Class 
 Book 
 
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 r-) 10 35 
 
 ■Ha 
 
 Copyright }I^. 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSm 
 
ISitiersiflie CDucational ittonogmpl^jS 
 
 EDITED BY HENRY SUZZALLO 
 
 PROFESSOR OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION 
 TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 
 
 THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 IN AND OUT OF SCHOOL 
 
 WILLIAM DeWITT HYDE 
 
 PRESIDENT OF BOWDOIN COLLEGE 
 
 I 
 
\^ 
 
 
 COPYRIGHT, I91O, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 
 C.aA268^59 
 
I"' 
 
 PREFACE 
 
 In state and church, in family and school, all of 
 us who are not anarchists agree that we must 
 have authority. As soon, however, as we ask, 
 "Where is its seat?" "In what spirit shall it be 
 exercised ?" the world splits into opposing camps. 
 The monarchists, the ecclesiastics, the tradition- 
 alists, the conservatives, tell us that authority 
 resides in official individuals, whose will must be 
 imposed upon the masses by pains and penalties. 
 Democratic Christianity, on the other hand, af- 
 firms that authority, potential or actual, resides in 
 all individuals whose interests are involved ; and 
 that the ruler, the minister, the husband and father, 
 the teacher are simply persons whose authority 
 is based on their power to serve more intelligently 
 and effectively the interests and aims, latent or 
 expressed, in the minds and wills of all concerned. 
 In the state, here in America at least, democ- 
 racy has won ; in the church it is winning ; in the 
 family it is meeting the reverses that forces fight- 
 ing in a strange and open field against strong 
 
 • • • 
 
 ni 
 
PREFACE 
 
 intrenchments must expect; in the school the 
 skirmishing has scarcely begun. Yet the school 
 is the point where the fight is sure to be fiercest. 
 For in the school we have one, or at most a 
 very few, mature, trained, experienced individ- 
 uals on the one side, and a mass of the immature, 
 the untrained, and the inexperienced on the 
 other. Here, if anywhere on earth, is the place 
 for ofiicial conservatism to dig its last ditch, and 
 fight to the bitter end. 
 
 Yet even here democratic Christianity has the 
 right upon its side, and soon or late will win. In- 
 deed, unless the school is to be out of the trend 
 of modern civilization ; unless the teacher is to 
 be the last surviving relic of an outgrown social 
 organization, he too, like the ruler, the minister, 
 the husband and father, must come down from 
 his throne of officialism, and prove his right to 
 rule by sympathetic and effective service of the 
 common interests and needs. 
 
 In the university this is the obvious thing to 
 do, and already is the universal practice. In the 
 college it is comparatively easy, though involving 
 risks from which the timid shrink. In the high 
 
 iv 
 
PREFACE 
 
 school it is harder, though, with the aid of voca- 
 tional interests, by no means difficult. In the 
 grammar school it is extremely difficult, requir- 
 ing enormous ingenuity to devise methods of 
 making hard work and right conduct automati- 
 cally preferable through artificial weighting of 
 alternatives. In the primary school the problem 
 is supremely arduous, requiring, in addition to all 
 that is valuable in what the kindergarten has 
 taught us, infinite tact and resourcefulness on 
 the part of the teacher. 
 
 Nevertheless, radical and revolutionary as 
 these apparently meek and mild ideals are, and 
 difficult and even dangerous as is their applica- 
 tion, the first part of this book ventures to state 
 them in uncompromising terms. One thing is 
 sure. As Plato said about his ideal republic : 
 " Not until philosophers are kings or the kings 
 and princes of this world have the spirit and 
 power of philosophy, will this our state have a 
 possibility of life and behold the light of day " ; 
 so we may be sure that not until our teachers are 
 philosophers, and bring the fruits of a wise phi- 
 losophy to their task, can schools be conducted 
 
PREFACE 
 
 on these principles. Accordingly the second part 
 aims to give the teacher such a sound and sane 
 philosophy of life and work 
 
 Good teaching, on its personal side, is simply 
 democracy, Christianity, good-will, incarnate in 
 the teacher, and diffused like an atmosphere 
 throughout the school. How to put that into the 
 school is told in the first part ; how the teacher 
 is to get it into himself or herself is told in the 
 second part. The order of development in the 
 first part was suggested by Professor Ralph 
 Barton Perry's " Moral Economy," published by 
 Charles Scribner's Sons; the second part is a 
 condensation and application to the problems of 
 the teacher of my " From Epicurus to Christ," 
 published by The Macmillan Company. The first 
 part shows the teacher how to humble himself and 
 become the sympathetic servant of his pupils ; the 
 second part shows him how to exalt himself and 
 become the rightful master of their free obedi- 
 ence. 
 
 William DeWitt Hyde. 
 
 BowDoiN College, Brunswick, Maine, 
 March 15, 1910. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Preface iii 
 
 Editor's Introduction Lx 
 
 PART I. THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IN SCHOOL 
 
 The Personality of the Pupil i 
 
 The Primary School : Suggested Immediate 
 Interests 4 
 
 The GR.A.MMAR School : Artificially Weighted 
 Interests 13 
 
 The High School: Elected Individual In- 
 terests 20 
 
 The College : Social Interests 25 
 
 The University: Professional Interests . ^y 
 
 Five Tests of the Teacher 43 
 
 PART IL THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 OUT OF SCHOOL 
 
 The Personality of the Teacher .... 49 
 
 The Epicurean: Happiness 54 
 
 • • 
 
 vu 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 The Stoic : Fortitude . 60 
 
 The Platonic: Serenity 65 
 
 The Aristotelian: Proportion 72 
 
 The Christian: Devotion 77 
 
 Five Principles of Personality 81 
 
 Outline 85 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 There was a time when the teacher, relatively 
 speaking, was a more important factor in our 
 educational consciousness. He was almost the 
 only factor about which people disturbed them- 
 selves. At least, we hear little in seventeenth 
 and eighteenth century America of the problems 
 of the course of study, the nature of the child, 
 and the need of social adjustment on the part 
 of the school. The one fact stressed in the organ- 
 ization of a school was the teacher's qualities. 
 The measure of the teacher was the measure of 
 the school. In so far as he was learned, the cur- 
 riculum was adequate ; in so far as he possessed 
 a genial, resourceful personality, his methods 
 were well adapted to the child; in so far as he 
 was the embodiment of valid ethical standards, 
 the school served the right social and moral ends. 
 Society and child, course of study and teacher, 
 were not regarded as separate factors, not even 
 for the convenience of thinking. The public and 
 
 ix 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 professional mind saw the whole of the school 
 situation in the personality that was made mas- 
 ter of the school. 
 
 Since then, education has become vastly more 
 self-conscious. Its consciousness has become sci- 
 entific ; and one by one the factors in the school 
 situation have been raised to the level of gen- 
 eral law and guiding principle. Soon it was not 
 enough that the teacher's personality should be 
 orthodox in religion, politics, and morals ; he 
 must have a scholarly command of the specific 
 subjects he was to teach, and by the middle of 
 the nineteenth century the movement for a 
 larger scholarly or cultural attainment among 
 teachers was in full swing. Later, another em- 
 phasis and another movement directed attention 
 to the need for a better understanding of the 
 child as a condition of the educative process, 
 and the close of the century saw " child study " 
 and "educational psychology" occupying an im- 
 portant position in the professional training of 
 teachers. And now at the beginning of the 
 twentieth century, the fullness of our political 
 and social introspectiveness forces its way into 
 
 X 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 the thinking of the schoolmaster, and school 
 education begins to be determined on the basis 
 of investigated social fact. 
 
 Each new emphasis has been a clear gain. 
 But each new movement has complicated educa- 
 tional theory and stratified it. The result is that 
 we have fallen into the way of thinking of teach- 
 ing as so much applied course of study, or so 
 much applied psychology, sociology, or ethics. 
 We scarcely see teaching in terms of its own 
 characteristic points of view or modes of action. 
 Furthermore, the concentration of the profes- 
 sional mind upon new factors has tended toward 
 a subordination, if not an utter forgetfulness, of 
 elements once clearly recognized. In the empha- 
 sis of child, society, and course of study, the 
 teacher has been forgotten. 
 
 It is odd that in our effort to know more fully 
 the nature of the elements in the educative pro- 
 cess, we should have become less considerate of 
 the personal human instrument through which 
 the teaching is to be done. The personality of the 
 teacher is as much a conditioning force as the 
 mental make-up of the child, the nature of 
 
 xi 
 
v/ 
 
 EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 the school subjects, and the conditions and needs 
 of modern life. It is more than a mere condition 
 of school life : it is its active force, — stimulat- 
 ing, guiding, encouraging, and applauding all the 
 activities of childhood. Surely the human factor 
 is worthy of some consideration, not upon human 
 grounds alone, but for the purpose of efficiency. 
 Yet, too often we hear of large, highly organized 
 school systems where everything is prescribed 
 by authority from above, subject matter and 
 teaching method alike, without regard for the 
 teacher's genius and limitation, the local situa- 
 tion, or the shift of child interests. Is it to be 
 wondered at that teachers feel that their indi- 
 viduality is gone, that they have become mere 
 tools without life ? What can teaching be under 
 such conditions but " piece work " and " day 
 labor" } And when the masters complain of the 
 mechanics they have made (but neither taught 
 nor consulted), saying that most teachers put no 
 soul into their work and get no high spiritual 
 result, have they forgotten that great beliefs are 
 never carried into the world by the unbeliever ? 
 At this point in our progress, we have no 
 
 xn 
 
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION 
 
 larger need than for a philosophy of teaching, 
 which unifies our modern complexities from the 
 view-point of the teacher, and raises to attention 
 again, in new and accurate ways, the nature of 
 the teaching personality and the teaching life. 
 Such we offer in this volume. 
 
PART I 
 
 THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IN SCHOOL 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 IN SCHOOL 
 
 The Personality of the Pupil 
 
 Over and above the lessons that he learns, or 
 rather in and through them, the pupil is devel- 
 oping his personality. The teacher, however 
 harsh or stupid he may be, cannot altogether 
 prevent this development ; but he may do much 
 to repress or pervert it. On the other hand, the 
 wise and sympathetic teacher can do much to 
 make the growing personality strong, sweet, and 
 pure. 
 
 Personality develops through taking up and 
 making over into an expression of itself, mate- 
 rials which at first are foreign to it. To stimu- 
 late, guide, restrain, and, without appearing to 
 do so, for that very reason all the more effect- 
 ively to control this development, is the teach- 
 er's task. 
 
 As a matter of fact, we recognize five stages 
 in our educational system, — the primary, the 
 
 I 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 grammar, the high-school, the college, and the 
 university. All these stages involve this same 
 process of taking up and making over into its 
 own substance materials that the outside world 
 presents ; and therefore in its broadest sense, 
 the task of the teacher at all stages is the 
 same. 
 
 Yet the materials taken up, and the methods 
 of appropriating them, are different at these dif- 
 ferent stages ; and at each stage the problem 
 assumes a special form. In the primary school, 
 the teacher's problem is to suggest a series of 
 immediate interests, which appeal to the play and 
 imitative instincts which in these years are the 
 child's chief forms of reaction on his environ- 
 ment. In the lower grammar grades, play-work 
 must give way to sustained efforts at tasks not 
 intrinsically attractive, but which are made arti- 
 ficially preferable through rewards bound up with 
 them, and penalties attached to the opposite al- 
 ternatives. In the upper grammar grades and in 
 the high school, the individuality of the pupil, 
 discovered by the teacher and revealed to the 
 pupil as a plan they mutually and sympatheti- 
 
 2 
 
PERSONALITY OF THE PUPIL 
 
 cally share, is the most effective organ of ap- 
 propriation. In college, the individual expands 
 through sharing the thoughts and aims of other 
 persons, presented both in literature and in life. 
 In the university, professional interest, the de- 
 sire to be a worthy exponent of some great de- 
 partment of theory or practice, supplies the sole 
 and all-sufficient motive. Without claiming that 
 this correspondence is complete, the five stages 
 of our educational system may serve at least as 
 convenient hooks on which to hang the five 
 principles of personal development. 
 
