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II. THOMAS W. BUTCHER, PRESIDENT, KANSAS STATE NORMAL SCHOOL,

EMPORIA, KANS.

It is impossible to state in a sufficiently forceful way the fact that there is certain to be a shortage of teachers in the United States next year. Indeed reports from all parts of the country indicate that a shortage has existed thruout the present school year. Men are leaving the teaching profession not only to go into the military service, but to go into commercial and agricultural lines as well. As these men leave the profession, women are taking their places. This movement in and of itself would have produced a shortage, but an additional draft is now being made upon the teaching force of the country by the government at Washington. Recently a superintendent of schools in one of the larger cities of Kansas told me that over 50 per cent of his women teachers are preparing for government positions. These women will receive at the outset not only more money annually than they are receiving as teachers, but more money per month. There is no indication that the public is willing to meet the advance in salaries which must be made to hold strong women, to say nothing of men, in the profession. Unless a very markt increase in salaries is made, and made within the next three months, the schools of the nation will be robbed of much of the best blood in their teaching force. The undesirable element will be left to train the youth of the nation.

The ravages of the battlefield are more bloody and in a sense more horrible than a calamity in the schools such as I have just described, but certainly not more dangerous for the future of the nation. Already pressure is coming from boards of education and the public generally for a lowering of standards as a means of keeping up the supply of teachers. It would be an easy thing indeed to lower standards. A motion once past by a state board of education, and for that state the deed is done. Into the wreck caused by such a motion would go more than a quarter of a century of struggle from which we have just emerged and which has made teaching and teachers respectable. Some day we are going to understand that men and nations are what they are chiefly, if not wholly, because of what they are taught. When that day dawns, teaching and teachers will get a new rating. The present fight for democracy is to be waged not only on the battlefields of Europe, but at home as well.

THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ACADEMIC AND

PROFESSIONAL SUBJECTS

W. C. BAGLEY, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
NEW YORK, N.Y.

In many, if not most, of our institutions for the preparation of teachers a sharp distinction is made between the academic and the professional This distinction is inevitable in all cases where professional

courses.

preparation consists chiefly in providing a few courses in psychology, educational theory, and the history of education as a supplement to the typical subject-matter courses of the secondary or collegiate programs. The inadequacy of this type of so-called "professional" training is now pretty generally recognized, and yet this inadequate type of program is still characteristic of many normal schools, as well as of practically all the liberal-arts colleges that make an explicit effort to prepare teachers for elementary- or high-school service.

I am myself thoroly convinst that the sooner we abandon the unfortunate distinction between the academic and the professional the better it will be for the welfare and ultimate success of our cause. That a house divided against itself cannot stand is as true of professional education as it is of government. Until we can concentrate all the work of our normal schools upon the purpose for which the normal school exists our efforts are bound to be abortive, and we cannot expect those who have been skeptical of the serious value of our work to undergo a change of mind and of heart, and to join with us in our efforts to place the professional training of teachers upon a basis that is consistent with the fundamental significance of the public service that the graduates of our schools are called upon to render.

When I say, however, that the work of the normal schools and teachers' colleges should be professionalized thruout, I do not mean this in a narrow sense. I should not eliminate the distinction between the academic and the professional by eliminating entirely, as some normal schools have attempted to do, the subject-matter courses, and limiting the training of teachers to a thin pabulum of psychology, history of education, general method, special methods, and practice teaching. Nor should I assume, as other normal schools have assumed, that the so-called academic training can be adequately lookt after by preliminary courses taken in the high school or even in the junior college. The normal school of the future will lay much greater emphasis upon subject-matter courses than it has done in the past and relatively less emphasis upon detacht and formal courses in psychology and educational theory.

What I have in mind then is rather a fundamental reorganization of all our work with the professional end constantly in view. Everything that goes into the teacher-training curriculum should be admitted solely upon the basis of its relation to the equipment of the successful teacher. It must include scholarship of a very high order, but a unique quality of scholarship. Not only must the teacher know his subject, but, as we have said so often in defending the normal school from its critics, he must know how to adapt his subject to the capacities and needs of those whom he is to teach. I have in mind, for example, the organization of the work in Latin in one of the middle western normal schools which is doing good work in preparing highschool teachers. The students who are preparing to teach Latin take advanst courses in this subject in the normal school. While these courses

are of the same grade as courses that the students might have taken in a liberal-arts college, they are selected and taught with reference to the light that will throw upon the high-school teacher's problem. These courses furnish the students with a new, fresh, vigorous, and virile view of the subject-matter illuminated from every source of light that they can profit. by thru their maturity and advanst training.

I know of another normal-school instructor in mathematics whose course in arithmetic, requiring as prerequisites strong courses in collegiate mathematics, is itself a course of real university grade, demanding I am sure, the same quality of mental effort that course in calculus would demand. At the same time it is distinctly a professional course, laying very large emphasis upon the very materials that a teacher in the primary grades will need; but it is very far from a primary course.

I think that the point of view that one needs to have in the construction of these advanst courses in elementary subjects has sometimes been handicapt by our inadequate conception of the elementary materials. We look upon them as simple and rudimentary, and as given to little children. they must be simple and rudimentary. The very fact indeed that they are basic and fundamental means that their roots strike deeper and ramify more widely than anything else that we teach. There is, however, in this case at least, a vast difference between what is common and what is commonplace. The fact that the earth is round is a fact of common knowledge, but it is very far from a commonplace fact; its establishment was very far from a commonplace achievement. The method of long division which we teach in our lower grades seems to be a simple and rudimentary device, and yet keen mathematicians struggled for generations with cumbrous cancellation methods before the present simple and relatively facile method was devised.

