FOOTNOTES:
[4] Social Principles of Education, p. 264.
IV
THE TEACHING OF THE RURAL SCHOOL
The importance of teaching
Teaching is the fundamental purpose for which the school is run. Taxes are levied and collected, buildings erected and equipped, and curriculum organized solely that teaching may go on. Children are clothed and fed and sent to school instead of being put at work in order that they may be taught. The school is classified into grades, programs are arranged, and regulations are enforced only to make teaching possible. Normal schools are established, teachers are trained, and certificates required in order that teaching may be more efficient.
The teacher confronts a great task. On the one hand are the children, ignorant, immature, and undeveloped. In them lie ready to be called forth all the powers and capacities that will characterize their fully ripened manhood and womanhood. Given the right stimulus and direction, these powers will grow into splendid strength and capacity; lacking this stimulus and guidance, the powers are left crippled and incomplete.
On the other hand is the subject-matter of education, the heritage of culture which has been accumulating through the ages. In the slow process of human experience, running through countless generations, men have made their discoveries in the fields of mathematics and science; they have lived great events and achievements which have become history; they have developed the social institutions which we call the State, the church, the home, and the school; they have organized great industries and carried on complex vocations; they have crystallized their ideals, their hopes, and their aspirations in literature; and have with brush and chisel expressed in art their concepts of truth and beauty. The best of all this human experience we have collected in what we call a curriculum, and placed it before the child for him to master, as the generations before him have mastered it in their common lives. For only in this way can the child come into full possession of his powers, and set them at work in a fruitful way in accomplishing his own life-purpose.
It is the function of the teacher, therefore, to stand as an intermediary, as an interpreter, between the child and this great mass of subject-matter that lies ready for him to learn. The race has lived its thousands or millions of years; the individual lives but a few score. What former generations took centuries to work out the child can spend only a few months or a few years upon. Hence he must waste no time and opportunity; he must make no false step in his learning, for he cannot in his short life retrieve his mistakes. It is the work of the teacher, through instruction and guidance, that is, through teaching, to save the child time in his learning and development, and to make sure that he does not lose his opportunity. And this is a great responsibility.