 The one word which best expresses the growth 
 of personality by feeding on the materials the world 
 presents is interest. Accordingly, our five stages 
 of development will appear as different forms of 
 interest. The primary school is the sphere of sug- 
 gested single interests, which appeal directly and 
 attractively to the play instinct of the child. The 
 lower grammar grades are the place for the 
 maintenance of interests by artificially contrived 
 rewards and penalties. The upper grammar 
 grades and the high school are the place for the 
 individual election of interests. The college de- 
 
 3 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 velops the interest in other persons. The uni- 
 versity develops the interest in truth for its own 
 sake, and the mastery of its practical applications. 
 
 The Primary School: Suggested Immediate 
 
 Interests 
 
 The problem of the primary school is to keep 
 the children occupied in doing a succession of 
 things in which they take eager interest, and 
 find immediate satisfaction. This gospel of the 
 play instinct, guided into profitable work without 
 letting the child know where play leaves off and 
 work begins, was the great contribution of the 
 kindergarten. It is perfectly consistent with what 
 is of permanent value in the kindergarten prin- 
 ciple to substitute for the specific " occupations " 
 and "gifts" of the traditional kindergarten, in- 
 teresting activities which more directly lead to 
 a mastery of the conventional tools of civiliza- 
 tion. The kindergarten spirit applied to the tra- 
 ditional primary -school subjects, as well as to 
 the traditional kindergarten material, gives the 
 ideal primary school. The essential thing at first 
 is not knowledge of this or that subject ; but the 
 
 4 
 
SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 
 
 child's eager interest in what he is doing ; the 
 power to pursue an end immediately before him, 
 and choose the means, and do the deeds essential 
 to attain that end. 
 
 In order to take an intelligent interest in any- 
 thing, the child must know the reality for which 
 the symbol stands before, or at least at the same 
 time, that he perceives the symbol. As Profes- 
 sor Keith ^ well says : *' The great and crowning 
 blunder and danger of school education is the 
 effort to get children to imitate conventional 
 activities for which they have no equivalent 
 meanings. The movement in all primary educa- 
 tion should be from the real activity — from the 
 meaning — to the symbolical expression." 
 
 Counting actual objects, putting them to- 
 gether, taking some away from the rest ; putting 
 piles of them together ; cutting them in pieces 
 and counting the parts, should accompany the 
 fundamental operations of arithmetic. Making 
 a map of the school grounds should be an early 
 lesson in geography. Reading something to 
 others of which they are to get an idea should 
 
 * Keith, Elementary Education, page 42. 
 
 5 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 be an essential part of the reading lesson. Cor- 
 respondence between the children should be a 
 feature of lessons in writing and spelling. By 
 these and similar devices the kindergarten spirit 
 may be applied to the primary-school subjects ; 
 and a school may be developed which is more 
 sturdy and profitable than the traditional kinder- 
 garten, and more interesting and vital than the 
 traditional primary school. 
 
 The first aim of the primary teacher should 
 be to keep the children busy doing interesting 
 things. Give a child four lessons to learn in a 
 school day, and you will have trouble with him 
 all day long, and he will learn next to nothing. 
 Give him twenty different things to do, each re- 
 quiring from five to fifteen minutes, and you will 
 have very little trouble with him, and he will 
 learn a great deal. Voluntary attention to a les- 
 son for half an hour is a sheer impossibility. De- 
 rived attention — attention, that is, derived from 
 his interest in doing something — is the only 
 kind of attention which he can long sustain. 
 
 Now if the traditional kindergarten things are 
 the only ones a teacher can clothe with this active 
 
 6 
 
SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 
 
 interest, by all means stick to them. But if a 
 teacher, in the kindergarten method and spirit, can 
 introduce reading, writing, geography, and arith- 
 metic, why, the sooner it is done the better. The 
 essential thing is to appeal to the will, not directly 
 through the compulsion of authority, but indi- 
 rectly through the attraction of interest ; and to 
 sustain activity, not through fear of punishment, 
 but through delight in doing interesting things. 
 Keeping this principle ever in mind, it does no 
 harm, but much good, to remember that some 
 kinds of activity are socially more serviceable 
 than others, and therefore educationally more 
 fruitful. 
 
 To secure the greatest personal development 
 of the child at this stage, the will of the child, 
 eagerly interested in doing something the teacher 
 has wisely suggested, should be in the foreground, 
 and the will of the teacher, which to be sure sug- 
 gests and guides the interest, should be kept in 
 the background. This, I am aware, is not the old 
 theory of discipline, which has come to us through 
 our Puritan inheritance. That theory was that you 
 must break the child's will ; make him mind ; as- 
 
 7 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 sert authority ; compel obedience as the founda- 
 tion of all right conduct. I have set forth the ex- 
 act opposite; that the first duty of the teacher is 
 not to break but to strengthen the child's will ; 
 to show him how to make the world mind him; 
 to teach him to exercise his own authority over 
 matter ; and train him to make the forces around 
 him his obedient slaves. 
 
 Here, surely, we are at the parting of the ways 
 in our whole theory of education. One theory 
 says, " Build up will " ; the other, '' Break will 
 down." One says, " Master things " ; the other 
 says, " Obey the teacher." Which is right ? Both 
 have their measure of truth, as we shall see ; but 
 the truth in the first is fundamental and essential ; 
 the truth in the second is incidental and auxiliary. 
 The first should be the teacher's normal aim and 
 expectation ; the second is an occasionally neces- 
 sary adjustment to abnormality. 
 
 The aim of the good primary teacher is to keep 
 the children doing a variety of things which 
 must be interesting, and may be as profitable as 
 is consistent with the maintenance of interest. 
 The skill with which the child's interest in what 
 
 8 
 
SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 
 
 he is doing is developed and sustained is the 
 test of primary teaching. For the power to main- 
 tain persistent and concentrated attention is natu- 
 rally lacking in the child at this stage. If the 
 primary teacher passes on her children with ca- 
 pacity for consecutive attention to interesting 
 things, and the power to accomplish desired re- 
 sults through persistent effort, she has done well 
 her educational work. If the things which they 
 are interested in, and therefore like to do and 
 can do, are at the same time socially serviceable, 
 that is so much clear gain. But the development 
 of will-power through interest, in place of the 
 naturally wandering, inconstant attention, and the 
 wayward and capricious, and therefore unservice- 
 able will, is the primary teacher's distinctive 
 achievement. 
 
 I know the reader is eager to interrupt at this 
 point with the question. Must we not have disci- 
 pline.^ Must we not enforce obedience .? Must we 
 not compel the child to do dry, disagreeable 
 things he does not like, and does not want to 
 do ? Yes. We must have all these things, in one 
 way or another, soon or late; but it is a very poor 
 
 9 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 sort of primary teacher, and a pitiful sort of pri- 
 mary school, that aims at them, or makes much 
 fuss about them, or measures success by them. 
 These things must not be absent from the school. 
 But they should be in the background, not in the 
 foreground. 
 
 Discipline by force is not direct education ; 
 but it is, at times, and with a minority of the 
 children, a condition of education. Such disci- 
 pline in school is precisely what the policeman 
 and the jail are in the community. You must 
 have your policeman and jailer to protect the 
 community against the two per cent of its 
 citizens who lack the normal domestic, eco- 
 nomic, social, and civic interests in life. In the 
 same way, there must be a policeman and jailer 
 quality in every teacher ; and, figuratively speak- 
 ing, there must be a billy, a pair of hand-cuffs, 
 and a cell in every school. No school is any more 
 safe without them, than a community. They are 
 essential to the prosecution of its work; and they 
 check bad habits, and induce good habits in the 
 obstreperous individual. 
 
 Furthermore, this background of inexorable, 
 
 10 
 
SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE INTERESTS 
 
 impartial discipline must win on every issue it 
 joins, and fight every battle, if need be, to the 
 bitter end. In the rougher days of a generation 
 ago, a young Bowdoin athlete was sent out to 
 "keep school" in a district where three successive 
 teachers had been put out of the building by the 
 "big boys," who, after a long season of farming 
 and fishing, attended the winter school. The com- 
 mittee, in despair, made a contract with him 
 which insured liberal pay in case he should keep 
 school throughout the whole term of nine weeks ; 
 but stipulated that he should receive no pay 
 whatever, in case he failed to teach the entire 
 term. On the first day, he locked the door, and 
 put the key in his pocket. Then he took off his 
 coat, folded it and laid it on the desk; next his 
 waistcoat, folded that and laid it on the desk; 
 finally his suspenders, deliberately folded them 
 and laid them on his desk. Then he rolled up his 
 sleeves, showing a powerful pair of arms. Thus 
 introduced, he made his opening speech, in which 
 he said : " Boys, I have taken this school on con- 
 dition that if I teach for less than the complete 
 term, I get no pay. I don't propose to waste my 
 
 II 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 time here teaching for nothing. You have put 
 out the last three teachers. If you want to try 
 me, now is your chance. Come one, or come all ; 
 but come now'' He kept the school, and drew 
 his pay. 
 
 Under those circumstances, he did right ; and 
 every teacher must stand ready in spirit, if not 
 in specific detail, to do likewise. Yet that was 
 not education ; any more than clearing the wil- 
 derness is raising crops. It was a preliminary to 
 education, a condition of education, but not the 
 thing itself. He simply subjected the brute force 
 and the will behind it in the boys, to a bigger 
 brute force and a stronger will in himself. He did 
 not build up, strengthen, and confirm the boys' 
 control over themselves, and over the things they 
 had to do. 
 
 We do not judge the good order of a city by 
 the number of arrests. Some are necessary ; but 
 too many are a confession that something is wrong. 
 There must be some discipline active, and much 
 more latent, in every school. But the less the 
 better ; and the ideal is to have it all latent and 
 none called out. While ideals are never perfectly 
 
 12 
 
ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 
 
 realized, yet they determine the tone and quality 
 of our will-attitudes. Making all the concessions 
 required by the strictest Puritan about the ne- 
 cessity of discipline as a last resort always latent 
 in the background, and occasionally a regrettable 
 feature of the foreground, the ideal of the primary 
 school is the strengthening of will, through inter- 
 est. True as it is that there are hard and disa- 
 greeable things which must be done, whether one 
 likes them or not, the best preparation for them, 
 at this primary stage, is the development of power 
 to do things which one likes to do. That power, 
 to be sure, must later be transferred to dry and 
 disagreeable tasks. But the problem distinctive 
 of the primary school is not the transmission of 
 power to this or that particular machine or pro- 
 cess ; but the generation of power which later 
 can be applied wherever wanted. 
 
 The Grammar School: Artificially Weighted 
 
 Interests 
 
 Now that the primary school has developed 
 the power to follow for a considerable period a 
 single interest of some difficulty and some im- 
 
 13 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 portance, the grammar school must train the 
 child to weigh one interest as compared with an- 
 other; reject the lesser, and accept the greater, 
 notwithstanding the temporary pains, privations, 
 and difficulties the following of the greater inter- 
 est may involve. 
 
 As soon as we reach the grammar grade; as 
 soon, that is, as we begin to give out lessons to 
 be studied through half-hour periods by the chil- 
 dren individually in their seats ; in other words, 
 as soon as, instead of suggesting single lines of 
 interest to them, we begin to place before them 
 a task not immediately and intrinsically of com- 
 pelling interest, but one which they can follow 
 only by rejecting hosts of competing interests 
 that are immediate and urgent, then the great 
 moral conflict is on. 
 