When I say then that the subject-matter courses should be professionalized I do not mean that they should be deprived of meat and substance, nor that they should be limited to the rudimentary content that the prospective teacher is to pass on to his future pupils. Nor do I mean that advanst courses bearing other names but which will throw light upon the elementary and secondary materials are to be abandoned. I simply mean that these latter courses are to be selected primarily because of this light, and I do mean emphatically that the question as to whether they will or will not be "recognized" by institutions that have other purposes ought not to enter at all into the discussion.

Subject-matter courses organized upon the principle that has been suggested will do much to break down the unfortunate dualism between the academic and the professional. In the first place, it is inconceivable that an instructor who is unfamiliar with the problem of teaching his subject on the lower levels will be competent to organize such courses. Instead of holding a proud aloofness from the elementary- and high-school classes, the

subject-matter instructor will be compelled by the very nature of his work to keep in the closest possible contact with the training school. He will have to know what his students are doing in the training school, what problems they are trying to solve, and how his course can help them in the solution of these problems. He will, I hope, be lookt upon as a member of the training department, with a seat in its cabinet and a voice and a vote in determining its policies.

In the second place the application of this principle of organization will do away very largely with the need of separate and often quite detacht courses in "special methods." Subject-matter and method will develop together instead of in separate and water-tight compartments.

In the third place, these professionalized subject-matter courses, together with the constant contact of instructors and students with the work of the training school, will make it possible to reorganize in a fundamental and thoro-going way what we now call the professional work. The traditional organization of this work, starting with abstract theory and culminating in concrete practice, is the most tragic example that I know of an educational institution refusing to take its own medicine, absolutely declining the challenge to practice what it preaches. It is an actual fact that professional schools of medicine and especially of law are today infinitely better exemplars of the very educational theory which we consider sound than are our own training institutions.

I have said that we should reorganize our professional work so that its general procedure will be from practice to theory, from cases to principles, from the concrete to the abstract, rather than the reverse. We shall have, I think, an introductory "orienting" course in very simple, very concrete theory-a brief course to serve as a propaedeutic to these substantial subject-matter courses which will be closely interwoven with laboratory work in the training school. Along with these we shall have brief but succinct and practical courses in the technique of teaching and management, in school hygiene, and in other subjects which can be made to bear directly upon the work that the student is doing. As the student's participation in the actual work of teaching comes to deal with the more difficult types of teaching and to involve larger and larger responsibilities for the progress of the pupils. His work in educational theory will increase in scope and intensity. There will be a place here for summarizing courses where he will consider as a whole the problems of some particular field, such as primary teaching, intermediate-grade teaching, upper-grade or junior high school teaching, or high-school teaching. These will be essentially curriculum courses, aiming to furnish a unified point of view regarding a particular field of teaching service. Finally, at the culmination of his normal-school residence, he will study general educational theory and the organization of school systems, and in three-year and four-year curricula perhaps he will have a substantial course in the history of education designed

to bring together and systematize a great many things that he has learned in his earlier courses.

The plan of organization that I have so roughly sketcht would do much, I am convinst, to insure an adequate equipment for the teacher. I may be permitted by way of summary to set forth very briefly what I consider to be the essential elements in a teacher's equipment, and how I believe that the suggested organization will furnish these elements. In the first place, the teacher must have scholarship of a high grade but of a unique quality. This the professionalized subject-matter courses should furnish. In the second place, a teacher must have a knowledge of the needs and capacities of the pupils whom he is to instruct. Here our primary dependence must be placed upon his actual contact with these pupils in the training school, with a definite responsibility from the earliest possible moment for a part of their care and culture. In the light of this intimate acquaintance he will be ready for whatever instruction in psychology may still further extend and rationalize his knowledge.

A third important item in the teacher's equipment may be included under the head of technical skills. This is the strictly habit side of the teacher's art, and its mastery involves primarily the study of good models, with careful supervision from the very moment that the student begins his actual teaching, helpt out by a study of the rules and precepts of teaching. For these models we must depend primarily upon the normal-school instructors themselves, and it is evident that their technique of teaching should illustrate in a positive way all the recognized proprieties of the art.

A fourth item in the teacher's equipment, for want of a better term, I shall refer to as teaching insight and resourcefulness. This finds expression in such capacities and abilities as the following:

1. Aptness in and fertility of illustration.

2. Clearness and lucidity in explanation and illustration.

3. Keen sensitiveness to evidences of misunderstanding and misinterpretation upon the part of pupils and students.

4. Dexterity and alertness in devising problems and framing questions that will focus the attention upon just the right points.

5. A sense of humor that will relieve tense or wearisome situations. 6. Ability to suspend judgment and yet avoid chronic neutrality. 7. The intellectual humility that means a bias toward a reasoned support of each point presented.

8. Ability to create an attitude in the class which is favorable to industry and application, and which takes good work and adequate results as matters of course.

9. Sensitiveness to evidences of inattention and lack of aggressive effort upon the part of pupils.

10. Ability to develop interests in pupils that will be more than merely transitory and will carry over to other subjects and other phases of life.

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