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VOL. VI.

FEBRUARY, 1906.

THE REACTIONS OF THE TEACHING PROFESSION.

NUMBER 6.

DR. EDWIN HOLT HUGHES, PRESIDENT DE PAUW UNIVERSITY, GREENCASTLE, IND. Inaugural Address before the Indiana State Teachers' Association at Indianapolis, December 27, 1905.) rule of mechanics: The Reactions of the Teaching Profession.

Ordinarily the subjects treated before educational gatherings are in answer to this question: What shall the teacher do with his profession? Whether the themes. relate to preparation, to books, to methods, to biography, to law or to personality, the teacher of teachers almost invariably views the profession as a field to be cultivated. It would be folly to quarrel with this mode of instruction-folly, indeed, to deny that it is primary. The main inquiry in reference to every teacher is just this: What is he doing with his profession with its material equipment, with its intellectual aim, with its social influence, with its moral opportunity? By that question we must all at last be judged.

But the reverse of this inquiry is not often treated. It is quite to our credit that we think so much of our work that we forget ourselves. Of course, sometimes we do deal with the effect of 'our profession upon our own lives; but usually the dealing is fragmentary. It may be doubted whether any teacher present has ever heard any broad discussion of the effect of the profession on the lives of its followers. The most generous among us can scarcely deny that this viewpoint is legitimate-more especially if the whole matter is lifted at length to the heights. It may thus be well to follow a path not often trod, since that path leads to a sacred goal. Therefore we will turn the customary question round about. Instead of asking: What does the teacher do with the profession? we will rather ask, What does the profession do with the teacher? The idea may be focused into a figure of speech, suggested by a

The question roots itself in a general law. The claim of the scientist has been that environment does all sorts of things. Admitting that this word has often been heavily laden, it is still true that it stands for a list of meaningful facts. When the law is studied in the social realm we find one of its most interesting expressions in the influence that any calling has on its followers. The more pronounced the quality of the calling, the more apparent are its characteristics. Commercial travelers can usually be detected on trains or in hotels; horse dealers come to have a kind of trade-mark; business men have a certain uniform of life; doctors carry with them the gravity and odor of their work; judges and lawyers are often apprehended at the bar of public recognition; while preachers sometimes wear about themselves unmistakable labels. And let it be said in whispers there have been a few instances, in the history of mankind when people have said of utter strangers who passed them on the street: "There go some schoolmarms." The air of a calling may amount to a badge.

We may be assured that, if occupations. have effects seen in these superficial signs, they have likewise their deeper reflexes. Action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions. Is not this more than a law of physics? Has it not higher parallels? If so, the teacher stands where the tides flow forth and back again. His life is a life of action, and the reaction is inevitably wrapped up in the process. There is something sub

tle here, and almost hidden-an elusive rebound that is not often brought to account. The teacher has a field, but he is a field; he has pupils, but he is a pupil; he occupies a building, but he is a rising building; he uses books, but he is a book in the making; he shapes his work, but his work shapes him. If all this is onehalf or one-tenth true, we can afford to halt for a while with the reflexive influences of our profession in order that we may understand them better and get from them their peculiar inspirations.

1. In connection with this theme one approaches the financial side of the teacher's life with real hesitancy-not only because it seems a pity to pull down a lofty matter, but also because we know well that in the coarser things the law of rebound works in a limited way. The markets of the world have not yet come under the sway of an ideal ruling-particularly when these markets are related to the upper services of life. Men have not learned how to weigh intellectual and moral work in terms of gold. The effect wrought on young life by a faithful teacher can never be placed on a ledger and made to read: So many quantums of mental culture for so many dollars of money. The scales of humanity are not adjusted to such fine balancing. We must all sympathize with every effort to secure justice of reaction in this respect. When we recall that there was a time in this State and in other States when vigorous objection was urged against any school tax whatever, we can see that an equal rate of progress for another forty years will bring us out of the wilderness into a land that will occasionally suggest milk and honey.

But having said all that we may of the things that hinder a proper financial reaction for the teaching profession, we still do wisely to observe that the law of rebound here is of some effect. It does not work to a nicety: for school-boards and trustees are not perfect yet, neither are the communities that empower them. There still survive some who fear a high rate of taxes more than they fear a low grade of schools. The devotees of the mud-gods are not all vanished. Yet, all

this being admitted, there works a law which fixes grades of financial reaction. One teacher gets $25 per month, another $250. That ten-fold difference is not accounted for by artifice, nor yet by artfulness, but rather by rules of rebound. The one man gives more; hence he gets more. The rules do not act strictly enough to give either man what he ought to have by all the justice of the respective situations; but they do work surely enough to classify teachers on a salary basis. You can not long keep a $3,000 man at a $300 task, nor will any kind of outer prop long hold a $300 man up to a $3,000 height. The rules of the financial reflex may work crudely, but they do take at least a hasty glance at the man before they determine what remuneration to offer.