 In this great conflict, the tragic fact is that 
 nature almost always backs the impulse which, 
 from the social point of view, is the less valuable. 
 Nature cares supremely at this stage for exercise, 
 nutrition, play ; and expresses these physiological 
 interests in restlessness, mischief, indolence, and 
 wool-gathering. These physiological impulses, 
 
 14 
 
ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 
 
 backed by heredity, stimulated by environment, 
 are intrinsically much stronger in their appeal to 
 the child than such pale, bloodless conceptions 
 as fractions, latitude and longitude, subject and 
 predicate, and the other tools of civilization that 
 the school is seeking to put into his hands. Now 
 the child must choose between two things of un- 
 equal value ; and the worst of it is that nature 
 has given the less valuable competitor the inside 
 track. Before the development of the doctrine 
 of evolution, we used to put all the blame for this 
 situation on the child himself, and label it " total 
 depravity," and try to take it out of him by the 
 rod. The child is not to blame ; and yet the child 
 left to himself will choose the lesser good almost 
 every time. 
 
 At this stage, the teacher's task is clear. It is 
 to lighten and brighten the larger good with such 
 artificial encouragements, rewards, advantages, 
 and attractions that, in spite of the pull of nature 
 in the opposite direction, the child will choose 
 that larger good which arithmetic, and grammar, 
 and geography, and nature study, and drawing, 
 and the other studies represent. It is to weight 
 
 15 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 down restlessness, and inattention, and laziness, 
 and inconsiderateness of all sorts with such auto- 
 matic artificial penalties, and privations, and dis- 
 abilities, that he will of his own preference re- 
 ject them. 
 
 Here again the teacher's will must be done ; 
 but it must be done as far as possible by keeping 
 itself in the background, and by bringing the 
 child's will into the foreground. The wise teacher 
 does not lay down the law arbitrarily, and then 
 enforce her will directly against the will of the 
 child. As before, in extreme cases, that may 
 be necessary, and should always be held, like 
 the policeman and the lock-up, in reserve. But 
 it is not the ideal which the teacher should have 
 in mind ; it is not the attitude she should cul- 
 tivate. On the contrary, the grammar-school 
 teacher should recognize as her distinctive task 
 the lightening of the better and the weighting of 
 the worse alternative, so that between the two 
 scales, thus lightened and weighted, the child 
 will make the right choice for himself, as a free 
 act of his own will. 
 
 It is no easy task by artifice thus to make the 
 
 i6 
 
ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 
 
 path of study the more attractive, and keep the 
 children marching, breast forward, intent upon 
 a series of goals just far enough ahead to let 
 them draw encouragement from the prospect and 
 not so far ahead as to be discouraging. Manual 
 training is an immense help at this point ; for the 
 thing to be done is ever in the future, yet so re- 
 lated to present effort, and so dependent upon 
 present industry, patience, perseverance, care- 
 fulness, and thoroughness, that the vision of the 
 completed product brightens and lightens the 
 labor of the moment and the hour. The worker 
 who cares for his work is always living " by the 
 glad light of futurity," and unconsciously devel- 
 oping the subordination of present inclination to 
 future satisfaction. 
 
 Frequent opportunity for special as well as reg- 
 ular promotion ; and, in some way or other, the 
 recognition of quality as well as quantity of work 
 as the proper basis of promotion, is another de- 
 vice which, besides being educationally and eco- 
 nomically valuable, is of great assistance in de- 
 veloping that eager forward look which ought to 
 mark the children in a well-conducted grammar 
 
 17 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 school. Nothing is more deadening than the lock- 
 step by which good and bad, bright and dull, 
 ambitious and listless, are marched through the 
 grammar grades. It is convenient for the school, 
 but costly and deadly for the scholars. If the boy 
 is made for the school, this lock-step, with only 
 one regular annual promotion, is all right. If the 
 school is made for the boys and girls, it is utterly 
 wrong. Some things taught in the grammar 
 school, like mathematics, are of such a nature 
 that unless he knows thoroughly what is taught 
 in the lower grade, the child cannot successfully 
 take up the work of the next higher grade. For 
 instance, the subject of interest could not be 
 profitably taught without acquaintance with deci- 
 mal fractions. 
 
 On the contrary, most of the subjects taught 
 in the grammar grades are not of this nature. A 
 bright boy who has studied the geography of 
 Europe, can take up the study of the geography 
 of Africa with a class which has studied the 
 geography of Asia, even though he has not. The 
 ambitious boy should be encouraged to skip one 
 or two of the grammar grades; and provision 
 
 i8 
 
ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED INTERESTS 
 
 should be made toward the end of the term for 
 his concentration on the essential features of the 
 work of the class just ahead of him, which he is 
 about to skip. 
 
 It is not the economic or even the strictly 
 intellectual gains — important as these are — 
 that I am chiefly commending. It is the moral 
 attitude encouraged by frequent promotion. It 
 is the placing of a portion of responsibility 
 for the child's progress upon the child himself. 
 Frequent promotion, the counting of quality, 
 as well as quantity, as a ground for promo- 
 tion, develops prudence instead of indifference; 
 eagerness instead of listlessness ; ambition in- 
 stead of sloth ; responsibility instead of irre- 
 sponsibility. 
 
 Manual training and frequent promotion are 
 matters of administration, and depend mainly 
 upon the superintendent. There is a large field, 
 however, which depends almost exclusively upon 
 the teacher. Given the same subjects to teach, 
 one teacher will contrive to hold up ideals, to 
 hold out inducements, to create the expectation 
 of satisfaction in achievement, which makes pre- 
 
 19 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 sent toil glow with the ardor of future delight in 
 the thing accomplished; while another teacher, 
 less resourceful, will make the same subjects a 
 dead lift by sheer force of will under slavish com- 
 pulsion. Not external results alone, but the sense 
 of freedom which the children have in achiev- 
 ing them, are the test of good grammar-school 
 teaching. 
 
 The High School: Elected Individual Interests 
 
 With the dawn of adolescence, individuality 
 appears; and then wise choice is not between 
 things which appeal to everybody as greater or 
 less, better or worse, but between what appeals 
 to me, with my capacities, tastes, aptitudes, and 
 preferences, and what does not appeal to me. 
 Here the boy is different from the girl ; the fu- 
 ture artisan from the future artist ; the future 
 lawyer from the future engineer. Here ought to 
 come, if possible, industrial and commercial, as 
 well as merely literary training; that the student 
 may learn by a fair trial where his deepest affin- 
 ities lie. Here the elective principle is essential. 
 Here the choice whether to go to college, or to 
 
 20 
 
ELECTED INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS 
 
 a technical school, or into mechanical or com- 
 mercial pursuits, must be provisionally made. 
 Here the high school has a just grievance against 
 the colleges, in so far as the rigidity and amount 
 of college requirements interfere with opportunity 
 to try a student out in lines other than mathe- 
 matics, languages, and theoretical science ; or to 
 turn aside from prescribed work to follow out 
 interesting applications of mathematics and sci- 
 ence to practical affairs. 
 
 The principal of a Boston grammar school, in 
 a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly, went so 
 far as to advocate the appointment in every school 
 of a vocational teacher, whose sole duty should 
 be to consult with the individual students, ascer- 
 tain their bent and power, and direct them into 
 those studies which would lead them to the choice 
 of the vocation for which they are best adapted. 
 So extreme a suggestion is hardly practical. But 
 every teacher in the upper grammar grades, and 
 in the high school, ought to help his students to 
 discover their own capacities and form plans of 
 life according to them. The teacher in the upper 
 grammar grades, and in the high school, may 
 
 21 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 take it for granted that every student in the school 
 is reaching out, more or less blindly, but eagerly 
 and intently, to find that aspect of the many-sided 
 world with which he or she has the deepest af- 
 finity, and that career in life which will prove 
 most useful and enjoyable. 
 
 Influence at this stage cannot be wholesale, 
 but must be individual and personal. The high- 
 school teacher who knows only the school or 
 class as a whole, does not know either school or 
 class at all. The teacher's philosophic task at 
 this stage is to discover and reveal to the youth 
 his undiscovered, longed-for self. This self does 
 not lie upon the surface ; and, if sought directly, 
 will dive down far out of reach. It is discovered 
 through the discovery of special aptitude where 
 that exists ; through the discovery of what the 
 youth admires in others ; and still more, through 
 the formation of tentative plans. These plans 
 which youth forms at this stage may or may not 
 be exchanged for other and better plans later, 
 but some plan the youth at this stage ought to 
 have ; and it is through that plan, and loyalty to 
 it for the time being, that his salvation at this 
 
 22 
 
 -i' 
 
ELECTED INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS 
 
 stage is best worked out. The future of the 
 youth is much more subject to the influence 
 of the parent and teacher then than either be- 
 fore or after. Before this period, influence is 
 easy and superficial. After that time it may be 
 profound, but it is difficult. The high-school 
 teacher who knows his students individually, 
 and leads them to the recognition of their deeper 
 selves, is almost omnipotent for determination of 
 both career and character. 
 
 I have in mind a principal who has been at 
 the head of two academies and one city high 
 school. From whatever school he has served as 
 principal, there has come to college a steady 
 stream of well-prepared and earnest students who 
 know why they are coming to college. When he 
 goes to a school, the stream starts ; and when 
 he leaves, unless he is followed by a like-minded 
 successor, the stream dries up. I do not mean 
 to say that college is the best thing for every 
 high-school student ; but it is one of many good 
 things, and it is within reach of many who 
 would never attain it without a wise teacher's 
 encouragement. I have no doubt this same 
 
 23 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 teacher is sending equally thoughtful students 
 into business and mechanical pursuits with en- 
 thusiastic devotion to the vocation for which 
 they are best adapted. 
 
 The teacher who, in the high school, will do 
 this work of revealing the student to himself, 
 and discovering his individual purpose, must of 
 course have a purpose of his own. Unless one 
 has chosen teaching because that is what he 
 feels specifically designed and drawn to do, he 
 will hardly have power to lead others into what 
 shall be to them an equally noble and enjoyable 
 career. You can never discover the true self in 
 others unless you have found and worked out 
 your own. The true high-school teacher finds 
 his crowning opportunity in revealing to his 
 students some appealing career and compelling 
 purpose which shall be to them what teaching is 
 to him. 
 
 Where this mutual understanding based on 
 recognition of the student's purpose is present, 
 discipline solves itself; or rather the necessity 
 for it disappears. Where this fails, communi- 
 cation with parents is the next best resource. 
 
 24 
 
SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 Here, as everywhere, there must be in the back- 
 ground compulsion or expulsion as a last resort. 
 But the ideal resource of every teacher fit to 
 teach in high school or upper grammar grades, 
 is the student's developed purpose, sympatheti- 
 cally shared. 
 
 The College: Social Interests 
 
 We have developed a will strong enough to 
 seek persistently a single interest, a will wise 
 enough to choose the bigger of two competing 
 interests, a will sufficiently individual to resist 
 the greater which is not one's own for the sake 
 of the lesser, provided that lesser interest ap- 
 peals to specific capacity and taste. All this, 
 however, is consistent with a very mean and selfish 
 attitude toward others. The next problem is to 
 develop a will which, as a matter of course, takes 
 account of the aims, interests, rights, prefer- 
 ences, and points of view of other persons, and 
 includes them in the social interest one makes 
 his own. To train men to recognize these social 
 interests is the specific task of the college. . 
 
 The college develops this social will in two 
 
 25 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ways : First, by the subjects in its curriculum. 
 First of these is literature, and especially the 
 literature of lands and ages other than our own. 
 To read good literature is the best way of ac- 
 quiring the habit of living in the minds and hearts 
 of other people, and learning how to take their 
 point of view. Of course when literature is made 
 a mere pretext for grammatical, linguistic, and 
 philological study, all this is lost. The tendency 
 in this direction, which we imported from Ger- 
 many a generation ago, and, to some extent have 
 reinforced in our own graduate schools, if allowed 
 to flourish would be the death and destruction of 
 the college. Unfortunately, the great wave of in- 
 terest in physical science which swept over the 
 world a generation ago under the lead of men like 
 Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall, frightened and 
 spoiled a great many of our college professors of 
 literature. Forsaking literature as literature, and 
 devoting themselves to philology and grammar, 
 they substituted for the warm and breathing 
 life of Greek, Roman, and European letters the 
 dry roots and dead branches of the most dis- 
 mal of pseudo-sciences. If we desire to preserve 
 
 26 
 
SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 the college and hold it to its true purpose of 
 developing the social will in men, we must re- 
 sist, as we would poison and the plague, this 
 tendency to degrade literature into the mere 
 material of science, and put the classification 
 of dead symbols above the appreciation of the 
 states of mind and heart these symbols are 
 meant to express. 
 
