is not invariably law.

IV

Nothing is more destructive of a teacher’s influence than the belief that he plays favorites or cherishes prejudices. He must be just, with a leaning toward mercy. It is well for him to be very certain of his facts before he brings charges or inflicts punishment. ‘Uncle Sam’ Taylor, at Andover, a pedagogue skilled in the brutality of the mid-nineteenth century, was accustomed after morning chapel to utter the ominous announcement, ‘The following individuals are requested to remain!’— terminating it with a list of those who had been guilty of the infraction of some rule. Once, when a lad appeared trembling before him, the principal roared, ‘Palmer, you’re reading too many novels!’ The unhappy boy, who had never read a book of fiction in all his fifteen years, had strength enough to protest, but the master turned a deaf ear and sent him away with an admonition. ‘Uncle Sam’ had suspected the lad and had taken this way of substantiating his charges. He thought himself justified, but the boy never forgot the incident and was accustomed half a century later to denounce the despot who had treated him so inconsiderately.

An Olympian fairness is difficult for a teacher to preserve. Boys are not always prepossessing. Some are maculate, some are rude, a few are disturbing because of graceless mannerisms. In such instances, teachers are often obliged to force themselves to be eventempered. When boys are constantly whining or objecting, when they waste precious minutes in meaningless argumentation, the provocation for a teacher to explode is almost irresistible. Yet he must, in spite of an overwhelming urge, maintain a judicial equanimity. If he does allow his marking to be affected by friendships or animosities, the school will soon know it. Possibly the highest compliment which a boy can pay a master is to say, ‘Well, old Mud Puppy is a bear-cat, but he’s on the square!'

A teacher without a well-regulated sense of humor is doomed ultimately to desiccation. Time is merciless to the pompous pedagogue who takes himself seriously and moves from recitation to recitation without a smile. In moments of tension a jest — not too antiquated — will dissipate the clouds and make everybody forget his worries. The only relief a teacher can be sure of in reading themes is the amusement which comes from some colossal blunder or egregious ‘ boner.’

It was well worth while for me to ask my boys to write heroic couplets, if only because one of them was delivered of the following authentic masterpiece : — It was only yesterday that another described the ‘turgid superfluity’ of the age of Johnson, thus adding a new phrase to literary criticism.

In the management of a class, a teacher should be able to keep his audience good-natured without resorting to buffoonery, always avoiding, of course, the sneering laugh of ridicule. He should be warned, however, by the example of the Greek professor who related the same anecdote for forty years at the same point in Lysias, with the result that those freshmen who inherited annotated textbooks were able to anticipate the rust-covered tale and begin to chuckle before the climax had been reached. The teacher who is merely a ‘wise-cracker’ or a punster will find his pupils laughing at him instead of with him.

A bored teacher will obviously have a bored class. On the other hand, vitality and enthusiasm are infectious and act like yeast to stir dullards into animation. To treat the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ properly, a teacher must approach the immortal stanzas with reverence and warmth of emotion. Only thus can he inspire other readers with his own passion for poetry. Never except with reluctance have I assigned Pilgrim’s Progress to my students. As a child, I felt a hatred for Christian when, ignoring the cries of his wife and family, he stuck his fingers stolidly in his ears and ran off to seek salvation. This incident, showing incredible indifference to his nearest relatives, disclosed such unmitigated selfishness that I could not for years read beyond that point in the narrative; and even now I could not teach the book with any real zest.

The normal youth of sixteen or eighteen has been hardened to resist instruction and submits to it unwillingly. But he will respond to enthusiasm when he feels it to be sincere. ‘Georgie’ Olds, at Amherst, used to talk about charts and graphs with a kind of lyrical devotion; and I once sat under a Latin instructor who transformed Cæsar’s Commentaries into a living chronicle of history. An exceptionally gifted teacher once told me, in strict confidence, that if he could not get a salary for his services he would be glad to pay the school for allowing him to retain his position. This crusader would have set an example which, as a fellow practitioner, I do not wish publicly to approve; but one must admit that such a missionary spirit is as commendable as it is uncommon. Nobody is more deadening than the teacher who pursues day after day the same routine, until his pupils sit down at their desks without curiosity and get up from them with delight. No profession requires more long-continued and unfading ardor. A teacher without enthusiasm is as discouraging as a flat tire.

The young are quick to recognize and respond to the essential humanity in a teacher. He can do little if his pupils do not perceive in him a person constructed like themselves, somewhat older and more scarred, but still struggling in the toils of half-truths and doubts, and still seizing every opportunity to learn. When a boy hears his French professor swear softly over a missed putt, he is drawn to his elder by a magnetic touch of nature. There may be cases where austerity and studied aloofness make a teacher seem like a demigod, with the power which comes from unreality. But in the end he will accomplish more if he conducts himself as a man, and not as ‘a very superior person.’ A leading Eastern headmaster was once escorting a guest over the grounds of his institution. When they returned to the inn, the head asked, ‘What impressed you most about the school?’ ‘Well,’ replied the visitor, ‘I was struck by the fact that some of your staff looked as though they could earn a living in some other job.’

That’s what the average undergraduate wants — a professor who could have been successful in business, in journalism, or in banking, but who preferred to teach.

The best teachers have a strong appeal to the imagination. Geometrical formulas and chemical experiments we all forget; but in our memories lingers the portrait of some picturesque figure who showed us how to work, and handed down to us the thrill of his passion and knowledge. Such a teacher achieves a kind of immortality in minds made better by his presence. Professor Garman, at Amherst, electrified whole generations of collegians, building up in them an ineradicable disposition to weigh evidence, balance motives, and face the truth. I can close my eyes now and visualize another professor, a big, rather awkward man, rough in his exterior, unpopular with his associates because of his outspokenness, who read Wordsworth’s ‘The Solitary Reaper’ with such consummate artistry that the beautiful lines acquired an added magic from his voice.

V

In the final analysis, teaching is a fine art, akin to acting. The really skilled teacher enters his classroom in a mood of alertness, like a man entering on a new adventure. As he proceeds, he is quick to shift both tempo and manner if things are not going well. He is ready to galvanize the drowsy with a joke and to stir the indolent by Socratic interrogation. He makes explanations in language which can be understood, answering questions patiently when he believes them to be well meant. By some sixth sense, he recognizes the query aimed solely at consuming time, and he eludes the trickery to which healthy American boys resort if they find that a master can be victimized. Like the actor, the teacher must, for an hour, throw himself into his part — but he has to walk his stage alone. Rules and systems will avail him little. Only his personality can make him successful.

How is one to paint a word portrait of the ideal teacher? He should be intelligent but not pedantic, dignified but not pompous, firm but not intolerant. He should be young enough to remember his boyhood, but old enough to have put aside childish things. With all his scholarship, he should be aware that it would be a sad world if all his pupils were trained to be teachers — like himself. He should not be ashamed to possess or disclose his ideals, but should temper them with practicality. He should be able, outside his own bailiwick, to mix with other people on even terms, without self-consciousness, superciliousness, or timidity. He should maintain at all costs his patience, his sympathy, and his sense of humor. If, in addition, he has energy and optimism, he should be qualified to secure and hold a position, and leave behind him a place in the memories of alumni.

It will make little difference where such a man functions, whether in a gorgeous lecture hall or in an ancient classroom, with the desks carved by generations of undergraduates. He may never get a medal or an honorary degree, but his spirit will remain alive long after his body rests in the local cemetery.