METHODS OF TEACHING.

PART I.

GENERAL PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION.

CHAPTER I.

SCHOOLS AND SCHOOL-TEACHING.

I. GENERAL REMARKS.

THERE is a profession of law, of medicine, and of theology: is there a profession of teaching? The skilful practice of any pursuit is termed an art: is there an art of teaching? There seems to be a popular opinion handed down from the past that anybody who has been "educated" can teach school; and that there is no art of teaching, no science underlying the practice of teaching, and therefore no profession of teaching. In most parts of our country, the impression prevails that anybody who can pass an examination and get a certificate is a duly qualified teacher, and, consequently, that no specific preparation for teaching is necessary other than personal experience derived from actual work in the schoolroom. And there is some ground for this opinion. Out of 300,000 teachers in the United States, not more than one in ten is a graduate of the normal school; of the remaining nine tenths, some have fitted themselves by thorough self-cult

ure to do the best kind of professional work, but more are merely unskilled school-keepers. Of this latter class, most have gained little by experience except a narrow conceit in their own empirical methods. Knowing nothing whatever of modern investigations in physiology, biology, and sociology, they sneer at all attempts at formulating the principles of teaching into a science.

In our educational centres, however, it is evident that the opinion is steadily gaining ground that education is based upon scientific principles, and that there ought to be a profession of teaching. The number of normal schools grows larger year by year. In several cities only normal graduates are employed as teachers; and in many places the preference is given to professionally trained teachers. Moreover, teachers' institutes and associations are diffusing a professional spirit more and more widely; the number of men and women who read educational journals and imbibe their progressive spirit is far in excess of former times; and, at length, some school-officers, and a few thinkers among citizens at large, begin to give evidence of a nebulous perception of the truth that teachers, as well as lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and artisans, need special training for their business.

II. THE SCIENCE OF TEACHING.

"In every department of human affairs," says John Stuart Mill, "practice long precedes, science; systematic inquiry into the modes of action of the powers of nature is the tardy product of a long course of efforts to use those powers for practical ends."

The science of teaching is a classification of principles derived by observation, investigation, and experience from

a knowledge of things to be taught, and from a study of the child to be trained. The object of school education is to aid the mental, moral, and physical development of the child by means of appropriate training and instruction in the kinds of knowledge required by existing social conditions as an outfit for the duties of life. From age to age school instruction has been modified to meet the new wants of each succeeding generation occasioned by each successive advance in civilization.

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The child, too, is a variable factor. It is an old saying that human nature is the same in all ages the world over; but this proverb, despite the wisdom of our ancestors, is a fallacy. The child is not plastic clay in the hands of the potter, nor a sheet of blank paper to be written upon; on the contrary, it is a bundle of inherited tendencies and capacities. Education merely aids development, and directs latent tendencies; it cannot create powers, and often fails to control them. Teaching, therefore, must depend in a great measure upon the transmitted nature of the child to be taught. The child of prehistoric man, born in some cave at the close of the last glacial period, had little except form in common with children now living in New York, London, or Berlin. It is evident that the child of an Apache Indian or an Australian savage cannot be trained successfully by the educational processes which are adapted to the hereditary capacities of children that represent the highest type of human development.

Hence no one particular age can prescribe the methods of education for succeeding ages; no one nation for all other nations; no one race for all other races. Schools are an organic growth of society. They represent, more

or less perfectly, the wants and spirit of a nation. Modern methods of teaching should therefore represent the existing state of knowledge and civilization, not the obsolete learning or methods of past ages; but traditional culture, like customs, manners, habits, and laws, too often holds sway long after the causes that organized it have ceased to act. "Like political constitutions," says Herbert Spencer, "educational systems are not made, but grow, and within brief periods growth is insensible."

While it cannot be claimed as yet that teaching is a fully developed science, great progress has been made in formulating the principles that underlie the best of our present methods of instruction. Educational history is full of errors, most of which were the result of empirical methods. Experience in this field, as in every other, in order to be of any value, must be the result of experiments directed by the light of science, and must have for its objective point the welfare of every child in the nation. "No matter how limited the strictly scientific domain of education is considered to be," says Mr. Soldan, of St. Louis, "it cannot be denied that there is such a science; and it should be mastered before the practical duties of teaching are assumed. In other pursuits the tyro may be allowed to spoil and waste the first piece of work, but in teaching the material is too precious to admit of useless experiment."

"Our teachers," says Mr. E. L. Youmans, Editor of the Popular Science Monthly, etc., "mostly belong to the old dispensation. Their preparation is chiefly literary. Their art is a mechanical routine; and hence, very naturally, while admitting the importance of advancing views, they really cannot see what is to be done about it. When