 A man may go through the philological dis- 
 cipline at present required for the degree of Doctor 
 of Philosophy without losing the power of appre- 
 ciation and creation ; many, however, are ruined 
 in the attempt. At present there are not enough 
 who have survived the process to fill a quarter 
 part of the chairs in literature. The spirit 
 and the letter are both desirable when they 
 can be found in happy combination ; but for 
 strictly college purposes, the man who has the 
 spirit of literature without the letter of philology 
 is infinitely preferable to the man who has the 
 letter without the spirit. Perhaps, as the Dean 
 of Dartmouth College has told us in an article 
 in the Educational Review on "The Critical 
 Period for the American College," the greatest 
 
 27 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 problem of the college administrator at the pre- 
 sent day is to protect his faculty against the in- 
 vasion of the latter type of man. 
 
 Philosophy, history, and political science come 
 next to pure literature in their value for the de- 
 velopment of social interests. To think out the 
 problems of life in the terms in which the master 
 minds have thought of them ; to read through the 
 deeds to the motives of the men who did them ; 
 and to discover the processes which have made 
 and un-made institutions and customs, are all 
 exercises in the art of acting outside our in- 
 dividual selves, and taking the social, national, 
 world-wide point of view. 
 
 The physical sciences, — physics, chemistry, 
 biology, geology, psychology, and astronomy, — 
 as they are presented in the elementary college 
 courses, are also a training in the appreciation of 
 scientific men and their achievements. In each 
 department, one or two advanced courses may 
 pass beyond this attitude of appreciation, and 
 enter on strictly scientific research. That, how- 
 ever, is the distinctive province of the university. 
 The great bulk of college teaching, even on 
 
 28 
 
SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 strictly scientific subjects, is directed toward the 
 enlarging and humanizing of the student, rather 
 than the enlarging and utilizing of scientific 
 knowledge. Broadly speaking, subject only to 
 occasional exceptions in a few advanced courses, 
 the college curriculum is determined by the fit- 
 ness of the subjects which enter into it to stim- 
 ulate and develop the social interests of the 
 students. 
 
 Secondly, the college trains its students in so- 
 cial interests through the life they lead with each 
 other. One cannot live three or four years with 
 several hundred other youth in the pursuit of 
 congenial studies, in class and fraternity affilia- 
 tions, in athletic and literary contests which call 
 out loyalty to comrades and strenuous opposi- 
 tion to temporary foes, without learning that an- 
 other person's will is as real as one's own, and 
 that the likes and dislikes, the whims and preju- 
 dices, the sentiments and aspirations of other 
 persons are facts as real and as necessary to 
 reckon with as brick and stone. 
 
 By these two methods of prolonged and vital 
 appreciation of literature, philosophy, history, and 
 
 29 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 science on the one hand, and intimate, intense 
 contact with persons as persons on the other, 
 the college makes genial, generous, tactful, influ- 
 ential, effective persons out of the young men 
 and women who come to it. 
 
 In fact, in these days, our one fear is that we 
 may do this work too well. The danger is that 
 we make our graduates so genial and generous,, 
 so companionable and comfortable, that they may 
 lose some of that sturdy independence and self- 
 centred individuality which the right sort of 
 high school develops, and which is essential to 
 the highest forcefulness and the largest achieve- 
 ment. As soon as boys catch the real college 
 spirit, the power of merely individualistic mo- 
 tives over them becomes greatly diminished. One 
 reason why athletics, fraternities, college papers, 
 and college functions appeal so strongly to them 
 is that in all these things they seem to be serving 
 the larger social rather than the narrower pri- 
 vate self. It is highly desirable, yes, imperative, 
 to get intellectual achievement and intellectual 
 honors back into the focus of the student's atten- 
 tion, and present them as attractive objects to 
 
 30 
 
SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 his will ; but if we ever succeed in doing this, it 
 will not be by reviving the old and out-grown ap- 
 peal to his mere individual and selfish ambition : 
 we shall have to appeal to him as a member of 
 his family, his class, his fraternity, his college, his 
 community, his profession, his country; and show 
 him that intellectual achievement has a social 
 value, renders a public service, and reflects honor 
 on something more than his mere individual self. 
 To find and work these new motives will doubt- 
 less require no little enterprise and ingenuity; 
 but it is some gain to see clearly and precisely 
 where the difficulty lies, and it is some comfort 
 to know that even the present tendencies in col- 
 lege which we most deplore have a secret root of 
 goodness underneath them, and are merely mis- 
 applications of the very principle which it is the 
 distinctive province of the college to develop and 
 utilize. 
 
 Here, as in lower stages, discipline will be 
 present in the background, automatic, impartial, 
 inexorable, to exclude the incorrigible few who 
 are incapable of appreciating and improving 
 that perfect freedom both in study and in life 
 
 31 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 which is the only atmosphere a college which is 
 to develop the social will can breathe : but the 
 appeal of the college, both in study and in life, 
 will be through freedom, not constraint ; it will 
 be the presentation of rich, varied opportunity, 
 and an appeal to the student to make the most 
 of it. 
 
 While this development of the social will is 
 the peculiar province of the college, and nothing 
 short of the college, as a rule, can develop it into 
 that intense second nature which is indispensable 
 for the highest business, political, and social 
 leadership, anticipations of it are possible and 
 desirable in the high school and the grammar 
 school. Indeed, as far down as the kindergarten, 
 all exercises that involve cooperation and all train- 
 ing in regard for the rights of others and the con- 
 ditions of common welfare so far forth are means 
 of training in the social will. The prefect system 
 and the school city, all cooperative undertakings, 
 all delegated duties, all associations for musical, 
 athletic, and kindred purposes in the schools are 
 developments of the college spirit ; every insight 
 into human character and motive imparted in a 
 
 32 
 
SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 lesson in reading or history, is a training in the 
 social will. Some high schools, like the Univer- 
 sity High School of Chicago, find it possible to 
 maintain almost as complex and highly developed 
 a set of social activities as a college. In the 
 schools, however, these activities require con- 
 stant direction and supervision : they need to be 
 kept very strictly to the special end of athletics, de- 
 bating, or music, which is their avowed purpose. 
 The secret fraternity in the high school is an 
 abomination not to be tolerated. Young persons 
 are not sufficiently developed to organize a 
 wholesome social life of their own and maintain 
 it for its own sake. As sure as they attempt it, 
 the worst impulses and instincts in them will 
 gain the upper hand, and make the fraternity the 
 source and centre of demoralization. It is difficult 
 enough to hold these fraternities to their legiti- 
 mate ends in a college ; in a school it is as a rule 
 impossible. 
 
 Just as the study and life in the school may 
 anticipate many of the valuable features of college 
 study and life, so the attitude of the teacher in 
 the grammar and high school may embody much 
 
 33 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 that is most valuable in the attitude of the college 
 officer toward his students. The college officer 
 should always include the point of view of the 
 student in his treatment of him. This is essen- 
 tial to the teacher's successful discipline in any 
 grade. As long as the student feels that you 
 understand him, appreciate his good qualities as 
 well as his bad qualities, make due allowance for 
 his weakness and temptation, and give due weight 
 to his peculiar point of view, you can say any- 
 thing to him, however harsh ; you can do anything 
 to him, however severe ; and he will not resent 
 it. The men you treat most severely will be your 
 best friends ; for they know their failings as well 
 as you do, and are willing to acknowledge them. 
 If, along with their failings, you know and recog- 
 nize their better side, they will appreciate you as 
 their friend even when the attitude you are com- 
 pelled to take toward their conduct is uncom- 
 promisingly hostile. On the other hand, if you 
 have not acquired this power to see and appre- 
 ciate others as they really are, and to include 
 their point of view in your own, you will find it 
 impossible to live with them in peace on any 
 
 34 
 
SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 terms. If you are kind to them, they will despise 
 you as weak, and try to take advantage of you ; 
 if you are unkind to them, they will resent it as 
 an intrusion and set you down as a brute. Not to 
 be understood by the person who undertakes to 
 deal with him in any way is, to the student's 
 mind, the only unpardonable sin. However bad 
 he may be, however wrong his acts may have 
 been, as long as there are good sides to his 
 nature which you do not discover and appreciate, 
 he will regard you in his inmost heart as an alien 
 and an enemy ; as a smaller, lower person than 
 himself; as his moral and spiritual inferior. In 
 this harsh judgment that he will pass upon you, 
 the worst of it is that he is absolutely right. To 
 deal with persons as though they were things ; 
 to deal with the acts of a person as though those 
 acts were the whole personality ; not to under- 
 stand a person with whom you presume to deal, 
 — this is indeed the teacher's unpardonable sin. 
 Whoever lacks that social insight and tact ought 
 either to set about acquiring it in earnest, or re- 
 sign at once. That person has no more business 
 to be teaching young persons than an infant has 
 
 35 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 to be playing with loaded guns or dynamite 
 bombs. 
 
 Now I do not mean to say that college is the 
 only way in which this power to include others in 
 one's self may be acquired. I simply say that it 
 is one way, and, as the best colleges are at present 
 conducted, an almost universally successful way. 
 The best substitutes for college are simply the 
 two things for which the college primarily stands. 
 If you can read and enjoy, either by yourself, or, 
 better still, with one or two congenial friends, 
 the great dramas, poems, novels, biographies, and 
 histories, you may acquire this distinctive college 
 quality in this way ; or, if you have the good for- 
 tune to be born in a large family, if you live in 
 close and intimate association with a group of 
 comrades, you may acquire it in that way. In 
 some way or other, you must acquire this quality 
 if you are to be a successful teacher. I suspect 
 that when superintendents and committees insist 
 on college men and women in certain school po- 
 sitions, they have in mind this insight and tact 
 gained by personal intimacy with others, either 
 in literature or life, quite as much as the specific 
 
 36 
 
PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 
 
 and scholastic accomplishments for which a col- 
 lege diploma stands. One cannot teach at all 
 who does not know his subject ; one cannot teach 
 well who does not know his students ; and one 
 cannot know his students who has not previously 
 known intimately and appreciatively scores of 
 other persons, either in literature or life, or pre- 
 ferably in both. 
 
 The college, then, stands for the will that in- 
 cludes other wills in its own, and deals with per- 
 sons as persons, not as things. It represents in 
 a broad way that justice based on the recogni- 
 tion of mutual rights in the society of equals 
 which was Rome's great contribution to the 
 world. It contributes something which it is not 
 well for any teacher to be without ; for good teach- 
 ing is the bringing together of two terms, the sub- 
 ject and the student ; and the teacher who lacks 
 this college quality, however much he may know 
 about his subject, can never know his students. 
 
