The child’s native interests.—In brief, she is teaching children and not books or subjects, and the interests of the children take emphatic precedence over her own. She enters into the life of the child and makes excursions into all life according to the dictates of his interests. The child is the big native interest to which she attaches the work of the school. The program is elastic enough to encompass every child in her school. Her program is a garden in which something is growing for each child, and she cultivates every plant with sympathetic care. She considers it no hardship to learn the plant, the animal, the place, or the fact in which the child finds interest. Because of the child and for the sake of the child she invests all these things with the quality of human interest.

The school and the home.—Arithmetic, language, history, and geography touch life at a thousand points, and we have but to select the points of contact with the life of each pupil to render any or all of these a vital part of the day’s work and the day’s life. They are not things that are detached from the child’s life. The child’s errand to the shop involves arithmetic, and the vitalized teacher makes this fact a part of the working capital of the school. The dinner table abounds in geography, and the teacher is quick to turn this fact to account in the school. Her fertility of resources, coupled with her vital interest in human beings and human affairs, soon establishes a reciprocal relation between the home and the school. Similarly, she causes the language of the school to flow out into the home, the factory, and the office.

The skill of the teacher.—History is not a school affair merely. It is a life affair, and through all the currents of life it may be made to flow. The languages, Latin, German, French, Spanish, are expressions and interpretations of life, and they may be made to appear what they really are if the teacher is resourceful enough and skillful enough to attach them to the life of the pupil by the human ligaments that are ever at hand. Chemistry, physics, botany, and physiology all throb with life if only the teacher can place the fingers of the pupils on their pulses. Given the human teacher, the human child, and the humanized teaching, the vitalized school is inevitable.

Questions and Exercises

  1. What agencies have been employed with the expectation that they would improve the school?
  2. What are the reasons why some of these have not accomplished more?
  3. Give instances in which the conservatism of teachers seems to have stood in the way of utilizing the element of human interest.
  4. What do you think of a teacher who asserts that no important advance has been made in educational theory and practice since, say, 1910?
  5. Make an outline of what you think a college of education should do for the school.
  6. What would you expect to gain from a course in school administration?
  7. The president of at least one Ohio college personally inspects and checks up the work of the professors from the standpoint of proper teaching standards, and has them visit one another’s classes for friendly criticism and observation. He reports improvement in the standard of teaching. How is his plan applicable in your school?
  8. A city high school principal states that it is not his custom to visit his teachers’ classes; that he knows what is going on and that he interferes only if something is wrong. What do you think of his practice? How is the principle applicable in your school?
  9. Do the duties of a superintendent have to do only with curriculum and discipline, or have they to do also with teaching power?
  10. What are some of the ways in which you have known superintendents successfully to increase the teaching power of the teachers?
  11. What things do we need to know about a child in order to utilize his interests?
  12. Distinguish three types of teachers.
  13. What are the objections to teaching the book?
  14. What are the objections to teaching the subject?
  15. What are some items of school work upon which some teachers spend time that they should devote to finding materials suited to the child’s interests?
  16. Can one teacher utilize all of the interests of a child within a nine-month term? What is the measure of how far she should be expected to do so?

CHAPTER XXI

BEHAVIOR

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Behavior in retrospect.—The caption of this chapter implies the behavior of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive. No sooner has the student arrived at deductions that seem conclusive than exceptions begin to loom up on his speculative horizon that disintegrate his theories and cause him to retrace the steps of his reasoning. Such a study affords large scope for introspection, but too few people incline to examine their own behavior in any mental attitude that approaches the scientific. The others seem to think that things just happen, and that their own behavior is fortuitous. They seem not to be able to reason from effect back to cause, or to realize that there may be any possible connection between what they are doing at the present moment and what they were doing twenty years ago.