In dealing with the vocation of the teacher, I shall necessarily be led to define the purpose of the social institution in which he labors and I shall for the sake of brevity use the word school to designate the social organs of education, which cover the period of childhood, adolescence and the beginning of manhood and womanhood.
The school is like the hundred-gated Thebes. It leads out into a hundred vocational avenues. But note the following: its aim is far greater than merely to prepare the student for that future vocation to which he is best suited. It should no less supply the incentive for creating new vocations, and for changing what are at present still occupations into vocations. The school searches out the individuality of its pupils. It undertakes to differentiate and to personalize individualities. But when it has done its part, it sends the pupils into a world where little account is taken of the finer differences of aptitude, where occupations predominate and vocations are few, and where most things, ethically speaking, are still in the rough. The school cannot indeed transform society by merely raising its indignant voice and asking society to pay heed to the finer things which it has fostered, and which often are subsequently crushed. But it can at least contribute to the vocational evolution of society by reiterating its unsatisfied demands.
Taking the three-fold reverence for my guide, I lay it down in the first place that the school is an organ of tradition. True conservatism has its place in the school. In it are preserved the knowledges and the skills of the past. The heir of today comes to his own by appropriating the products of past thinking and past labor, and the school superintends the process of appropriation and assimilation. At the same time it sifts in tradition what is clean from what is unclean, what is true from what is false, what is usable from what is dead. Reverence is shown in this very sifting process. To revere the past is to make the past live again; but only what is vital can go on living.
The teaching should be reverential in spirit. The business spirit, the drive towards mere efficiency, cannot in the long run satisfy. Efficiency as commonly understood has in view the utilities of the moment. It merely exploits the past for the sake of present interests, and as a rule is unmindful of the future. Industrial efficiency, in particular, reverses the right ethical relation between work and personality; instead of work being so contrived as to liberate personality, it is mechanized so as to sacrifice personality.
The teacher should be reverent towards the great masters of his own craft, his own art. No one is reverenced by others who does not himself habitually revere someone. The teachers should be acquainted at first hand with the master educators, such as Plato, Comenius, Pestalozzi and the others.
I pass on to speak of the second type of reverence. This involves cordial reciprocally stimulating relations between the members of the teaching staff. It is generally agreed that no other factor counts for more in shaping the character of the young than personal influence. The best personal influence, however, is not unilateral, like that which radiates from a single teacher upon his class. The best is that which proceeds from cross-relations between a number of teachers. Just as in the home it is not the father singly, nor the mother singly, but the reciprocal relations between the two that touch child life to finer issues and create a spiritual atmosphere in the learner, so also in the school the best spirit is created by the relations of reciprocal furtherance between the teachers, each doing his work in such a way as to make easier and more successful the work of his colleagues, with a strong sense of partnership in the common work of man-building.
The teachers as an organized body should also relate themselves to an organized body of parents. Home and school should not merely coöperate but interpenetrate. The interests and efforts of both are centered on the same young lives. The home is supremely concerned in what goes on in the school, and the school in the kind of influence that prevails in the home. An organized conference of parents is in a position to render signal service to a school by appraising its ideals, by keeping tally on the extent to which acknowledged standards are carried out, and by joining in the unceasing endeavor to advance the standards. Schools must be backed by the interest and appreciation of the community. Parents whose children are pupils of a school are for that particular school the best representatives of the community.
The school is to prepare its charges, not only for vocational life, but for citizenship. Teachers must be good citizens. They cannot give what they do not possess. They must keep in living contact with the civic and social movements of the time.
The first and second types are instrumental to the third. Now here, if anywhere, a new departure in educational philosophy is called for. For when we discuss this third kind of reverence, the question of all questions is raised: To what end do we educate? What is to be the aim and outcome of all our effort? And our answer to this question will depend on our philosophy, and if our philosophy is ethical our answer must be distinctively ethical. Froebel was a pantheist, and his pantheism colored his conception of the educational end. Pestalozzi was an eighteenth century humanitarian. Many modern writers on education are biological evolutionists. Others even expressly disclaim any general outlook, and appear to be exclusively interested in perfecting the technique of schoolmastering. Reverence of the third type is reverence for the undeveloped human being,—for the new generation, for our successors. What is it that we are to revere in a child? Its spiritual possibilities, its latent personality. To bring to birth its personality is the supreme educational end. We show our reverence for the child in the effort to personalize it. Let us consider in brief some of the practical consequences of this idea.
To personalize the individual the first step is to discover the empirical substratum in his nature. There is ever an empirical substratum subject to ethical transformations. The empirical substratum of personality is individuality! Individuality manifests itself in a leading interest of some kind, a predominant bias which indicates the thing which the individual is fit to be and do. To discover the bent or bias is the first step, and the difficulties in the way of taking even this first step are admittedly great. Children and even adolescents often show no marked intellectual preferences whatever. Many adults too appear to be neutral so far as their mental life is concerned. Circumstances ran them perhaps into a certain mould—they might have been run into some other just as well. It is the task of the educator to discover the predominant interest where it exists, and to try to produce such an interest where it does not. What nature has not done in such cases art must attempt.