THE STATE NORMAL SCHOOL.
Address to the graduating class of the State Normal School, delivered at Emporia, June 11, 1885.
Mr. President, and Ladies and Gentlemen: In one sense, at least, the State Normal School is the most important of our higher educational institutions. The others educate, each year, a number of individuals, and necessarily a limited number, who are, individually, to fill various positions on life’s battle-field. The State Normal educates the educators, and thus by its influence, its system, its method and thought, reaches and shapes the minds of many thousands. There were, last year, 8,342 teachers in the public schools of Kansas, and they controlled and instructed an army of 308,600 children—an army larger than Grant, or Napoleon, or Wellington ever commanded; an army far more difficult to direct than were theirs; an army whose drill, discipline and instruction will exercise, through all the coming years, a larger and a far more important influence over the material and intellectual well-being of humanity than did the victories of these great commanders.
The office of teacher has not, until late years, been regarded as other vocations are. Men were educated in law, or medicine, or theology, or learned the trades of craftsmen, because they expected to make practical use, during their life-time, of the knowledge and skill they acquired. But men and women drifted into the school-room as teachers—and in too many cases still do so—not because they expected to make teaching their business, but because, for the time being, they could find nothing else to do. Many of these teachers were and are, undoubtedly, well qualified for educational work; many of them have achieved marked success in this work, and, growing to like it, have continued in it. But many others, and far the largest number, I fear, of those who engage in teaching as a mere temporary make-shift, do not fairly earn even the poor salaries they are paid. No one can succeed at anything if he does not put his heart and mind into his work. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might,” is a lesson which the teacher must take to heart, or his or her teaching will come to naught.
And surely there can be no more important work than that of an educator in the schools. Year by year this fact is strengthening in the public mind, and as a result the teacher is growing in public appreciation and pecuniary value.
The underlying spirit, the clear purpose of the State Normal, is not to educate lawyers, or doctors, or ministers, or tradesmen, but to educate, train and fit men and women for the profession of public educators. They who enter this Institution with any other purpose in view, are guilty of a fraud on the generosity of the State. The General Government educates young men, at West Point and Annapolis, for the army and navy. There is no law which compels them, after graduation, to enter either branch of the service. But there is an unwritten code which, appealing to their personal honor, is stronger than any statute, and which compels these graduates of the Nation’s schools to serve two years in its army or navy. They may then resign, but in the event of war, they must promptly tender their services to the Government.
Some such code of ethics should govern graduates of the State Normal. They are educated by the State, as teachers, for the purpose of elevating the standard and qualifications of its public educators, and they should feel in honor bound to fulfill this implied personal obligation.
And surely there can be no nobler ambition than to be a really great teacher—such a teacher, for example, as Arnold of Rugby, or Horace Mann. To rule and shape human minds, to mould and fashion children and youth for the highest and noblest duties of life—is not this a work which should enlist in its service the best heart and brain of all the land?
Last year, in a quiet hamlet in Pennsylvania, an old man died. For more than sixty years he had been a teacher. He had taught in nearly every district of the county where his long and useful life was spent, and half the men of that county, under sixty years of age, have been his pupils. More fully than any other person I have ever known, he was my ideal of what a school master should be—the controlling spirit of a school; its master literally, as well as in name; a firm, strong, just man, encouraging the diffident, punishing the vicious, and inspiring all. Fully six feet in stature, angular, with immense reach of arms, large hands, a noble height and breadth of forehead, and steel-gray eyes sparkling under bristling eye-brows, the heaviest that ever adorned a human face—he was, in the school-room, a formidable figure. Even the later-day “hoodlum,” with his reckless impudence, would have regarded him with awe. He was a strict disciplinarian. He had no mawkish sentimentality about corporal punishment. He delighted, I think, to deal with a vicious, disobedient boy—one of the half-animal and wholly perverse kind, as full of cruelty and meanness as an egg is of meat. When one of this class was enrolled among his pupils, it was wonderful how soon all the perversity of his nature was reduced to subjection.
Yet this old master was not a school-room tyrant. The well-disposed among his pupils held him in affectionate regard, and even the turbulent respected the justice of his decisions and the firmness and sincerity of his rule. He did not take pleasure in inflicting pain. He “trounced” a bad or unruly boy because he regarded trouncing as a necessary and wholesome discipline, which would make him a better man and a better citizen. And the punishments he inflicted were rarely, if ever, undeserved. He was as just as he was stern.
As an instructor, he had mastered the branches he taught. He rarely held a book in his hand while hearing a class. With the range of text-books then in use, he was thoroughly familiar. Every rule or principle or fact they contained was at his tongue’s end. He had a real love for his work, and an affectionate interest in the progress of his pupils. The old, weather-beaten brick school house on the “Commons,” with its rude pine desks and benches, whittled by the jack-knives of more than one generation of boys, and its painted black-board on the wall, was the soul of his earthly interests and ambition.
Amid such surroundings he lived for more than sixty years, engaged in a laborious, often perplexing and wearisome, but always useful work. He sent out into the world thousands of men, disciplined, instructed and moulded by his firm but kindly hands—men who are scattered, to-day, from ocean to ocean, and many of whom have achieved the most distinguished success in life. For among his pupils were James G. Blaine, Senator McMillan, of Minnesota, ex-Congressman Townsend, of Ohio, and a host of others eminent in law, in medicine, in literature, and in business.
He reached a venerable age, dying at eighty-four. And I am sure that his pupils, wheresoever they had wandered, received the news of his death with profound sorrow. For the mention of his name would call up a thousand recollections of him—of his tall, athletic person, of his massive head and shaggy eye-brows, of his homely but intellectual face and his keen and kindly eyes, of his quick, firm, dominating voice, and of his relish for every physical as well as mental enjoyment. For the stern master of the school-room was, on the “Commons,” a boy with the boys—the surest catch, the strongest hand at the bat, and the swiftest runner of them all. Remembering Master Joshua V. Gibbons thus, is it strange that his old pupils, grown to manhood and scattered far and wide, should hold his memory in reverent and tender recollection?
I sincerely hope and trust that the Normal will send out hundreds of teachers who, though they may lack the ample physical powers of Master Gibbons, will possess, in full measure, his strong will and just judgment, his admirable perspicuity and precision as an instructor, his wide range of information, and, above all, his ardent, inspiring, never-flagging love for his work. The influence of even a dozen such teachers, scattered throughout Kansas, would amply repay the State for all the expenditures it has ever made in behalf of this Institution, and spread far and wide the reputation of the Normal as a deserving and useful training school for educators.