 The University : Professional Interests 
 
 Now that we have provided the student with 
 the power to pursue a single interest ; to choose 
 
 37 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 the larger interest ; to express himself in his in- 
 terests ; and to recognize and treat other persons 
 as persons, and include in his own will the wills 
 of the persons with whom he lives, only one fur- 
 ther step remains : that is, to see and obey the 
 universal system of interests which is expressed 
 in the laws of nature, and coming to expression 
 in the history and institutions, the thoughts and 
 ideals of men. To teach men that there are facts 
 independent of our caprice or choice, and that 
 these facts have laws which it is our glory to dis- 
 cover and obey — this field of pure science is 
 the distinctive province of the university. Not 
 what I like, not what other people like, but what 
 is, forms the subject of university study. The 
 difference between the university attitude and 
 those which have preceded it is happily illustrated 
 by a conversation between President Oilman 
 and Professor Sylvester, the great mathematician. 
 They went to the opera one evening, but Profes- 
 sor Sylvester took apparently no interest in what 
 was going on. As they were coming out. Presi- 
 dent Oilman asked him how he enjoyed the 
 opera. Professor Sylvester said, **I became in- 
 
 38 
 
PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 
 
 terested in a mathematical problem and forgot 
 all about the opera." Then he went on to de- 
 scribe a remarkable discovery he had made. 
 When he had finished, President Gilman said to 
 him, "Do you not wonder at the powers of your 
 own mind?" "No," replied Professor Sylvester, 
 "but I wonder that these things are so." The 
 emphasis here, you see, is not, as in the high 
 school and college stages, on the individual and 
 the development of his powers, but on facts ex- 
 pressed in law. Now the function of the uni- 
 versity is to make its students bow before the 
 authority of fact, and through obedience to the 
 laws of fact, become masters of those depart- 
 ments of knowledge and those practical vocations 
 in which these facts and their laws apply. Once 
 some department or vocation is selected, that 
 subject becomes supreme. The teacher now 
 withdraws still farther into the background, and 
 leaves the student with his subject to work out 
 his own salvation. If he succeeds, that is his own 
 affair ; if he fails, the responsibility rests with 
 him alone. Sometimes this highest appeal works 
 miracles where lower appeals have proved in 
 
 39 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 vain. Boys who have been listless in the lower 
 schools, lazy in the high school, indifferent or 
 worse in college, sometimes wake up into eager 
 and earnest intellectual life, when brought face 
 to face with the compelling power of some great 
 department of truth, and the serious responsi- 
 bility of some great profession. 
 
 One acquires this professional spirit, whether a 
 university student or not, whenever he passes be- 
 yond the mere repeating of what books or other 
 teachers say, and comes into first-hand contact 
 with a subject, — reading it up ; thinking it out ; 
 discovering new facts about it, and making it so 
 completely his own, or rather surrendering him- 
 self so completely to it, that it speaks through 
 him and therefore gives to what he says the note 
 of authority. No man is a scholar as long as his 
 ideas have been merely heard from another, and 
 have not in this vital way been made his own. The 
 test which the university imposes is a thesis which 
 contains an original contribution to the sum of 
 human knowledge. 
 
 While the research of graduate students, es- 
 pecially in the department of literature, has often 
 
 40 
 
PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 
 
 been woefully misdirected, nevertheless, the test 
 of original contribution is right and essential. No 
 man is a scholar until he has dug the ore of truth 
 with his own hand, out of the exhaustless mine of 
 fact, and put the stamp of his individuality upon 
 it. The bit of truth mined may be small ; but the 
 processes of mining and minting are essential to 
 the rank and title of the scholar: and the only 
 possible proof that the man has done the min- 
 ing is the product he brings back. 
 
 What the graduate school of a university ought 
 to produce, but what no American university 
 to-day is producing, or even intelligently aiming 
 to produce, is the Doctor of Philosophy. To be 
 sure every year scores of men and women with the 
 letters Ph. D. after their names are turned loose 
 on much-to-be-pitied classes of undergraduates. 
 But in reality they are not Doctors of Philosophy 
 — men and women with vital individual apprecia- 
 tion, fresh personal interpretation, enthusiastic 
 power of communication of those portions of the 
 world's great accumulated treasures which have 
 proved a joy and inspiration to themselves. 
 
 On the contrary, in spite of the misleading 
 
 41 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 letters after their names, they are for the most 
 part mere doctors of science — specialists in some 
 narrow field of remote and minute research ; not 
 only impotent to transmit to others, but incapa- 
 ble of grasping for themselves the broad, human 
 significanbe of the departments of literature, 
 history, or science which they "profess " to re- 
 present. 
 
 Enough research to acquire its methods and 
 appreciate its standards is doubtless an essential 
 part of a university training. But from the point 
 of view of the proper preparation of teachers for 
 school and college, it is at present enormously 
 overdone. For the purposes of the teacher a few 
 ounces of appreciation and interpretation of the 
 large features of our common intellectual heri- 
 tage, are worth many pounds of newly discovered 
 but unimportant information. 
 
 The teacher's profession is the taking of some 
 portion of our intellectual inheritance, and passing 
 it on to the coming generation. To do that well, 
 he must know how his subject arose and developed 
 into its present form, with the same thoroughness 
 that the physician knows his anatomy, the lawyer 
 
 42 
 
FIVE TESTS OF THE TEACHER 
 
 his precedents, and the engineer his strength of 
 materials. In whatever grade a teacher serves, this 
 sense of having some grasp of the subject, or 
 some art of its presentation, which he has worked 
 out for himself — some touch of the university 
 attitude, in other words — is essential if his work 
 is to rise to the dignity of a profession, and he is 
 to have in it the professional spirit. 
 
 Five Tests of the Teacher 
 
 Such are the five stages of education, and the 
 five corresponding types of interest. As I said at 
 the outset, the correspondence is not complete ; 
 the stages overlap ; every school has some students 
 who failed to learn the lessons of the stages below ; 
 and others who are ready to learn the lessons 
 of the stages above. 
 
 On the whole, however, these five types of in- 
 terest develop successively in the educational 
 system. The teacher should use them all. The 
 tests of a good teacher are five. 
 
 First V Is my interest in my work so contagious 
 that my pupils catch from me an eager interest in 
 what we are doing together t Then I have the 
 
 43 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 primary teacher's quality, essential to success 
 there and everywhere. 
 
 Second : Is my work thorough and resourceful, 
 rather than superficial and conventional, so that 
 the brightness of my industry and the warmth 
 of my encouragement kindles in my pupils a re- 
 sponsive zeal to do their best, cost what it may ? 
 Then I have the grammar school teacher's essen- 
 tial quality, without which no one can teach any- 
 where aright. 
 
 Third : Do I get at the individuality of my 
 students, so that each one is different to me from 
 every other, and I am something no other person 
 is to each of them ? Then I have the high school 
 teacher's special gift ; and shall be a power for 
 good all through my students' lives. 
 
 Fourth : Do I treat them, and train them to 
 treat each other, never as mere things, or means 
 to ends ; but always as persons, with rights, aims, 
 interests, aspirations, which I heartily respect 
 and sympathetically share ? Then I have the col- 
 lege quality ; and am sure to be popular and suc- 
 cessful everywhere. 
 
 Fifth : Am I so reverent toward fact, so obedi- 
 
 44 
 
FIVE TESTS OF THE TEACHER 
 
 ent to law, that through me fact and law speak 
 and act with an authority which my students in- 
 stinctively recognize and implicitly obey ? Then 
 the mantle of the university, and a double por- 
 tion of the professional spirit has fallen upon me ; 
 and wherever I teach, the problem of discipline 
 for the most part will solve itself through the 
 mutual recognition by both students and teacher 
 of a Power greater than either and higher than 
 all. 
 
PART II 
 
 THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 OUT OF SCHOOL 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 OUT OF SCHOOL 
 
 The Personality of the Teacher 
 
 Some people can teach school and other people 
 can't. Some teachers have good order, as a mat- 
 ter of course, as soon as they set foot in a school 
 class-room. Other teachers can never get any- 
 thing more than the outward semblance of deco- 
 rum, try as hard as they will ; and often cannot 
 get even that. Some teachers the scholars all 
 love. Other teachers they all hate. 
 
 Some teachers a superintendent or president 
 will jump at the chance to secure after a five 
 minutes' interview. Others, equally scholarly, 
 equally experienced, equally well equipped with 
 formal recommendations, go wandering from 
 agency to agency, from one vacant place to an- 
 other, only to find that some other applicant has 
 secured or is about to secure the coveted posi- 
 tion. 
 
 For twenty-five years I have had to employ 
 
 49 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 teachers every year, and to recommend teachers 
 to others. I have seen many succeed, and some 
 fail. But I have never seen a success that could 
 be accounted for by scholarship and training 
 alone. I have never seen a failure that I could 
 not account for on other grounds. What is it, 
 then, that makes one teacher popular, success- 
 ful, wanted in a dozen different places ; and an- 
 other, equally well trained, equally experienced, a 
 dismal failure where he is, and wanted nowhere 
 else ? 
 
 The one word that covers all these qualities is 
 personality ; that is the thing all wise employers 
 of teachers seek to secure above all else. In col- 
 leges for men in New England it is absolutely 
 imperative. In elementary and secondary schools, 
 in colleges in other sections of the country, a 
 teacher with serious defects of personality may 
 be carried along by the momentum of the sys- 
 tem, and the tact of superintendents and presi- 
 dents. But in a men's college in New England a 
 professor with seriously defective personality is 
 simply impossible. The boys will either make 
 him over into a decent man by the severest kind 
 
 50 
 
THE PERSONALITY OF THE TEACHER 
 
 of discipline, or else they will turn him out. I 
 have seen them do both more than once. A man 
 who is egotistical, insincere, diplomatic, mean, 
 selfish, untruthful, cowardly, unfair, weak, is a 
 person whom New England men students will 
 not tolerate as a teacher. No amount of know- 
 ledge and reputation, no amount of backing from 
 the administration, can save him. On the whole, 
 I am glad that this is so. It makes the responsi- 
 bility of selecting professors tremendous. But, 
 on the whole, it secures in the end a better type 
 of man for college professors than we should be 
 likely to get if the office could be held on any 
 easier terms. 
 
 Now, personality is very largely a matter of 
 heredity. Some people are born large-natured ; 
 other people are born small-souled. The former 
 are born to succeed ; the latter are born to fail 
 in any work in which personality counts for so 
 much as it does in teaching. People with these 
 mean natures and small souls never ought to try 
 to teach. They ought to get into some strictly 
 mechanical work where skilled hands count for 
 everything and warm hearts count for nothing. 
 
 51 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Still, personality, though largely dependent 
 on heredity, is in great measure capable of culti- 
 vation. If it were not, it would be useless for 
 me to talk about it here. Some teachers would 
 be foreordained to succeed, others foreordained 
 to fail ; and nothing but the process of natural 
 selection after actual experience could separate 
 those who are personally fit to teach from those 
 who are not, and never can be. Our personality 
 is largely an affair of our own making. Those 
 who have weak points may, by thoughtfulness 
 and resolution, strengthen them ; and those who 
 are naturally strong, by effort may grow stronger 
 still. How this may be done is what I am to 
 try to tell. Fortunately, it is not a new story, 
 but a very old one, at which the world has been 
 working a long while. To our problem of per- 
 sonality the world has found five answers : the 
 Epicurean, the Stoic, the Platonic, the Aristo- 
 telian, and the Christian. I shall present these 
 five answers in order. Some of you will doubt- 
 less find that you can apply one of these princi- 
 ples ; others will find another principle the one 
 of which they stand in need. I shall not under- 
 
 52 
 
THE PERSONALITY OF THE TEACHER 
 
 take to make all that I say consistent. I shall 
 be simply the mouthpiece of those five types of 
 personality ; and leave the reader to select what 
 he needs, and reject the rest as unprofitable. 
 These five answers in brief are as follows : — 
 
 The Epicurean says : " Take into your life 
 as many simple, natural pleasures as possible." 
 The Stoic says : " Keep out of your mind all 
 causes of anxiety and grief." The Platonist 
 says: ''Lift up your soul above the dust and 
 drudgery of daily life, into the pure atmosphere 
 of the perfect and the good." The Aristotelian 
 says : " Organize your life by clear conception 
 of the end for which you are living, seek dili- 
 gently all means that further this end, and 
 rigidly exclude all that would hinder it or dis- 
 tract you from it." The Christian says: ''En- 
 large your spirit to include the interests and aims 
 of all the persons whom your life in any way 
 aflFects." 
 
 Any man or woman of average hereditary 
 gifts, and ordinary scholarship and training, who 
 puts these five principles in practice, will be a 
 popular, effective, happy, and successful teacher. 
 
 53 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 Any teacher, however well equipped otherwise, 
 who neglects any one of these principles will, to 
 that extent, be thereby weakened, crippled, and 
 disqualified for the work of teaching. Any per- 
 son who should be found defective in the ma- 
 jority of these five requirements would be unfit 
 to teach at all. Let us, then, take them in order, 
 and test ourselves by them. First, the Epicurean. 
 
