On the Firing Line in Education

in the Exchange Lectureship existing between the University of Manitoba and the Univ

niversity of North Dakota, for the current year, I made inquiry as to the nature of the different groups of peop

t would be, of the more thoughtful and intelligent people of the community, Universit

e. This is true because in such a state and with such a people, the state or provincial university is the recognized leader of thought and action. And this is true since the one great function of such an institution is to take the choice youth and maidens from the various secti

etic prowess? Its beautiful campus? Why, no, of course not. Not any one of these nor all of them combined, complete and extended and excellent as they may be, or as useful as they all are, ever yet made or ever can make a great university. A real university, or any other institution of lea

not misunderstand me. I am not inveighing against these things; they are necessary. What I am insisting upon is that not things but teachers make a university. And so my topic, "The University and the Teacher," launches us at once into the midst

the meeting together of speaker and audience will be the direct outcome of their thoughts and not of his words. So, after having thus spoken briefly of the university as a whole-of its place in the state, its great influence and that of its teaching body-I invite you to think with m

hers the Univers

scussion of this sub-topic. The development of a competent leadership is the all-embracing function of such an institution, but that can not be done save as the institution is, at the same time, thru some or all of its teachers, keeping fully abreast, or well in the lead, of the discovery of new knowledge and of new applications of knowl

t one side; we must also have men of vision, men of great breadth of view, men of broad human sympathies, men who can take this knowledge, old and new, and with it, as educative material, help to shape opinions, and mold characters, and fashion destinies, thus transf

the spirit of discovery alive and active in the land, and also that he may invite his students to drink at a living stream instead of a stagnant pool. The teacher who is not also a student, and continually working at it, is usually but a poor teacher. But while all this is true, it is probably true also that no person is equally successful in both fields. Some men are primarily teachers-are in their element in the classroom engaged with the problems of the student but only indifferently successful in the laboratory, while others, at home in the laboratory, are somewhat out of place and il

d and who also greatly desires to take knowledge as an instrument and with it develop boys and girls and equip them for leadership in the great world of action. S

n the manner of conducting the same. Likewise, if he is to be a teacher, he should be well grounded in the theory and art of teaching. If he is going to shape opinions, mold character, give points of view, develop human minds, then it goes without saying that his preparation should have included a very thoro study of the human mind in its various

y Teacher in

ust treated. It is so intimate that perhaps discretion would be the better part of valor, but since I am at a conside

" President Foster of Reed College, Oregon, puts it thus: "It is possible to graduate from almost any college without an idea in one's head." Professor Wenley, Head of the Department of Philosophy in Michigan University, had about the same thought when he gave me his original definition of an American college as "A so-called institution of higher learning wh

ons entered into in an effort to discover the cause. The outcome of all such consideration, so far as I am able to learn, throws the responsibility upon the teacher rather than upon the institution as a whole, and upon his teaching ability rather than upon any lack of knowledge. We cannot teach, it is said.

here is no learning, there can have been no teaching. "Learning is not merely the correlative idea of teaching, but is one of its constituent elements." No matter how much an instructor may know, no matter how much he may say nor what he may do, if he doesn't cause

our best teaching is done in the elementary grades, second best in the high schools, and poorest in the higher institutions. Another puts it thus: "We have excellent teaching in the lower primary grades and in the graduate schools, but between these two extremes, we can call it tea

atter of erudition. But they have not given any reflective thought to the art of teaching. They have not made a study of the human mind in its development in order to know how it receives knowledge as mental nourishment, and to understand the assimilative process; they have not given themselves to a systematic and scientific study of human life so as to know how to handle it in its various moods and characteristics. How differently these good people would have planned if

re: "I, O man of Athens, have never learned the medical art from any one, nor have been desirous that any physician should be my instructor; for I have constantly been on my guard, not only against learning anything

e two together in a helpful manner. Of the three, I am afraid that university instructors have, in the main, but the first. At any rate, all they know of the other two is of an empirical character and what they have picked up incidentally. There are exceptions, to be sure. Every worthy i

ty president just quoted, "a raw doctor fresh from three years of graduate work," he probably begins by copying the methods of procedure of his own rec

cism. It would have been all right for that young doctor (he was younger than I was at that time) to deal with the facts of textual criticism, with some people, at some time, but it was all wrong for him to attempt to give those facts to us in our freshman year in the College of Arts. They were not adapted to our intellectual needs. They did not fit into our mental stomachs. We could not keep them down, or in, or something. But the pathetic fact was that the instructor did not know that they did not fit. I, being older than many in the class and thus appreciat

