WANTED: THE GREAT TEACHER
But how are we to train such teachers for our undergraduates? This is no child’s task. It is the matchless opportunity of the college; it is the crying need of our times. A large proportion of undergraduates in college lecture-rooms are virtually untouched in either their feelings or their intellects by the ministry of the church. Whatever the ministry may have been in our father’s times, it is not to-day significant or effective in imparting its message to students. The fact is periodically demonstrated by test questions of teachers to their students concerning the Bible, English literature, and church history. I have recently visited a dozen of the leading preparatory schools whose headmasters and teachers quite invariably unite in lamenting the inadequacy of the Sunday-schools and of religious training in the home. Indeed, many students go up to our best preparatory schools in almost a heathenish condition as regards religion and Christian knowledge. It is the day and time of the teacher’s ministry in both secondary schools and in colleges. No pulpit in our day is more far-reaching and decisive than the desk of the college teacher. The college professor who does not forget that he is first a man, then a professor, and who can get past the friendship of books and knowledge to a genuine friendship with students, can be the highest force in our present day civilization. But the teacher says: “I am only a teacher of literature, or of chemistry, or of engineering, or of bridge-building. I am not an evangelist or a moral reformer, or a promoter of polite accomplishments or of social service.” Much of this is true also of the great teachers of history. Yet somehow these men found in their specialty the door through which they entered into the very hearts and lives of their school-boys.
A short time ago at the University of Iowa I had the opportunity of meeting at luncheon thirty members of the faculty. The subject for discussion was: “What can the professor do really to assist students at the University of Iowa in discovering the values worth while in college life?” Approximately one-half of the teachers for various reasons prayed to be excused from the discussion. I was specially interested in the answers of the other men—among whom were the men, according to student testimony, who had a real hold upon the university life. One man was of the department of chemistry. He was prominent in student activities. When he was introduced, a student said, “There is no man more truly liked in the university than Professor ——.” As he talked, we felt that, while he might be a good teacher of chemistry, his department was chiefly important in giving him a point of departure from which he could go forth to interest himself in the life of young men. After the conference he said to me: “If professors want influence with students, let them appear at debates, at athletic games, and at student mass-meetings; let them show real interest in undergraduate activities of all sorts, even at personal sacrifice.”
Another professor was a teacher of English. He was not interested in athletics or in the religious life of the students so much as in revealing to students in the classroom as well as outside the classroom the charm of literary things. That was his message—his individual message to his college. His life-work was more than presenting the evolution of the English novel: it was a mission to students to secure on their part habits of reading and a taste for genuine literature which in after years would be to many the most priceless reward of their college days. It is not necessary that two college teachers should present the same truth in the same way, but when college professors and instructors, presidents, deans, and tutors, realize that teaching to-day as in former days is a calling, not simply a means of livelihood, and that every man who holds any such position must somehow discover how to reach personally at least a small circle of students, then our colleges will not longer be defined as “knowledge shops,” but as the homes of those inspirations and friendships, those ideals and incitements, which make life more than meat and the body than raiment.
While the drift of our modern life in the outside world may be toward technical and scientific education, the drift in college is still toward the great teacher—the man of thought-provoking power and of spiritual capacity; sincere and genuine both in scholarship and manhood, of whom one can speak, as Carlyle spoke of Schiller, “a high ministering servant at Truth’s altar, and bore him worthily of the office he held.”