 The Epicurean: Happiness 
 
 The Epicurean gospel is summed up best in 
 
 Stevenson's lines, " The Celestial Surgeon " : — 
 
 If I have faltered more or less 
 In my great task of happiness ; 
 If I have moved among my race 
 And shown no glorious morning face, 
 If beams from happy human eyes 
 Have moved me not ; if morning skies, 
 Books, and my food, and summer rain 
 Knocked on my sullen heart in vain — 
 Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take 
 And stab my spirit broad awake : 
 Or, Lord, if too obdurate I, 
 Choose thou, before that spirit die, 
 A piercing pain, a killing sin, 
 And to my dead heart run them in. 
 
 54 
 
THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 
 
 The one thing in which the teacher on no ac- 
 count must fail is this which Stevenson calls 
 our "great task of happiness." The world is a 
 vast reservoir of potential pleasure. It is our first 
 business here, so says the Epicurean, for whom I 
 am speaking now, to get at all costs, save that of 
 overbalancing pain, as many of these pleasures as 
 we can. Doubtless you will say, this is a very 
 low ideal of life. Well, I admit that there are 
 higher ideals, for the sake of which this ideal, to 
 a considerable extent, must be sacrificed. I admit 
 that the mother with a sick child, the scholar 
 with a difficult problem, the statesman in a 
 political campaign, — all of us, in fact, — ought 
 to have higher ideals, and sacrifice thi« ideal of 
 pleasure to them. But you cannot sacrifice it 
 unless in the first place you have it, and care 
 very much for it. 
 
 If we grant that it is a low ideal, it is all the 
 more shameful if we fall below it. And a great 
 many teachers fall below it, and enormously di- 
 minish their usefulness in consequence. What, 
 then, is the Epicurean ideal for the teacher.? 
 Plenty of good wholesome food, eaten leisurely 
 
 55 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 in good company and pleasant surroundings. No 
 hurried breakfasts of coffee and doughnuts ; no 
 snatched lunches or dinners. A comfortable 
 room where you can be quiet by yourself and not 
 have to talk when you do not want to. Now, in 
 the old days of boarding the teacher around, 
 these things, perhaps, were not possible. But, in 
 the long run, these fundamentals of a pleasant 
 room and a good boarding-place are half the 
 battle ; and before accepting a position a teacher 
 should make sure that these fundamental requi- 
 sites can be had. Don't save money by deny- 
 ing yourselves these necessities when they can 
 be had ; and don't stay long in any place where 
 they cannot be had. No one can permanently be 
 a good teacher without a background of restful 
 quiet, and a basis of wholesome food. Next comes 
 exercise in the open air. How many hours of 
 every day do you spend outdoors, free from care, 
 enjoying the sunlight, the fresh air, the fields, the 
 flowers, the birds, the hills, the streams } To be 
 sure, there are vocations which do not permit 
 this. But the teacher, shut up in close air under 
 high nervous tension for five or six hours, can 
 
 56 
 
THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 
 
 and must offset all this abnormality by at least 
 an hour or two of every school day, and more on 
 Saturday and Sunday, under the open sky, as 
 care-free and light-hearted as the birds that sing 
 in the tree-tops. Are you living up to your Epi- 
 curean duties in this respect ? 
 
 Of course you have games you are fond of play- 
 ing. A teacher who works at such exhausting 
 and narrowing work as instructing thirty or forty 
 restless children, and does not counteract it by 
 plenty of play, is not only committing slow sui- 
 cide, but he is stunting and dwarfing his nature 
 so that every year will find him personally less 
 fit to teach than he was the year before. With 
 walking, riding the bicycle, driving, golf, tennis, 
 croquet, skating, cards, checkers, billiards, rowing, 
 sailing, hunting, fishing, and the endless variety 
 of games and sports available, a teacher who 
 does not do a lot of them in vacations, and a 
 good deal of them on half-holidays, and some of 
 them almost every day, is falling far below the 
 Epicurean standard of what a teacher ought to do 
 and be. Play and people to play with are as 
 necessary for a teacher as prayer for a preacher, 
 
 57 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 or votes for a politician, a piano for a musician, 
 or a hammer for a carpenter. You simply cannot 
 go on healthily, happily, hopefully, without it. If 
 I should learn of any candidate for a position as 
 professor in Bowdoin College that he did and 
 enjoyed none of these things, though he should 
 be backed by the highest recommendations the 
 leading universities of America and Europe could 
 bestow, I would not so much as read the letters 
 that he brought. For, however great he might be 
 as a scholar, I should know in advance that he 
 would be a failure in the teaching of American 
 youth. There are probably just enough exceptions 
 to this rule to prove its truth. But even those ex- 
 ceptions, so far as I can think of them, are due to 
 invalidism, for which the individuals at present 
 are not responsible. Are you playing as much 
 as Epicurus would tell you that you ought to 
 play ? 
 
 Do you sleep soundly, as long as nature re- 
 quires, never letting the regrets of the day past 
 nor the anxieties of the day to come encroach 
 upon these precious hours, any more than you 
 would that greatest of abominations — the alarm 
 
 58 
 
THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 
 
 clock ? Do you lie down every night in absolute 
 restfulness, and thankfulness, and tranquillity ? 
 Do you live in care-proof, worry-tight compart- 
 ments, so that the little annoyances of one sec- 
 tion of your life are never allowed to spill over 
 and spoil the other sections of your life ? In 
 short, to quote one who is our most genial mod- 
 ern apostle of Epicureanism, do you recognize 
 and arrange your life according to the principle 
 
 that — 
 
 The world is so full of a number of things 
 I 'm sure we should all be as happy as kings ? 
 
 Have you friends with whom you spend de- 
 lightful hours in unrestrained companionship? 
 Have you books which you read for the pure fun 
 of it ? Do you go to concerts and entertainments 
 and plays as often as you can afford the time and 
 money? Take it altogether, are you having a 
 good time, or, if not, are you resorting to every 
 available means of getting one ? Then, not other- 
 wise, will you pass this first examination as to 
 your personal fitness to be a teacher. None of us 
 are perfect on this point. None of us are having 
 nearly so good a time as we might. But we ought 
 
 59 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 to fall somewhere above seventy or eighty on a 
 scale of a hundred on this fundamental question. 
 Let us hereafter mark ourselves as rigidly on this 
 subject as we do our scholars in arithmetic and 
 geography. They are marking us all the time on 
 this very point ; only they do not call it Epicu- 
 reanism, or record the result in figures. They 
 register it in slangy terms of their own likes 
 and dislikes. 
 
 The Stoic: Fortitude 
 
 Second. Be a Stoic, which means keep your 
 mind free from all worry, anxiety, and grief. You 
 say, "That is impossible. The world is full of 
 evils and we can't help worrying about them and 
 being depressed by them." "Yes, you can," the 
 Stoic tells us ; for things out there in the exter- 
 nal world never trouble us. It is only when they 
 get into our minds that they hurt ; and whether 
 they shall be let into our minds depends entirely 
 on ourselves. You make a mistake on Monday 
 morning. That is an external fact to be acknow- 
 ledged and corrected as promptly as possible. If 
 it makes you nervous all Monday afternoon, and 
 
 60 
 
THE STOIC: FORTITUDE 
 
 takes away your appetite Monday evening, and 
 keeps you awake Monday night, and starts you 
 out on Tuesday morning* enfeebled, distrustful, 
 and consequently ten times as likely to make 
 mistakes as you were the day before, that is en- 
 tirely your own affair and, if it happens, your own 
 fault. You have allowed that external fact that 
 ought to have been left in the outside world, 
 where it belongs, to come in and take possession 
 of your mind and drive out your normal mental, 
 emotional, and physiological processes. 
 
 Stoicism is fundamentally the doctrine of ap- 
 perception applied to our emotional states. Stoi- 
 cism says that our mental states are what we are, 
 that no external thing can determine our mental 
 state until we have woven it into the structure 
 of our thought and painted it with the color of 
 our dominant mood and temper. Thus, every 
 mental state is for the most part of our own mak- 
 ing. Of course this Stoic doctrine is somewhat 
 akin to the doctrine of Christian Science. Yet 
 there is a decided difference. Christian Science 
 and kindred popular cults deny the external 
 physical fact altogether. Stoicism admits the 
 
 6i 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 reality and then makes the best of it. For in- 
 stance, the Christian Scientist with the tooth- 
 ache says there is no matter there to ache. The 
 Stoic, both truer to the facts and braver in spirit, 
 says there is matter, but it doesn't matter if 
 there is. Stoicism teaches us that the mental 
 states are the man ; that external things never, 
 in themselves, constitute a mental state; that the 
 all-important contribution is made by the mind 
 itself; that this contribution from the mind is 
 what gives the tone and determines the worth of 
 the total mental state, and that this contribution 
 is exclusively our own affair and may be brought 
 entirely under our own control. As Epictetus 
 says, "Everything has two handles, — one by 
 which it may be borne, another by which it can- 
 not. If your brother acts unjustly do not lay hold 
 of the affair by the handle of his injustice, for by 
 that it cannot be borne; but rather by the op- 
 posite, — that he is your brother; that he was 
 brought up with you ; and thus you will lay hold 
 on it as it is to be borne." Again, he says men 
 are disappointed " not by things, but by the view 
 which they take of things. When, therefore, we 
 
 62 
 
THE STOIC: FORTITUDE 
 
 are hindered, or disappointed, or grieved, let us 
 never impute it to others, but to ourselves, that 
 is, to our views." All this, you see, is the funda- 
 mental principle that the only things that enter 
 into us and affect our states of thought, and will, 
 and feeling are things as we think about them, 
 forces as we react upon them ; and these thoughts, 
 feelings, and reactions are our own affairs, and, 
 consequently, if they are not serene, tranquil, and 
 happy, the fault is in ourselves. 
 
 Now, we can all reduce enormously our trou- 
 bles and vexations by bringing to bear upon them 
 this Stoic formula. There is a way of looking at 
 our poverty, our plainness of feature, our lack of 
 mental brilliance, our unpopularity, our mistakes, 
 our physical ailments, that will make us modest, 
 contented, cheerful, and serene. The blunders 
 we make, the foolish things we do, the hasty 
 words we say, though they, in a sense, have gone 
 out from us, yet once committed in the external 
 world they should be left there ; they should not 
 be brought back into the mind to be brooded 
 over and become centres of depression and dis- 
 couragement. Stoicism teaches us to shift the 
 
 63 
 
,THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 emphasis from dead external facts beyond our 
 control to the live option which always presents 
 itself within. It tells us that the circumstance 
 or failure that can make us miserable does not 
 exist unless it exists by our consent within our 
 own minds. To consider not what happens to us 
 but how we take it ; to measure good in terms 
 not of sensuous pleasure but of mental attitude ; 
 to know that if we are for the universal law of 
 right, it matters not how many things may be 
 against us ; to rest assured that there can be no 
 circumstance or condition in which this great law 
 cannot be done by us and, therefore, no situation 
 of which we cannot be more than masters through 
 obedience to the great law that governs all, — 
 this is the stern and lofty law of Stoicism. 
 
 Carried too far. Stoicism becomes hard, cold, 
 proud, and, like its popular cults of to-day, 
 grotesque. But there is a healing virtue in its 
 stern formula after all ; and when things do not 
 go as we should like, when people maltreat us 
 and find fault with us, when we meet our own 
 limitations and shortcomings, it is good for us to 
 know that these external facts have no more 
 
 64 
 
THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 
 
 power to worry us and depress us and unfit us 
 for our work than we choose to let them have. 
 
 A teacher's hfe is probably more full of con- 
 scious failure, personal collision, severe criti- 
 cism, and general discouragement than almost 
 any profession. The ends at which the teacher 
 aims are vast and indefinite, the material is per- 
 verse and recalcitrant, the resources available 
 are often meagre, and the outcome is always far 
 below what one would wish. But the Stoic for- 
 mula, faithfully applied, will help us frankly to 
 recognize these facts and at the same time to 
 overcome them. We shall save ourselves many 
 a troubled day and sleepless night if we learn to 
 bring this Stoic formula to bear whenever these 
 evils incidental to our arduous profession press 
 too heavily upon us. 
 