e this very year by young doctors and by old doctors and by many who are not doctors at all, in one subject or another, in well-nigh every college or university in the United States. Our instructors do not know well

as the food is adapted to the organism. And just as much care as our scientific dietitians give to our dining-room service, our university instructors should give to the mental and moral pabulum that they serve to their students, especially the

tion." I am afraid that he is correct. I am very much afraid that that is mainly what we are doing. But it is wrong. The greater part of our work should not be to impart knowledge. It should be to assist in interpreting the knowledge that the student himself gets-to fit it to his own life needs and to help him learn how to study and h

ecause it is easy. How much easier it is than to conduct a real live recitation in which there is the give and take, the action and reaction, of eager vigorous young minds, where the instructor is the agency of interpretation and the inspiration! To conduct such an exercise with f

d his lectures from manuscript. We were supposed to put into our note books every golden word that dropt from his inspired lips. And the most of us tried to do so, and in the effort got down some that were not golden. I did as the rest did till one day, fresh from the lecture, I went into the library and chanced upon a copy of Burt's "History of Greek Philosophy." I opened

ds carry more weight than do mine-Nicholas Murray Butler, President of Columbia University-(Ed. Rev. Apr., 1915, p. 399): "To use-or rather to abuse-the academic lecture by making it a medium for the conveyance of mere information is to shut one's eyes to the fa

vanced courses, especially in the sciences, where an instructor is doing both lines of university work-carrying on research and giving his adva

bject or with new phases of an old subject not yet covered by a satisfactory text. But here it need not continue long because some enterprising instructor will soon satisfy the need. The formal lecture has therefore no place in the earlier and b

not all. Every institution has some good teachers, some very excellent ones, but no institution is overstockt with species of that genus. The great majority of our undergraduates are poorly taught. That examination mortality is not greater than it is is due to two fine qualities, one in the student body

er the State or the governing board of the college shall demand professional preparation of every one allowed to occupy a teaching position, just as we do now for positions in the elementary and secondary schools. And if any one should raise a question as to the value of such preparation, my only but all-sufficient answer is to point to the universally recognized improvement in the character of teaching in those parts of our educational system since that requirement was put into effect. And the second needed change is this-for Presid

he last of my t

ard the Preparation of Teache

e University-to provide leaders-the answer to the question is at once apparent. The logic of the situation is clear. For what other body of people in a state are so clearly the state's leaders as the teachers? Always intellectually and, for the most part, in these

zen of these institutions. North Dakota has three. The course of study covers from one to two years' work in advance of a four-year high school course. In the East it is usually

inds, and teachers for college and university positions. And this latter is a work, it seems to me, the State University must perform. They are already doing this, to quite an extent, for the high schools; a

Our system of education was not planned at the beginning from a careful theoretical study of our present or prospective educat

t a betterment of conditions. They quickly put the finger upon the sore spot-the poor quality of teaching being done in the schools. A remedy was sought. It was found in the European Normal Schools, an institution devoted to the professional preparation of teachers for the elementary schools. An agitation was begun for its establishment on this side of the water. After

ion. But when, after the Civil War, the high schools began to develop so markedly, the problem of teachers became a pressing one. Since teachers with normal school preparation were everywhere being re

Regents established a chair called the "Theory and Art of Teaching." The example was followed by others, and, tho limited in scope and experimental in character, it was at once seen to be justified in the improved character of high school teaching. Improvements were sure to follow. The next step was the expansion of the department of education into the Teachers Colleg

ive or six years, however, several others have fallen into line including such institutions as Missouri, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. The institutions that have not yet effected this change and thus organized schools of education still maintain their Departments of Education and thus try to satisfy the need. The University of North Dakota was also one of the

and as irrevocable, as tho produced by deductive reasoning. An explanation of a statement made earlier in the paper as to the relative teaching

ity toward the education of teachers? Let

And this demand, like the others, is no longer confined to professional schools or educational journals-to the people from the inside. It is being taken up by laymen, even the daily papers, and prest with some vigor. To give the point of view, I give a single quotation from an editorial in a recent issue of the Minneapolis Journal: "None of our graduate schools require any course in education or teaching methods, or

others. And as a result the teaching of our undergraduates will be improved. To do this added work, however, will not require

become competent lawyers and judges to secure the administration of justice, and thru its College of Engineering, its engineers to safeguard property, public welfare and life itself, so, thru its School of Education, it must provide

he university, must ere long be recognized, by virtue of the work thus forced upon it