Craftsmanship in Teaching

by William C. Bagley

I refer to this hypothetical case to show the extreme difficulty of reaching anything more than hypotheses by a priori reasoning. We have a certain number of fairly well established general principles in secondary education. Perhaps those most frequently employed are our generalizations regarding adolescence and its influences upon the mental and especially the emotional life of high-school pupils. Stanley Hall's work in this field is wonderfully stimulating and suggestive, and yet we should not forget that most of his generalizations are, after all, only plausible hypotheses to be acted upon as tentative guides for practice and to be tested carefully under controlled conditions, rather than to be accepted as immutable and unchangeable laws. We sometimes assume that all high-school pupils are adolescents, when the likelihood is that an appreciable proportion of pupils in the first two years have not yet reached this important node of their development.

I say this not to minimize in any way the importance that attaches to adolescent characteristics, but rather to suggest that you who are daily dealing with these pupils can in the aggregate add immeasurably to the knowledge that we now have concerning this period. A tremendous waste is constantly going on in that most precious of all our possible resources,—namely, human experience. How many problems that are well solved have to be solved again and again because the experience has not been crystallized in a well-tested fact or principle; how many experiences that might be well worth the effort that they cost are quite worthless because, in undergoing them, we have neglected some one or another of the rules that govern inexorably the validity of our inferences and conclusions. That is all that the scientific method means in the last analysis: it is a system of principles that enable us to make our experience worth while in meeting later situations. We all have the opportunity of contributing to the sum total of human knowledge, if only we know the rules of the game.

I said that one way of solving these subordinate problems that arise in the realization of our chief aims in teaching is the a priori method of applying general principles to the problems. Another method is to imitate the way in which we have seen some one else handle the situation. Now this may be the most effective way possible. In fact, if a sufficient number of generations of teachers keep on blindly plunging in and floundering about in solving their problems, the most effective methods will ultimately be evolved through what we call the process of trial and error. The teaching of the very oldest subjects in the curriculum is almost always the best and most effective teaching, for the very reason that the blundering process has at last resulted in an effective procedure. But the scientific method of solving problems has its very function in preventing the tremendous waste that this process involves. English literature is a comparatively recent addition to the secondary curriculum. Its possibilities of service are almost unlimited. Shall we wait for ten or fifteen generations of teachers to blunder out the most effective means of teaching it, or shall we avail ourselves of these simple principles which will enable us to concentrate this experience within one or two generations?

I should like to emphasize one further point. No one has greater respect than I have for what we term experience in teaching. But let me say that a great deal of what we may term "crude" experience—that is, experience that has not been refined by the application of scientific method—is most untrustworthy,—unless, indeed, it has been garnered and winnowed and sifted through the ages. Let me give you an example of some accepted dictums of educational experience that controlled investigations have shown to be untrustworthy.

It is a general impression among teachers that specific habits may be generalized; that habits of neatness and accuracy developed in one line of work, for example, will inevitably make one neater and more accurate in other things. It has been definitely proved that this transfer of training does not take place inevitably, but in reality demands the fulfillment of certain conditions of which education has become fully conscious only within a comparatively short time, and as a result of careful, systematic, controlled experimentation. The meaning of this in the prevention of waste through inadequate teaching is fully apparent.

Again, it has been supposed by many teachers that the home environment is a large factor in the success or failure of a pupil in school. In every accurate and controlled investigation that has been conducted so far it has been shown that this factor in such subjects as arithmetic and spelling at least is so small as to be absolutely negligible in practice.

Some people still believe that a teacher is born and not made, and yet a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency. In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,—for twenty-eight per cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against forty-four per cent of the college graduates. These investigations, I may add, were made by university professors, and I am giving them here in a university classroom and as a university representative. And of course I shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important essential. Our mistake has been in assuming sometimes that it is the only essential.

Very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. Most teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and repetition is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. Every time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has unmistakably confirmed this belief. Some very recent investigations made by Mr. Brown at the Charleston Normal School show conclusively that five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes.

Other similar cases could be cited, but I have probably said enough to make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways—first by the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the principles of control and test which are now at our service, and which permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of trial and error could not encompass in a millennium.

The teaching of English merits treatment by this method. I recommend strongly that you give the plan a trial. You may not get immediate results. You may not get valuable results. But in any case, if you carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and, whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already imbued with them. I always tell my students that, even in the study of science itself, it is the ideals of science,—the ideals of patient, thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,—it is these ideals that are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,—and these latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress and our present amenities of life.