 The Platonic : Serenity 
 
 The third of the world's great devices for the 
 development of personality is Platonism. The 
 Epicurean tells us to take in all the pleasure we 
 can get. The Stoic shows us how to keep out grief 
 and pain. But it is a constant strife and struggle 
 
 6s 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 in either case. The Platonist bids us rise above 
 it all. " The world," says the Platonist, "is very 
 imperfect, almost as bad as the Stoic makes it 
 out." We must live in this imperfect world after 
 a fashion and make the best of it while it lasts. 
 This, however, he tells us, is not the real world. 
 Individual people and particular things are but 
 imperfect, faulty, distorted copies of the true 
 pattern of the good which is laid up in heaven. 
 We must buy and sell, work and play, eat and 
 drink, laugh and cry, love and hate down here 
 among the earthly shades ; but our real conversa- 
 tion all the time may be in heaven with the per- 
 fectly good and true and beautiful. This doctrine, 
 you see, is very closely akin to much of the popu- 
 lar philosophy which is gaining so many adher- 
 ents in our day. A little of it is a good thing, but 
 to feed on it exclusively or regard it as the final 
 gospel is very dangerous. These Platonists go 
 through the world with a serene smile and an 
 air of other-worldliness we cannot but admire; 
 they are seen to most advantage, however, from 
 a Uttle distance. They are not the most agreeable 
 to live with ; it is a great misfortune to be tied to 
 
 66 
 
THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 
 
 one of them as husband or wife, college or busi- 
 ness partner. Louisa Alcott had this type in mind 
 when she defined a philosopher as a man up in a 
 balloon with his family and friends having hold 
 of the rope trying to pull him down to earth. 
 Pretty much all of the philosophy of Christian 
 Science, and a great deal that passes for Chris- 
 tian religion, is simply Platonism masquerading 
 in disguise. All such hymns as " Sweet By-and- 
 By," '*0 Paradise, O Paradise," and the like 
 are simply Platonic. Thomas a Kempis gives 
 us Platonism in the form of mediaeval Christian 
 mysticism. Emerson has a large element of Pla- 
 tonism in all his deeper passages. In all its forms 
 you get the same dualism of finite and infin- 
 ite, perfect and imperfect ; unworthy, crumbling 
 earth-mask to be gotten rid of here on earth, and 
 the stars to be sought out and gazed at up in 
 heaven. 
 
 It is easy to ridicule and caricature this type 
 of personality. Yet the world would be much the 
 poorer if the Platonists and the mystics were 
 withdrawn. The man or woman who at some 
 time or other does not feel the spell or charm of 
 
 67 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 this mood will miss one of the nobler experiences 
 of life. 
 
 In spite of this warning against Platonism 
 accepted as a finished gospel, it contains truth 
 which every teacher ought to know and on occa- 
 sion to apply. When one is walking through the 
 forest and knows not which way to go, it is a 
 gain sometimes to climb a tree and take a look 
 over the tops of the surrounding trees. The 
 climbing does not directly help you on your 
 journey, and, of course, if you stay in the tree- 
 top you will never reach your destination ; but it 
 does give you your bearings and insures that the 
 next stage of your journey will be in the right 
 direction. Now the teacher lives in a wilderness 
 of dreary and monotonous details which shut out 
 the larger horizon as completely as the trees of 
 the forest. Every teacher ought, now and then, 
 to climb the tall tree, or to leave the figure, to go 
 away by himself and look at his life as a whole. 
 A traveler in a Southern forest found an aged 
 Hegro sitting with his banjo under a tree ten 
 miles from the nearest settlement. In his sur- 
 prise, he asked the Kfegro what he was doing off 
 
 68 
 
THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 
 
 there so far in the wilderness alone, and he re- 
 plied, "I'm just serenading my own soul." Pla- 
 tonism teaches us to get out of the bustle and 
 tangle of life once in a while and serenade our 
 own souls. We need, at times, to look at our- 
 selves in the large, to make clear to ourselves the 
 great purpose for which we are living, and the 
 ideal of character toward which we aspire. We 
 need to commune with the better self that we 
 hope to be and take our bearings anew for the 
 immediate journey before us. Most people get 
 this Platonic refuge in religion ; some get it in 
 music, some in art, some in intimate personal 
 friendships. In some way or other every teacher 
 should have some sphere of life apart from the 
 daily routine in which he can dwell undisturbed 
 and find everything serene, perfect, and complete. 
 When one comes down, as come down one must, 
 from these mounts of transfiguration, or, to use 
 Plato's figure, " when one returns from the sun- 
 light back into the cave," when one takes up again 
 the duty and drudgery of life, though at first it 
 will seem more impossible and irksome than ever, 
 yet in the long run he will find a cheerfulness and 
 
 69 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 serenity in the doing of these hard, homely duties 
 which he never could have gained unless for these 
 brief periods he had gone up into the summits 
 where he sees the world as a whole bathed in 
 unclouded sunshine. A teacher will hardly be 
 able to keep his poise, his temper, and his cheer- 
 ful outlook upon life without the aid in some form 
 or other of these Platonic resources. Yet I must 
 conclude this word about Plato, as I began, with a 
 warning. It must be taken in moderate doses, 
 and every added outlook and emotion derived 
 from Platonic sources must be followed imme- 
 diately by prompt and vigorous attention to the 
 duties that await us at the foot of the mount. 
 The mere Platonist who is that and nothing 
 more, whether he call himself mystic, monastic, 
 Catholic, Evangelical, Protestant, Theosophist, 
 or Christian Scientist, must remember that, 
 though he draw his inspiration from above the 
 clouds, the real tests of life are found on the 
 solid earth beneath his feet. The Platonist of 
 all these types should take to heart the lesson 
 conveyed in Stevenson's "Our Lady of the 
 Snows. " 
 
 70 
 
THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 
 
 And ye, O brethren, what if God, 
 When from heav'n's top he spies abroad, 
 And sees on this tormented stage 
 The noble war of mankind rage, 
 What if His vivifying eye, 
 O monks, should pass your corner by ? 
 For still the Lord is Lord of might, 
 In deeds, in deeds he takes delight; 
 The plough, the spear, the laden barks, 
 The field, the founded city, marks ; 
 He marks the smiler of the streets. 
 The singer upon garden seats ; 
 He sees the climber in the rocks ; 
 To Him, the shepherd folds his flocks. 
 
 For those He loves that underprop 
 With daily virtues heaven's top, 
 And bear the falling sky with ease, 
 Unfrowning caryatides ; 
 Those He approves that ply the trade, 
 That rock the child, that wed the maid, 
 That with weak virtues, weaker hands, 
 Sow gladness on the peopled lands, 
 And still with laughter, song, and shout, 
 Spin the great wheel of the earth about. 
 But ye ? O ye who linger still 
 Here in your fortress on the hill, 
 With placid face, with tranquil breath, 
 
 71 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 The unsought volunteers of death, 
 
 Our cheerful General on high 
 
 With careless looks may pass you by. 
 
 The Aristotelian: Proportion 
 
 The fourth great lesson of personality was 
 taught the world by Aristotle. According to 
 Aristotle, man is to find his end, not in heaven 
 in the hereafter, but here and now upon the 
 earth. The end is not something to be gained by 
 indulgence of appetite with the Epicurean, by 
 superiority to passion with the Stoic, by solitary 
 elevation of soul with the Platonist ; the end is 
 to be wrought out of the very stuff of which the 
 hard world around us is made. From the Aristo- 
 telian point of view nothing is good in itself; noth- 
 ing is bad in itself. The goodness of good things 
 depends upon the good use to which we put them, 
 and the badness of bad things depends likewise 
 on the bad use to which we put them. 
 
 From this point of view personality depends 
 on the sense of proportion. This sense of pro- 
 portion is the most essential part of a teacher's 
 equipment. Every teacher has opportunity to do 
 
 72 
 
THE ARISTOTELIAN: PROPORTION 
 
 twenty times as much as he is able to do well. 
 The important thing is to know which twentieth 
 to do and which nineteen twentieths to leave 
 undone. Between mastery of subjects taught, 
 general reading, professional study, exercise, re- 
 creation, social engagements, personal work with 
 individual scholars, private affairs, correspond- 
 ence, the regular work of the classroom, the cor- 
 recting of papers, preparation of particular lessons, 
 church, clubs, there is obviously far more draft on 
 the teacher's time and strength than can be met 
 with safety. Teaching is an extra-hazardous pro- 
 fession, so far at any rate as the nervous system 
 is concerned. Into each of several of these lines 
 one might put his whole energy and still leave 
 much to be accomplished. The teacher's problem, 
 then, is one of proportion and selection, to know 
 what to slight and what to emphasize. The ele- 
 ments that enter into the problem are different 
 in each person. Consequently, no general rules 
 can be laid down. The teacher should have a 
 pretty clear idea of what he means to do and be. 
 That which is essential to this main end should 
 be accepted at all costs ; that which hinders it 
 
 n 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 should be rejected at all costs. When the choice 
 is between things which help it more and help it 
 less, those which help it more should be taken, 
 and those which help it less should be rejected. 
 The teacher should learn to say "No!" to calls 
 which are good in themselves, but are not good 
 for him. For instance, amateur theatricals are 
 good in themselves ; but no teacher who is 
 teaching five or six hours a day can afford to 
 give three or four evenings a week to lengthy 
 rehearsals. Church fairs are good in themselves, 
 but the wise teacher will leave the management 
 of such things to persons who have much more 
 leisure. Church attendance on Sunday is a good 
 thing in itself, but one service a day is as much 
 as the average teacher can attend who would do 
 his best the five working days of the week. Sun- 
 day-school teaching is an excellent thing in it- 
 self, but as a rule it is the one thing above all 
 others from which the conscientious public-school 
 teacher will most rigidly refrain. For Sunday- 
 school teaching puts the teacher on what should 
 be the chief day of rest into precisely the same 
 state of nervous tension that must be maintained 
 
 74 
 
THE ARISTOTELIAN: PROPORTION 
 
 during the greater part of the week. Sunday- 
 school teaching for a public-school teacher is very 
 much the same misuse of Sunday that taking in 
 a big Sunday washing would be for a washer- 
 woman who had washings to do on all the other 
 six days of the week. Making out absolutely ac- 
 curate rank and reading carefully all the written 
 work of a large class of pupils is a good thing in 
 itself; but wise superintendents will save their 
 teachers as much of that work as possible, and 
 teachers themselves will understand that if any- 
 thing is to be shirked this is the best place to 
 economize nervous force. Of course, if it is done 
 at all, it must be done honestly. But the differ- 
 ence between rapid glancing and quick final judg- 
 ment in such matters, and minute perusing and 
 prolonged deliberation in each case is of little ad- 
 vantage to the pupils in the long run, and is often 
 bought at excessive cost of vitality and strength 
 of the teacher. Emphasize essentials, slight non- 
 essentials. Do the thing that counts. Leave things 
 that do not count undone or get them done 
 quickly. Remember that physical health, mental 
 elasticity, and freshness and vivacity of spirits 
 
 75 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 must be maintained at all costs in the interests 
 of the school and the scholars no less than as a 
 matter of imperative self-preservation. The wise 
 teacher will say to himself, *'I must know the 
 lessons I teach." *'I must do some reading out- 
 side." "I must take an interest in my individual 
 scholars." "I must keep myself strong and happy 
 and well." "These are essential, and for the sake 
 of these things I stand ready to sacrifice all mere 
 red tape." "I stand ready to be misunderstood 
 by good people who know nothing of the strain 
 I am under." "I stand ready even to shirk and 
 to slight minor matters when it is necessary to 
 do so in order to do the main things well." In 
 the great name of Aristotle, then, resolve to ob- 
 serve and apply this fundamental sense of pro- 
 portion. Be sure that what you do is right for 
 you, under the circumstances in which you are 
 placed, with the definite obligations that are laid 
 upon you. Never mind if you do not do every- 
 thing that other people expect you to do ; if you 
 do not do things which, though good in them- 
 selves and right for other people to do, in your 
 specific situation for you would be wrong. In 
 
 76 
 
THE CHRISTIAN: DEVOTION 
 
 other words, have your own individual ends per- 
 fectly clear, and accept or reject the various calls 
 that come to you according as they further or 
 hinder these clearly grasped individual aims. 
 
