The Teacher / Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and Government of the Young

by Jacob Abbott

10. Lastly, in every new plan, consider carefully whether its success in your hands, after you have tried it and found it successful, be owing to its novelty and to your own special interest in it, or to its own innate and intrinsic superiority. If the former, use it so long as it will last, simply to give variety and interest to your plans. Recommend it in conversation or in other ways to teachers with whom you are acquainted, not as a wonderful discovery, which is going to change the whole science of education, but as one method among others which may be introduced from time to time to relieve the monotony of the teacher's labors.

In a word, do not go away from the established institutions of our country, or deviate from the great objects which are at present, and ought continually to be pursued by them, without great caution, circumspection, and deliberate inquiry. But, within these limits, exercise ingenuity and invention as much as you will. Pursue steadily the great objects which demand the teacher's attention. They are simple and few. Never lose sight of them, nor turn to the right or to the left to follow any ignis fatuus which may arise to allure you away, but exercise as much ingenuity and enterprise as you please in giving variety and interest to the modes by which these objects are pursued.

If planning and scheming are confined within these limits, and conducted on these principles, the teacher will save all the agitating perplexity and care which will otherwise be his continual portion. He can go forward peaceably and quietly, and while his own success is greatly increased, he may be of essential service to the cause in which he is engaged, by making known his various experiments and plans to others. For this purpose, it seems to me highly desirable that every teacher should KEEP A JOURNAL of all his plans. In these should be carefully entered all his experiments; the new methods he adopts; the course he takes in regard to difficulties which may arise, and any interesting incidents which may occur which it would be useful for him to refer to at some future time. These, or the most interesting of them, should be made known to other teachers. This may be done in several ways:

(1.) By publishing them in periodicals devoted to education. Such contributions, furnished by judicious men, would be among the most valuable articles in such a work. They would be far more valuable than any general speculations, however well conceived or expressed.

(2.) In newspapers intended for general circulation. There are very few editors whose papers circulate in families who would not gladly receive articles of this kind to fill a teacher's department in their columns. If properly written, they would be read with interest and profit by multitudes of parents, and would throw much light on family government and instruction.

(3.) By reading them in teachers' meetings. If half a dozen teachers who are associated in the same vicinity would meet once a fortnight, simply to hear each other's journals, they would be amply repaid for their time and labor. Teachers' meetings will be interesting and useful, when those who come forward in them will give up the prevailing practice of delivering orations, and come down at once to the scenes and to the business of the school-room.

There is one topic connected with the subject of this chapter which deserves a few paragraphs. I refer to the rights of the committee, or the trustees, or patrons in the control of the school. The right to such control, when claimed at all, is usually claimed in reference to the teacher's new plans, which renders it proper to allude to the subject here; and it ought not to be omitted, for a great many cases occur in which teachers have difficulties with the trustees or committee of their school. Sometimes these difficulties result at last in an open rupture; at other times in only a slight and temporary misunderstanding, arising from what the teacher calls an unwise and unwarrantable interference on the part of the committee or the trustees in the arrangements of the school. Difficulties of some sort very often arise. In fact, a right understanding of this subject is, in most cases, absolutely essential to the harmony and co-operation of the teacher and the representatives of his patrons.

There are then, it must be recollected, three different parties connected with every establishment for education: the parents of the scholars, the teacher, and the pupils themselves. Sometimes, as, for example, in a common private school, the parents are not organized, and whatever influence they exert they must exert in their individual capacity. At other times, as in a common district or town school, they are by law organized, and the school committee chosen for this purpose are their legal representatives. In other instances, a board of trustees are constituted by the appointment of the founders of the institution, or by the Legislature of a state, to whom is committed the oversight of its concerns, and who are consequently the representatives of the founders and patrons of the school.

There are differences between these various modes of organization which I shall not now stop to examine, as it will be sufficiently correct for my purpose to consider them all as only various ways of organizing the employers in the contract by which the teacher is employed. The teacher is the agent; the patrons represented in these several ways are the principals. When, therefore, in the following paragraphs I use the word employers, I mean to be understood to speak of the committee, or the trustees, or the visitors, or the parents themselves, as the case in each particular institution may be; that is, the persons for whose purpose and at whose expense the institution is maintained, or their representatives.

Now there is a very reasonable and almost universally established rule, which teachers are very frequently prone to forget, namely, the employed ought always to be responsible to the employers, and to be under their direction. So obviously reasonable is this rule, and, in fact, so absolutely indispensable in the transaction of all the business of life, that it would be idle to attempt to establish and illustrate it here. It has, however, limitations, and it is applicable to a much greater extent, in some departments of human labor than in others. It is applicable to the business of teaching, and though I confess that it is somewhat less absolute and imperious here, still it is obligatory, I believe, to a far greater extent than teachers have been generally willing to admit.