Hence it is well that at the meeting where we discuss the project of higher wages for teachers, we discuss, also, the relation of study, professional training, and personality to the teacher's life. Men say somewhat scornfully: "If you talk about higher wages, you will get a good attendance;" and we reply somewhat boastingly: "Yes! but if you advertise a poet you will get a better attendance." The splendid army of teachers, marching forth to veritable struggle in every city, town, village and rural seat between the two great seas, is not an array of hirelings. It would be a calamity beyond all reckoning if the time should come when men should enter the service of education under the mercenary prompting. But the danger now lies in quite another direction -a negative peril, and still a very real peril. It must sadden us all to see strong men leaving our profession because they feel that they must make financial proxision for sickness and old age. May the day soon come when the public shall answer the modest prayer of our elan: "Give us neither poverty nor riches!"

But in the long or short meantime the crusade for better teachers must accompany the crusade for better wages. The improvement of the profession will mean the improvement of its pay. We need to educate public sentiment; but we need to educate ourselves. We need to put pres

sure on legislatures; but we need to put pressure on our own natures. We need to estop the election of Lilliputian school boards; but we need to grow up into giant teachers. In short, we ought to make ourselves so big that communities will not dare to offer us so little. And while we wait for the fairer day, we should stress those higher reactions which come, unhindered by legal statutes or false economics, and which are in themselves the truest compensations.

2. Assuredly one of the greatest of these compensations is to be found in the fine recoil of the teacher's work upon his own intellectual life. There are still some accidents in this region-limitations that prevent the buying of books, surroundings that do not call forth enthusiasm, counsels of foolishness that persuade men from the utmost preparation. Yet, taken at its worst, the teaching profession in its nature exercises a most helpful reflex influence on the mental life. It is difficult to see how any one can deal day after day with mind and not get more mind for himself. Cable has in his "Bonaventure" a character of singular charm and pathos. He started his school in one of the parishes of Louisiana while the priest frowned and parents looked on in doubt. But he seized with avidity every suggestion that came his way. He waited eagerly for the arrival of the State's school inspector. One day a gay traveler appeared in the doorway of the wee school; Bonaventure at once takes him for the expected official; with much ceremony he arrays his classes. The deceiving stranger hears the lesson in spelling and finds, to his astonishment, that the children misspelled words only to be complimented by their teacher. Poor Bonaventure did not know how to spell and he was teaching the children his own blunders! The special point now is that he not only misled his pupils, he also confirmed his own mistakes, fastening them more tightly upon his mind with each recitation. He gave errors, and he received his own with usury. And this is precisely what happens when any teacher comes to his work with slovenly preparation. The scholars

suffer; but the teacher suffers, too. Shoddy material has gone into his own intellectual life. His fallacies, made more fallacious by repetition, have returned. to abide with him. Let us believe that it is not specially needful to press this point. We are all quite forefended against this sad reaction by the misery of pretense, the fear of detection, the loss of self-respect-to say nothing of the fact that our reinforced ignorance pours itself back into our own brains.

But we are better protected against the negative reaction than we are prepared for the positive thing. We may let ourselves off when we have done what is fairly respectable when we should hold ourselves grimly to what is fairly possible. That is to say, we may do our good, or even our better, when we ought to do our best, and to try ever to make our best better still. No people in the community have such chances for intellectual culture as have the teachers. For any but a hopelessly sluggish mind there is in the work itself a quickening process. The successful shoemaker may wear poor boots; the successful builder may dwell in a shabby house; the successful jeweler may wear no watch at all; the successful doctor may not be rugged in health; but the teacher must illustrate his work. In a singular way he is bound up with what he does. He must first get for himself what he would give to others. He is to be not merely an agent, but a medium. In all this there is a refreshing effect. The pool that has no exit and that keeps its waters locked within its own narrowness until the resistless fingers of the sun scatter its deposits into vapors becomes a stagnation and a stench; the spring that receives and gives equally, that draws from the depths the floods that fall from the heights and pours them out again upon a thirsty world, keeps itself clear and vital. The sea that has no outlet is always the Dead Sea.

The figure of speech is not overdone. The fact that we are called upon to promote the intellectual development of others is naturally a call to inspire our own minds. It is no accident that practically every great scholar in the world has been

a great teacher. Notice the form of this statement: Practically every great scholar in the world has been a great teacher. Our tendency would be to say that every great teacher has been a great scholar. But this affirmation is scarcely as true as the other. The scholastic, who works in the closet rather than in the school-room, dries up the fountains of his own mental life. He lacks the stimulus of concrete facts, the appeal of the living mind, the passion of a human mission. We may

sometimes say that our work leaves us small time for study; but let us bethink ourselves, also, that our work demands. study. Whenever teacher ceases to palpitate with eagerness for knowledge, let him be frightened until his cheek is fairly blanched by the thought of decline and doom. The great poetess of England writes of a character:

"He taught me all the ignorance of men, And how God laughs in heaven when any

man

Says: Here I'm learned; this I understand; In this I'm never caught at fault or doubt.'"

There is evermore room for improvement. What fields we may traverse in forty or fifty years! What ranges we may climb until we wind our slow and plucky way to the topmost peaks! The intellectual reaction of the profession is incomparable. When this reaction ceases with any of us and we find ourselves held to a level and are content therewith, we shall surely discover that we have likewise ceased to act vigorously and effectively. For the inevitable result of wise and conscientious teaching is a wholesome recoil upon intellectual life. Plato may have made his classes; but the classes helped, also, to make Plato. He may have established the Academy, but the Academy likewise established him.