 The Christian: Devotion 
 
 Now, we have four bits of advice from four 
 of the world's greatest teachers. There remains 
 the counsel of the greatest teacher of all. Christ 
 says to the teacher, "Make the interests and aims 
 of each one of your scholars your own." Whether 
 a teacher is a Christian in the profoundest sense 
 of the term depends not in the least on whether 
 he is a Catholic or a Protestant, a Conservative 
 or a Liberal. It depends on whether the teacher 
 has his own point of view, his personal interests, 
 and then regards the scholars as alien beings to 
 be dealt with as the rules of the school may re- 
 quire and as his own personal interest and repu- 
 tation may suggest ; or whether in sympathy 
 and generous interest he makes the life and 
 problems of each scholar a genuine part of the 
 problem of his own enlarged nature and generous 
 heart. The greatest difference between teachers, 
 
 ; .% 77 
 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 after all, is that in this deepest sense some teach- 
 ers are Christians and some teachers are not. 
 The teacher who is not a Christian according to 
 this definition will work for reputation and pay, 
 — will teach what is required and rule the school 
 by sheer authority and force. Between teacher 
 and scholar a great gulf will be fixed; the only 
 bridges across that gulf will be authority and 
 constraint on the part of the teacher, fear and 
 self-interest on the part of the pupils. Such a 
 teacher will set tasks and compel the scholars 
 to do them. Here such a teacher's responsibility 
 will end. 
 
 Precisely here, where the unchristian teacher's 
 work ends, is where the Christian teacher's best 
 work begins. Instead of imposing a task on the 
 scholars, the Christian teacher sets before schol- 
 ars and teacher alike a task which they together 
 must do ; the teacher is to help each scholar to 
 do it and each scholar is to help the teacher to 
 get this task done. It is a common work in which 
 they are engaged. If they succeed it is a common 
 satisfaction ; if any individual fails it is a com- 
 mon sorrow. The Christian teacher will be just 
 
 78 
 
THE CHRISTIAN: DEVOTION 
 
 as rigid in his requirements as the unchristian 
 teacher, but the attitude toward the scholars is 
 entirely different. The unchristian teacher says 
 to the scholars, " Go and do that work : I shall 
 mark you and punish you if you fail." The Chris- 
 tian teacher says, "Come, let us do this work 
 together; I am ready to help you in every way I 
 can, and I want each of you to help me." The 
 Christian teacher looks forward to each pupil's 
 future, and enters sympathetically into the plans 
 which the child has for himself and his parents 
 have for him. 
 
 Now undoubtedly this Christian attitude to- 
 ward each scholar is pretty expensive of the teach- 
 er's time and strength. Doubtless, hitherto you 
 have thought me very selfish, hard-hearted, and 
 parsimonious in the counsel I have been giving. 
 I have told you in the name of Epicurus to get 
 all the pleasure you can ; in the name of the 
 Stoics to shut out all superfluous griefs and worry; 
 in the name of Plato to get above petty details 
 and live a life of your own, apart from mere hum- 
 drum routine; in the name of Aristotle to develop 
 a sense of proportion, to shirk and slight and ex- 
 
 79 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 elude a thousand distractions that are well enough 
 for other people, but which you cannot afford. 
 But in giving all this selfish, hard-hearted, coolly 
 calculated advice, I have asked you to save your- 
 selves for this Christian work, which is the best 
 worth while of all. Pour yourselves unreservedly, 
 without stint or measure, into the lives of your 
 scholars. See things through their eyes ; feel 
 keenly their joys and griefs. Be sure that you 
 share in sympathy and helpfulness every task 
 you lay upon them ; that you rejoice in every 
 success they achieve, and that you are even more 
 sorry than they for every failure they make. Be 
 a leader, not a driver, of your flock : for to lead 
 is Christ-like, to drive is unchristian. The differ- 
 ence, you see, between the teacher who is a Chris- 
 tian and the one who is not, is not a difference 
 of doctrine or ritual or verbal profession. It is a 
 difference in the tone, temper, and spirit of the 
 teacher's attitude toward the scholars. It is a 
 hard thing to define, but it is something an ex- 
 perienced person can feel before he has been in 
 a class-room five minutes. In one class-room you 
 feel the tension of alien and antagonistic forces, 
 
 80 
 
FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALITY 
 
 — the will of the teacher arrayed against the will 
 of the scholars, and, as an inevitable consequence, 
 the will of the scholars in latent antagonism to 
 the will of the teacher. In another class-room 
 there is tension, to be sure, as there ought to 
 be, but it is the tension of one strong, friendly, 
 united will of teacher and scholar directed against 
 their great common tasks. The Christian spirit 
 alone, without sufficient mental equipment and 
 force of will, will not teach school any more than 
 it will manage a factory or win a game of football 
 without technical training and equipment. All 
 this, however, I am taking for granted. Assum- 
 ing these general qualifications, it may be safely 
 said that every teacher who combines the five qual- 
 ities we have been describing will find teaching a 
 perpetual joy and will achieve a brilliant success. 
 
 Five Principles of Personality 
 
 Such are the five principles of personality as 
 the world's great teachers have developed them 
 and as they apply specifically to the work of the 
 teacher. Show me any teacher of sufficient men- 
 tal training and qualifications who is unpopular, 
 
 8i 
 
THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY 
 
 ineffective, unhappy, and I will guarantee that 
 this teacher has violated one or more of these 
 five principles of personality ; either he has ne- 
 glected diet, exercise, rest, and recreation, and 
 failed to have a good time ; or else he has wasted 
 his nervous substance in riotous worry, and spent 
 the energy needed to make things go right to- 
 day in regretting what went wrong yesterday or 
 anticipating what may go wrong to-morrow; or 
 else he has no life of his own outside of the school 
 and above it, from which he comes down clothed 
 with fresh inspiration and courage to meet the 
 duties and details of each new school day ; or else 
 he has missed the great sense of proportion, and 
 squandered the energies which should have been 
 devoted to the few things that are needful, on a 
 variety of burdens which the importunity of others 
 or the false conscientiousness of himself had laid 
 upon him ; or else, and this is by far the most 
 common and serious cause, he has failed to 
 merge his own life in the lives of the scholars, 
 so that they have felt him a helper, a leader, a 
 friend in the solving of their individual problems 
 and the accomplishment of their common work. 
 
 82 
 
FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALITY 
 
 On the other hand, I will guarantee perfect per- 
 sonal success to any well-trained teacher who will 
 faithfully incorporate these five principles into 
 his personal life. The teacher who is healthy and 
 happy with Epicurus nights and mornings, holi- 
 days and vacations, at meal-time and between 
 meals ; who faithfully fortifies his soul with the 
 Stoic defenses against needless regrets and super- 
 fluous forebodings ; who now and then ascends 
 with Plato the heights from which he sees the 
 letters of his life writ large, and petty annoyances 
 reduced to their true dimensions ; who applies the 
 Aristotelian sense of proportion to the distribu- 
 tion of his energy, so that the full force of it is 
 held in reserve for the things that are really worth 
 while, and, finally, sees in the lives of his scholars 
 the supreme object for which all these other ac- 
 cumulations and savings have been made, and de- 
 votes himself j oyf ully and unreservedly to the com- 
 mon work he tries to do with them, for them, and 
 through them for their lasting good, — this teacher 
 can no more help being a personal success as a 
 teacher than the sunlight and rain can help making 
 the earth the fruitful and beautiful place that it is. 
 
L 
 
 OUTLINE 
 
 I. THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY IN SCHOOL 
 
 THE PERSONALITY OF THE PUPIL 
 
 1. The development of personality as the teacher's 
 
 task I 
 
 2. The five stages in our educational system ... 2 
 
 3. The different forms of school interests .... 3 
 
 THE PRIMARY SCHOOL: SUGGESTED IMMEDIATE 
 
 INTERESTS 
 
 4. Eager interest and immediate satisfaction in pri- 
 
 mary teaching 4 
 
 5. The strengthening of the child's will through in- 
 
 terest 8 
 
 6. Discipline by compulsion is abnormal but neces- 
 
 sary 10 
 
 THE GRAMMAR SCHOOL: ARTIFICIALLY WEIGHTED 
 
 INTERESTS 
 
 7. The weighting and choosing of competitive in- 
 
 terests 14 
 
 8. The function of artificial encouragements ... 15 
 
 9. The special value of the manual activities ... 16 
 ID. The worth of special and frequent promotions . 17 
 II. The teacher's power to stimulate joy in achieve- 
 ment 19 
 
 8s 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 THE HIGH SCHOOL: ELECTED INDIVIDUAL INTERESTS 
 
 12. The need for discovering the youth's individual 
 
 self 20 
 
 13. The adolescent is readily influenced through his 
 
 aptitudes 23 
 
 14. The power of a devoted and purposeful teacher . 24 
 
 THE COLLEGE : SOCIAL INTERESTS 
 
 15. The college develops a social will 25 
 
 16. The curriculum as a means: (i) literature, 
 
 (2) philosophy, history, and political science, 
 
 (3) the physical sciences 26 
 
 17. Student life as a resource 29 
 
 18. The dangers of the college spirit 30 
 
 19. The social attitude may be developed below the 
 
 college 32 
 
 20. The best substitutes for college 36 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY: PROFESSIONAL INTERESTS 
 
 21. The university stimulates reverence for truth . 38 
 
 22. The professional spirit demands expert com- 
 
 mand of a subject 40 
 
 23. The place of research in the university .... 40 
 
 24. The misdirected training of the doctor of phi- 
 
 losophy 41 
 
 25. Scholarship and presentation in the teacher's 
 
 profession 42 
 
 FIVE TESTS OF THE TEACHER 
 
 26. The overlapping of stages and interests ... 43 
 
 27. The five tests of a good teacher 43 
 
 86 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 II. THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY OUT OF 
 
 SCHOOL 
 
 THE PERSONALITY OF THE TEACHER 
 
 1. Differences in personality among teachers ... 49 
 
 2. The parts played by heredity and cultivation . . 51 
 
 3. Five historic types of personality 52 
 
 4. The importance of typical attitudes in the teacher 53 
 
 THE EPICUREAN: HAPPINESS 
 
 5. The importance of happiness 54 
 
 6. Some specific Epicurean duties 55 
 
 7. The necessity of play to the teacher ..... 57 
 
 8. Rest and recreation 59 
 
 THE STOIC: FORTITUDE 
 
 9. The Stoic keeps his mind free from care ... 60 
 
 10. Stoicism is the doctrine of apperception applied 
 
 to emotional states 61 
 
 11. The special need of the teacher for a Stoical 
 
 attitude 6s 
 
 THE PLATONIC: SERENITY 
 
 12. Other-worldliness as a refuge from ills .... 66 
 
 13. The limitations of this attitude 67 
 
 14. Its supplemental worth in life 68 
 
 THE ARISTOTELIAN: PROPORTION 
 
 15. The goodness of things is a matter of use ... 72 
 
 16. The sense of proportion an essential equipment 
 
 in teachers 72 
 
 17. The necessity for selection and rejection in a 
 
 busy life 73 
 
 87 
 
OUTLINE 
 
 THE CHRISTIAN: DEVOTION 
 
 i8. The sharing of the scholars' problems » . . . yy 
 
 19. Two types of teachers 78 
 
 20. The teacher as a leader of children 80 
 
 FIVE PRINCIPLES OF PERSONALITY 
 
 21. The absence of these principles makes for failure 
 
 and unhappiness . 8r 
 
 22. These five principles of personality are a surety of 
 
 success 83 
 
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