The reading of these biographies will give the student many interesting starting-points for studies in American politics, economics, literature, reform movements as widely separated as abolition and the introduction of the merit system into the civil service. The author should also read the article American Literature (Vol. 1, p. 831; equivalent to 35 pages of this Guide), by Professor G. E. Woodberry, and, if his field is that of the publicist, he should read the article on the history of the United States (Vol. 27, p. 663), equivalent to 225 pages of this Guide; and the allied articles to which he is referred from that.

The advertising writer will find a valuable and stimulating article on Advertisement (Vol. 1, p. 235, equivalent to 20 pages in this Guide), which gives a history of the subject, deals with posters and signs, circulars, periodical advertising, and legal regulation and taxation. For a full list of articles of particular usefulness for the author, see the chapter Literature in this Guide. The following brief list may serve as the basis for a preliminary course of reading.

CHAPTER XXIII
FOR TEACHERS

The Teacher’s “Factor of Safety”

Every teacher has one pupil who tries harder than any of the others to absorb knowledge, and yet is never content with the progress made, who knows how hard the teacher works, and yet is never satisfied with the teacher—and that pupil is the teacher’s self. For every other learner there is a limit to the amount of knowledge to be acquired, but in the case of the teacher a “standard” is supposed to indicate no more than an indispensable minimum. When you are trying to make your pupils master a text-book, the volume seems to contain a most stupendous mass of learning, and when one of them asks you a question about the subject with which the text-book deals, that particular point is sure to be one that the text-book does not cover. What engineers call the “factor of safety,” the margin by which the strength of materials must exceed the stress it is expected to encounter, is, for the teacher, incalculable. It is, of course, a favorite pastime of parents to send a child to school primed with some question “to ask Teacher,” selecting an enigma that has been for centuries a battle-ground for scholars or scientists. And, apart from these malicious pitfalls, children themselves seem, quite innocently, to hit upon questions of extraordinary difficulty. A rebuff, a careless response, or, worst of all, an ingenious evasion of the issue, is fatal to the teacher’s authority and influence. “Ask me that again, to-morrow morning,” is the phrase with which a conscientious teacher often meets such a contingency. And then how a fagged brain is tormented that evening, how the few books available (and they are likely to be a very few if there is no public library at hand) are searched in vain! That is not all. If it be true that the teacher is the most diligent, yet always the least satisfied, of all the teacher’s pupils, it is equally true that many of the most puzzling questions with which the teacher is confronted arise in the teacher’s own mind.

Answers to All Questions

The question-answering power of the Britannica is therefore of cardinal importance to the teacher, and is to be considered not only in connection with the use of the work for reference, but also in the selection of such courses of reading as may be expected to supply information of the kind that questions most often demand. And this question-answering power lies in three characteristics of the work, and may be measured by the extent to which the three are found in it: broad scope, unimpeachable authority and convenient arrangement. Its scope covers the whole range of human knowledge, everything that mankind has achieved, attempted, believed or studied. Its authority is doubly vouchsafed. The fact that the Britannica is published by the University of Cambridge (England), one of the world’s oldest and most famous seats of learning, in itself gives such a guarantee as no other Encyclopaedia has ever offered, and the assurance thus given may be regarded as showing, chiefly, that there are no errors of omission, for against the existence of the errors of commission there is a further guarantee. The articles are signed by 1,500 contributors, including the foremost specialists in every department of knowledge. Among this army of collaborators, chosen from twenty countries, there are no less than 704 members of the staffs of 146 universities and colleges. This means that by means of the Britannica the youngest teacher in the most isolated village is brought into stimulating contact with the great leaders of the teaching profession. Its arrangement gives it the advantages of a universal library, providing the varied courses of reading outlined in this Guide, and those also of a work of reference which yields an immediate answer to every conceivable question. The index of 500,000 entries instantly leads the enquirer to any item of information in the 40,000 articles. No teacher could hope to form, in the course of a lifetime, a collection of separate books which would contain anywhere near as much information.

A Library of Text-Books

In another relation, the Britannica is of daily service to anyone engaged in educational work. It has already been remarked that the teacher needs a “factor of safety,” a reserve of knowledge beyond that which is directly called for in the ordinary routine of the class room. But in the very course of that routine, there is also a need for co-ordinated knowledge, presented in a form available for use in teaching, of a more advanced kind than that in the text-books with which pupils are provided. And the Britannica is, in itself, a vast collection of text-books.