[18] W.F. Book, Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. i, 1910, p. 195.
CHAPTER XII
The Ideal Teacher[19]
I wish to discuss with you briefly a very commonplace and oft-repeated theme,—a theme that has been handled and handled until its once-glorious raiment is now quite threadbare; a theme so full of pitfalls and dangers for one who would attempt its discussion that I have hesitated long before making a choice. I know of no other theme that lends itself so readily to a superficial treatment—of no theme upon which one could find so easily at hand all of the proverbs and platitudes and maxims that one might desire. And so I cannot be expected to say anything upon this topic that has not been said before in a far better manner. But, after all, very few of our thoughts—even of those that we consider to be the most original and worth while—are really new to the world. Most of our thoughts have been thought before. They are like dolls that are passed on from age to age to be dressed up and decorated to suit the taste or the fashion or the fancy of each succeeding generation. But even a new dress may add a touch of newness to an old doll; and a new phrase or a new setting may, for a moment, rejuvenate an old truth.
The topic that I wish to treat is this, "The Ideal Teacher." And I may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination. This is the essential feature of any ideal. The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics. We take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination a paragon, the counterpart of which could never exist on earth. He would have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their defects and all their inadequacies. He would have the manners of a Chesterfield, the courage of a Winkelried, the imagination of a Dante, the eloquence of a Cicero, the wit of a Voltaire, the intuitions of a Shakespeare, the magnetism of a Napoleon, the patriotism of a Washington, the loyalty of a Bismarck, the humanity of a Lincoln, and a hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of some superlative quality, drawn from the historic figure that represented that quality in richest measure.
And so it is with the ideal teacher: he would combine, in the right proportion, all of the good qualities of all of the good teachers that we have ever known or heard of. The ideal teacher is and always must be a creature, not of flesh and blood, but of the imagination, a child of the brain. And perhaps it is well that this is true; for, if he existed in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us out of business. The relentless law of compensation, which rules that unusual growth in one direction must always be counterbalanced by deficient growth in another direction, is the saving principle of human society. That a man should be superlatively good in one single line of effort is the demand of modern life. It is a platitude to say that this is the age of the specialist. But specialism, while it always means a gain to society, also always means a loss to the individual. Darwin, at the age of forty, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one idea. Twenty years before, he had been a youth of the most varied and diverse interests. He had enjoyed music, he had found delight in the masterpieces of imaginative literature, he had felt a keen interest in the drama, in poetry, in the fine arts. But at forty Darwin quite by accident discovered that these things had not attracted him for years,—that every increment of his time and energy was concentrated in a constantly increasing measure upon the unraveling of that great problem to which he had set himself. And he lamented bitterly the loss of these other interests; he wondered why he had been so thoughtless as to let them slip from his grasp. It was the same old story of human progress; the sacrifice of the individual to the race. For Darwin's loss was the world's gain, and if he had not limited himself to one line of effort, and given himself up to that work to the exclusion of everything else, the world might still be waiting for the Origin of Species, and the revolution in human thought and human life which followed in the wake of that great book. Carlyle defined genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. George Eliot characterized it as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline. But to make the definition complete, we need the formulation of Goethe, who identified genius with the power of concentration: "Who would be great must limit his ambitions; in concentration is shown the Master."
And so the great men of history, from the very fact of their genius, are apt not to correspond with what our ideal of greatness demands. Indeed, our ideal is often more nearly realized in men who fall far short of genius. When I studied chemistry, the instructor burned a bit of diamond to prove to us that the diamond was, after all, only carbon in an "allotropic" form. There seems to be a similar allotropy working in human nature. Some men seem to have all the constituents of genius, but they never reach very far above the plane of the commonplace. They are like the diamond,—except that they are more like the charcoal.
I wish to describe to you a teacher who was not a genius, and yet who possessed certain qualities that I should abstract and appropriate if I were to construct in my imagination an ideal teacher. I first met this man five years ago out in the mountain country. I can recall the occasion with the most vivid distinctness. It was a sparkling morning, in middle May. The valley was just beginning to green a little under the influence of the lengthening days, but on the surrounding mountains the snow line still hung low. I had just settled down to my morning's work when word was brought that a visitor wished to see me, and a moment later he was shown into the office. He was tall and straight, with square shoulders and a deep chest. His hair was gray, and a rather long white beard added to the effect of age, but detracted not an iota from the evidences of strength and vigor. He had the look of a Westerner,—of a man who had lived much of his life in the open. There was a ruggedness about him, a sturdy strength that told of many a day's toil along the trail, and many a night's sleep under the stars.
In a few words he stated the purpose of his visit. He simply wished to do what half a hundred others in the course of the year had entered that office for the purpose of doing. He wished to enroll as a student in the college and to prepare himself for a teacher. This was not ordinarily a startling request, but hitherto it had been made only by those who were just starting out on the highroad of life. Here was a man advanced in years. He told me that he was sixty-five, and sixty-five in that country meant old age; for the region had but recently been settled, and most of the people were either young or middle-aged. The only old men in the country were the few surviving pioneers,—men who had come in away back in the early days of the mining fever, long before the advent of the railroad. They had trekked across the plains from Omaha, and up through the mountainous passes of the Oregon trail; or, a little later, they had come by steamboat from St. Louis up the twelve-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri until their progress had been stopped by the Great Falls in the very foothills of the Rockies. What heroes were these graybeards of the mountains! What possibilities in knowing them, of listening to the recounting of tales of the early days,—of running fights with the Indians on the plains, of ambushments by desperadoes in the mountain passes, of the lurid life of the early mining camps, and the desperate deeds of the Vigilantes! And here, before me, was a man of that type. You could read the main facts of his history in the very lines of his face. And this man—one of that small band whom the whole country united to honor—this man wanted to become a student,—to sit among adolescent boys and girls, listening to the lectures and discussions of instructors who were babes in arms when he was a man of middle life.