3. It might not be without profit if we were to consider the social reactions of the teaching profession. But we will pass this by lightly. If we were to treat the parlor idea of the adjective, we would feel that we were dealing with the superficial. We can dismiss this phase by saying that no man's standing in a community suffers because he is a teacher. In

deed, the profession is a passport into the social country. If after our entrance there we know its language and heed its customs, the best doors of our constituency will swing open at our coming. We are so sure of the social standing of our fellow teachers that we will not even discuss it; for the first law of good society is that men shall take themselves for granted. When any man or calling seeks to protect social repute, it is a sign that the standing is thought to be somewhat precarious. We, therefore, compliment the teaching profession by refusing to discuss its social grade.

But there is a broader meaning of the adjective, signifying the impress that a man's total life makes on his fellows. In this connection we need make but one observation: No other profession has been so frequently and successfully used as a stepping-stone as ours. This, in truth, has been one of its disadvantages. A man can become a teacher without financial capital. Hence the profession has often been made a kind of intermediate state between the grim desert of hardship and the fair country of good fortune. If you would know what is meant, read the biographies of ministers, and statesmen, governors, congressmen, judges, senators, and even presidents, and note how many of them were once school teachers. In these cases could be seen many examples of magnificent reaction. It is a fact that these men brought to their temporary calling an earnest spirit: but it is also true that they went out more earnest and with a refined sense of life's value and opportunity. Other callings have been heavy debtors to ours, and we can claim in all soberness that the school has schooled the teachers and that its small dominion has often prepared them for what men would call the wider rulerships.

4. We come now to think of the deepest reflex-that upon the moral life. We do not exaggerate when we say that, even as the world's greatest Teacher was the world's best Man, there has always been a public demand that teachers shall be men of fine character. At the entrance to the profession every candidate meet

this demand. It is universally true that in the long run the success of a life must depend upon the moral confidence which that life commands. The exceptions to this rule are not as many as we may at first think; for the political boss depends for his success upon the confidence he inspires in his henchmen, while the rapacious pirate of industry can not well get on without the confidence of some commercial allies. Hence it is well-nigh a social truism, if not a social axiom, that the success of a life hangs at some point upon moral confidence.

But in the teaching profession this fact is raised to its highest power. The ministerial profession is its only rival here; and, after all, is not the minister a religious teacher? When once the schoolmaster has lost the moral confidence of any considerable portion of his community, it is but a matter of time until he must go elsewhere. Grant that the publie demand is often an impertinence; grant that it sometimes drives the teacher to what he deems a dreary puritanism; grant that in some places its exactions are occasionally an affront to personal independence; grant that the oversight of certain elements in our constituency may be paternal, if not indeed grandmotherly, --still it is an unusual compliment to our work that the public standard sifts our ranks and casts out the doubtful characters. We may draw this strong and final conclusion: The world will never knowingly consent that its young life shall be moulded by unclean hands and that its future citizens shall come under the awful thrall of impure hearts. The teacher thus finds that in his very choice of a profession he has placed himself where it is hard to do wrong. Provided that he does not allow public clamor to make him. play a game of pretense and so to become the victim of unreality, the reaction at this point must be only good.

But this does not express the largest fact. The public sentiment is itself an effect of a large cause; it is created by the nature of the teacher's work. To the conscientious man that work will appeal with far keener exactions than are registered in the public demands.

There will be, first of all, an ever-deepening impression that his work stands for one of the supremest needs of human life. This means that it has its side of benevolence. It is a fact that sometimes we grow weary of this claim, especially when it comes from men whom we suspect not to use it sincerely. But if hypocrisy be the tribute which vice pays to virtue, the protests of the insincere often represent the attitude that true men should seek to hold. It is not contended that a man, in the midst of a profession which supplies his wants, should be ever posing as a philanthropist; but it is insisted that a man should view his work in relation to the needs of life and so should beget the generous temper. He who does not hold this estimate will become more and more of a professionalist and less and less of a man. The person who seeks the best equipment merely because he would get higher wages and more recognition, and not because he would render a finer contribution and a deeper service to humanity. is sinking his manhood in his teacherhood. After all, it is motive that redeems and crowns our labor. Mrs. Browning puts it extremely and picturesquely in the words:

"I would rather dance

At fairs on tight rope, till the babies dropped

Their gingerbread for joy, than shift the types

For tolerable verse, intolerable

To men who act and suffer. Better far Pursue a frivolous trade by serious means Than a sublime art frivolously."

Happily we are not driven to either blunder. It is ours to pursue a sublime art and to do this with an earnest spirit. Every morning the teacher can feel that he goes forth to meet a need of life and so can face his work with moral seriousness. This conception is good for the soul; under it the moral reaction of the profession must reach in wholesome fashion to the very deeps.

This is the manward side, if you please. There is, too, what we may dare to call a godward side. This is true of all honest employment; but with the

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