THE TEACHER’S LIFE

Evening Star, Issue 19326, 12 August 1926, Page 10

THE TEACHER’S LIFE

A NOVEL SUGGESTION THREE PERIODS OF TRAUJING No one ought to be a echool master more than fourteen years.—Dr Vv'estcott. How long should a teacher tench r This question is raised in a searching manner by a correspondent of ‘ The Times Educational Supplement,’ who makes a drastic, suggestion. Me quote the concluding portion of his contribution :—■ We got a little nearer the evil, perhaps, by considering the nature of the temptation that besots us as teachers tsays the writer). We are in contact with unformed minds, with scholars who have less knowledge than ourselves, with children over whom we can exercise authority. From this point of view our work is too easy, and easily begets pretence. We can pose before our class, suggesting directly or indirectly that we know more than wo do, handing over the results of another’s efforts without acknowledging our indebtedness. We get more and more familiar with our task as wc repeat it, and we consequently expend in it less and less effort. * The experienced teacher is sometimes little more than an experienced automaton, and his apparent gain is more than counterbalanced by the loss of effort, of creative sense, of enthusiastic discovery, which his increasing facility in technique has destroyed. - . There is probably no work which mav make so great or so small a demand on a man’s personality as teaching. For he may give all his facilities, all his powers, all his passion, to the task, or he may give merely his acquired habits, thereby wrecking the personality upon which he makes no demands. It is in this sense that wo may ho out of touch with reality, for wo are cutting ourselves off from the most real part of life, our own inward self. We lose our sense of true values, wo substitute means for ends, wo become more and more dead to the adventure of life. Main- of our schools are clinked with this encumbrance; why, then, should wo bo impatient if onlookers gibe at our dullness? Young teachers frequently express their dissatisfaction with the older teachers under whom they begin their work, and the older teachers nearly as frequently resent the attitude assumed. It is partlv a, case of the dissonance of age and vouth, but its intensity is a measure of the reality of the evils of the teaching world. It should warn us all of the danger we are in. It is not a habit of young men and young women to think o! themselves “ forty years on”; and few. if any, realise what they will themselves he like when a life of teaching has changed and moulded their development. Their chains will he forged imperceptibly, their ideas will turn more and more round a fixed point, their minds will develop more and more slowly. If youth could see itself in old age. would ilio world survive such a revelation ? Is there a remedy? It is no exaggeration to say that the most, potent factor in ihe teacher’s atrophy is his classroom isolation. There are teachers who literally spend their' working -life in a classroom in. The pernetual company of their scholars. They may exchange no ideas with adults save in routine business, they _ mav never see another teacher exercising Iris craft, i.hev may never sec another school at work, they may never receive a f-ompel-liiur stimulus to hoh) them to redirect their attention to their problems,_they may never realise that 1 teaching is an art of infinite variety. These are haunting facts. They mean that their daily work, their life work,' can give them no adeonate task, no proper challenge, no satisfying in(erects. It, is not in this way that'.the artistic sense is strengthened, it is the way in which the mere routinist is confirmed in his (mbits. If the leaching world is to save its soul alive it must not remain for ever in its classrooms.

Is not the only hone of solution to be found iu our methods of training

teachers? The present system concentrates all its energies on the earh period, and turns out a young teacho: in his early twenties, asking no mop questions throughout that long perioi of forty years’ service. Common sensi suggests that the method is ludicrous!;wrong. There are comparatively few minds that would not stagnate undei such easy conditions. The teaching profession, moreover, has steadily moved towards a condition of affairs in which stimuli to effort have rapidly diminished. In an earlierday the teacher who grew inert lost his pupils, and with them his salary. Or he incurred the displeasure of His Majesty’s inspector and was reduced in status. Or ho vexed the managers and governors of the school, and was discharged. Because of the abuses of these powers the teachers fought for and secured a living salary, regularly graded and certain increments, unification of professional qualifications, and security of tenure, with the result that, while the artificial and perhaps immoral stimuli have been abolished, nothing has taken their place. Without any increase of cost_ the amount of money spent in the training of teachers could ho distributed over a longer period. The preliminary period could bo cut down to a minimum, to be followed, after an interval, by a soeend course, and after a longer interval, by a third. Our training colleges would then hold novitiates, journeymen, and craftsmen, and the expression “ trained teacher ” might die a proper death. We are all teachers in process of training, and the process is lifelong. It would he pure gain to the training colleges to have a stream of teachers returning from tho schools, with leisure and freedom to analyse the problems they have discovered, and with experience wherewith to challenge the theories of the lecture room.

As their needs and their interests would differ so widely, so would tho methods of the training have to become more and more individual. The special interests which the teacher would bring back must he fed and nurtured at all costs, and the regulations should be framed in such a way as to allow all conceivable variations. By such means Dr Westcott’s term of fourteen years might ho extended and its implied sting removed ._ It is difficult to see iu what other direction we can look for such far-reaching reforms as would follow from this simple change.