THE TEACHER
The Greatest Factor.—Now, although we may have a beautiful school campus, an adequate and artistic building, a library, laboratories and workshops with all necessary physical or material appointments complete, we may yet have a poor school; these things, however desirable, will not teach alone. The teacher is the mainspring, the soul of the school; the "plant," as it may be called, is only the body. A great person is one with a great soul, not necessarily with a great body. Hence it is that a great teacher with poor buildings and inferior equipments is incomparably better than great buildings and equipments without a competent teacher.
What Education Is.—Education is essentially and largely the stimulation and transformation of one mind or personality by another. It is the impression of one great mind or soul upon another, giving it a manner of spirit, a bent, an attitude, as well as a thirst for knowledge. This is too often lost sight of in the complexity of things. Many people are inclined to think that educational equipment and machinery alone will educate. There is nothing further from the truth. Mark Hopkins would be a great teacher without equipment; buildings, grounds, apparatus, and laboratories will not really educate without a great personality behind the desk. There is probably nothing more inspiring, more suggesting, more stimulating, or more transforming than intimate contact with great minds. Thought like water seeks its level, and for children to come into living and loving communication with a great teacher is a real uplift and an education in itself.
As a saw will not saw without some extraneous power to give it motion, neither will the gun do execution without the man behind it. The locomotive is not greater than the man at the throttle, and the ship without the man at the helm flounders aimlessly upon the sea. Just so, a great personality must be behind the teacher's desk or there cannot be in any sense a real school.
What the Real Teacher Is.—The true teacher is an inspirer; that is, he breathes into his pupils his spirit, his love of learning, his method of study, his ideals. He is a real leader in every way. Children—and we are all children to a certain extent—are great imitators, and so the pupils tend to become like the teacher.
The true teacher stimulates to activity by example. Where you find such a teacher, things are constantly "doing"; people are thinking and talking school all the time; education is in the atmosphere. The real teacher is, to use a popular phrase, a "live wire." Something new is undertaken every day. He is a man of initiative and push, and withal he is a man of sincerity and tact. While he is retrospective and circumspective he is also prospective—he is a man of the far-look-ahead type.
A Hypnotist.—The teacher is in the true sense a suggester of good things. He is an educational hypnotist. The longer I continue to teach the more am I impressed with the fact that suggestion is the great art of the teacher. Hence the true teacher is the leader and not the driver.
Untying Knots.—A man once said that the best lesson he ever learned in school was the lesson of "untying knots." He meant, of course, that every problem that was thrown to the school by the teacher was "tackled" in the right spirit by the pupils. They investigated it and analyzed it; they peered into it and through it to find all the strands of relationship existing in it. It would be easier, of course, for the teacher under these circumstances merely to cut the knot and have it all done with, but this would be poor teaching. This would be telling, not teaching. This would lead to passivity and not to activity on the part of the pupils. And it may be said here that constant and too much telling is probably the greatest and most widespread mistake in teaching. Teachers are constantly cutting the knots for children who should be left to untie them for themselves. To untie a knot is to see through and through a subject, to see all around it, to see the various relations of its parts and, consequently, to understand it. This is solving a problem; it is dissolving it; that is, the problem becomes a part of the pupil's own mind, and, having made it a part of himself, he understands it and never forgets it.
This is the difference between not being able to remember and not being able to forget. In the former case the so-called knowledge is not a part of oneself; it is not vital. The roots do not penetrate beneath the surface of our minds; they are, as it were, merely stuck on; the mental sap does not circulate. In the latter case the knowledge is real; it is alive and growing; there is a vital connection between it and ourselves. It would be as difficult to tear it from us as it would to have our hearts torn out and still live.