The teacher needs
(a) Knowledge of the circumstances and character of each pupil.For, no matter how large the class, the true teacher must study and respect the individuality of each member of it. Though her class may pass a most successful examination, yet, in examining herself, she must mark down (against herself), as a failure, the name of each child who has remained to her merely one of the crowd. The eyesight, the hearing, the spine, the headaches, the home surrounding of each child, should be known to its teacher, and should modify the demands made upon that child.
Curvature of the mind is far more common than curvature of the spine, and the teacher must have keen intellectual sympathy with each child’s individual mental tangles. She must clear the ground of harmful stumbling-blocks, and yet leave enough to exercise the mental muscles. Surely if the difficulty of a task can fire enthusiasm, the teacher should burn with zeal.
(b) A right judgment and presence of mind.The moral temperament of each child is an even more complex study than the mental peculiarities; praise, for instance, is a tonic for one and poison for another. The teacher must have presence of mind to criticise on the spur of the moment, with due regard to the child’s moral digestion, to the abstract question of justice in the class as a whole, and to maintaining a high, and yet not depressing, standard of work. One child requires to be repressed and one to be encouraged to do itself justice. One child has thoughtful difficulties which need sympathetic unravelling; another suffers from mere inattention, and requires decisive pulling together.
It stands to reason that, to appreciate all these shades of character and to satisfy the needs of each, in such a manner as not to waste the time of the class (and not to sin against the code of rough and ready justice, to which the childish mind, quite rightly, owns allegiance), is a very delicate task, and involves much of that moral thoughtfulness which is the foundation of a good teacher.
(c) Self-mastery.One reason for the supreme importance of this quality is that it not only means insight into others, but also involves self-mastery without which no educative control of others is possible. Forcible control is quite possible to a severe or hot-tempered nature: children are easily cowed, but they do not learn to control themselves if they are subject to this martial law. If a mistress finds that her children are good with her and tiresome with other people, she may rely on it that her own discipline is defective. Probably she has allowed personal affection for herself to be an admissible motive for good conduct, whereas insubordination would be almost better for the child! This last would be repented of, in time, as a fault, whereas many a girl goes through life mistaking impulse for principle, because at school, obedience “to please Miss So-and-so” was accepted, as equivalent to obedience to duty. It may be that the teacher has mastered the children’s tempers by dint of having a worse one herself; if so, the children will recoup themselves, for the enforced restraint of her presence, by licence in her absence; whereas the control exercised by a serene, equable nature develops the element of self-control in the child, and also a sense of self-respect which tends towards good behaviour when with other teachers.
The teacher must avoid
(a) Overstrain.This is one great reason why teachers should make it a matter of principle, as well as of worldly prudence, to avoid overstrain. You sometimes hear a young teacher boasting of the tax which she lays on her constitution; she tells it, half as a grievance that she should have so much to do, half in triumph that she is so peculiarly constituted—just as poor people exult in ailments that mark them out from the common herd! But these excesses of work (whether caused by bravado, or by bad management, or by an ill-informed conscience) are not a luxury of which she herself can defray the expense; the cost is really borne by her home people, by her fellow-teachers, and, worst of all, by her class, who all suffer from her overwrought nerves—in plain English, from her temper. I say, worst of all her class, because she may be a means of wholesome discipline to the other sufferers, but she does distinct moral harm to the children. And do not let her imagine that heroic efforts to control outward signs of temper will qualify her to be a teacher: children are acutely sensitive to atmosphere, and suffer even more under one who is elaborately controlling her temper, than under one who frankly loses it and then is serene again. If a teacher is to be worth her salt, she must have no temper! She must be of a serene, sunny temperament which enjoys the children’s presence, and her anger, when needed, must be of the impersonal kind which Fuller describes as one of “the sinews of the soul”.
(b) Injudicious reproofs.Of course scolding has to be done, but there should be no connection of ideas in the child’s mind between a merited scolding and the teacher’s temper. Mr. Arthur Sidgwick’s essay on Form Discipline gives the whole principle of the matter, but there are three suggestions I would like to add for the use of women teachers. One I take from Mrs. Beecher Stowe’s book on Little Foxes. She there describes two households in each of which a young servant is being trained. In one, the mistress looks at the dinner table and remarks that the salt is not what it should be: in the other, the mistress, on coming to inspect the table, exclaims, “Why, Sally, how bright your silver is, and you have remembered everything to-day; the only thing that is not perfect is the salt, and I am sure you will always look specially at that in future”. There was no comparison between those mistresses as to success in servant-training, and probably the teacher who blends praise and blame will cultivate a hopeful energy of self-improvement in her children, unknown in the class taught by one who coldly points out faults and passes over merits.
My second suggestion is, as the Spanish proverb says to authors: “Leave something in your inkstand”; underscold rather than overscold. A woman usually has a power of statement that makes her take an artistic pleasure in putting her case completely and convincingly. But children have a fine sense of justice (until it is blunted by contact with the world), and the culprit who undergoes one of these comprehensive scoldings is apt to feel that full measure for the crime has been meted out and so she thinks no more of it. Understate your case and that same sense of justice will make her say to herself all that you leave unsaid, and this self-condemnation will probably be the most effectual part of the scolding. At all events, very little harm comes from scolding too little, and irreparable harm often comes from scolding too much. When the nail of reproof is once in, every additional blow of the hammer tends to loosen it.
My third suggestion is, avoid scolding as much as possible when you have reasonable cause for supposing your own nerves likely to be on edge. There are times, e.g., the end of the summer term, when you are not likely to see things in true proportion: at such seasons distrust your own power of judging, and look the other way as often as possible, for blunders are liable to be more severely dealt with in July, than crimes in the fresher air of September!
Let us now pass on from the question of the state of mind desirable in a teacher, to consider the aim and possibilities of her work with the child.