Craftsmanship in Teaching

William Chandler Bagley

Informations

• Publié par: osle
• Publié le: 08 décembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 19
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Project Gutenberg eBook, Craftsmanship in Teaching, by William Chandler Bagley This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net Title: Craftsmanship in Teaching Author: William Chandler Bagley Release Date: November 2, 2005 [eBook #16987] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING*** E-text prepared by Barbara Tozier, Janet Blenkinship, Bill Tozier, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/) CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING BY WILLIAM CHANDLER BAGLEY AUTHOR OF "THE EDUCATIVE PROCESS," "CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT," "EDUCATIONAL VALUES," ETC. New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1912 All rights reserved C OPYRIGHT, 1911, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. Set up and electrotyped. Published April, 1911. Reprinted June, October, 1911; May, 1912. Norwood Press J.S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. TO MY PARENTS PREFACE The following papers are published chiefly because they treat in a concrete and personal manner some of the principles which the writer has developed in two previously published books, The Educative Process and Classroom Management, and in a forthcoming volume, Educational Values. It is hoped that the more informal discussions presented in the following pages will, in some slight measure, supplement the theoretical and systematic treatment which necessarily characterizes the other books. In this connection, it should be stated that the materials of the first paper here presented were drawn upon in writing Chapter XVIII of Classroom Management, and that the second paper simply states in a different form the conclusions reached in Chapter I of The Educative Process. The writer is indebted to his colleague, Professor L.F. Anderson, for many criticisms and suggestions and to Miss Bernice Harrison for invaluable aid in editing the papers for publication. But his heaviest debt, here as elsewhere, is to his wife, to whose encouraging sympathy and inspiration whatever may be valuable in this or in his other books must be largely attributed. U RBANA, ILLINOIS, MARCH 1, 1911 CONTENTS PREFACE I—C RAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING II—OPTIMISM IN TEACHING III—H OW MAY WE PROMOTE THE EFFICIENCY OF THE TEACHING FORCE? IV—THE TEST OF EFFICIENCY IN SUPERVISION V—THE SUPERVISOR AND THE TEACHER VI—EDUCATION AND U TILITY VII—THE SCIENTIFIC SPIRIT IN EDUCATION VIII—THE POSSIBILITY OF TRAINING C HILDREN TO STUDY IX—A PLEA FOR THE D EFINITE IN EDUCATION X—SCIENCE AS R ELATED TO THE TEACHING OF LITERATURE XI—THE N EW ATTITUDE TOWARD D RILL XII—THE IDEAL TEACHER CRAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING CHAPTER I C RAFTSMANSHIP IN TEACHING [1] I "In the laboratory of life, each newcomer repeats the old experiments, and laughs and weeps for himself. We will be explorers, though all the highways have their guideposts and every bypath is mapped. Helen of Troy will not deter us, nor the wounds of Cæsar frighten, nor the voice of the king crying 'Vanity!' from his throne dismay. What wonder that the stars that once sang for joy are dumb and the constellations go down in silence."—ARTHUR SHERBURNE H ARDY : The Wind of Destiny . We tend, I think, to look upon the advice that we give to young people as something that shall disillusionize them. The cynic of forty sneers at what he terms the platitudes of commencement addresses. He knows life. He has been behind the curtains. He has looked upon the other side of the scenery,—the side that is just framework and bare canvas. He has seen the ugly machinery that shifts the stage setting—the stage setting which appears so impressive when viewed from the front. He has seen the rouge on the cheeks that seem to blush with the bloom of youth and beauty and innocence, and has caught the cold glint in the eyes that, from the distance, seem to languish with tenderness and love. Why, he asks, should we create an illusion that must thus be rudely dispelled? Why revamp and refurbish the old platitudes and dole them out each succeeding year? Why not tell these young people the truth and let them be prepared for the fate that must come sooner or later? But the cynic forgets that there are some people who never lose their illusions, —some men and women who are always young,—and, whatever may be the type of men and women that other callings and professions desire to enroll in their service, this is the type that education needs. The great problem of the teacher is to keep himself in this class, to keep himself young, to preserve the very things that the cynic pleases to call the illusions of his youth. And so much do I desire to impress these novitiates into our calling with the necessity for preserving their ideals that I shall ask them this evening to consider with me some things which would, I fear, strike the cynic as most illusionary and impractical. The initiation ceremonies that admitted the young man to the privileges and duties of knighthood included the taking of certain vows, the making of certain pledges of devotion and fidelity to the fundamental principles for which chivalry stood. And I should like this evening to imagine that these graduates are undergoing an analogous initiation into the privileges and duties of schoolcraft, and that these vows which I shall enumerate, embody some of the ideals that govern the work of that craft. II And the first of these vows I shall call, for want of a better term, the vow of "artistry,"—the pledge that the initiate takes to do the work that his hand finds to do in the best possible manner, without reference to the effort that it may cost or to the reward that it may or may not bring. I call this the vow of artistry because it represents the essential attitude of the artist toward his work. The cynic tells us that ideals are illusions of youth, and yet, the other day I saw expressed in a middle-aged working-man a type of idealism that is not at all uncommon in this world. He was a house painter; his task was simply the prosaic job of painting a door; and yet, from the pains which he took with that work, an observer would have concluded that it was, to the painter, the most important task in the world. And that, after all, is the true test of craft artistry: to the true craftsman the work that he is doing must be the most important thing that can be done. One of the best teachers that I know is that kind of a craftsman in education. A student was once sent to observe his work. He was giving a lesson upon the "attribute complement" to an eighthgrade grammar class. I asked the student afterward what she had got from her visit. "Why," she replied, "that man taught as if the very greatest achievement in life would be to get his pupils to understand the attribute complement,—and when he had finished, they did understand it." In a narrower sense, this vow of artistry carries with it an appreciation of the value of technique. From the very fact of their normal school training, these graduates already possess a certain measure of skill, a certain mastery of the technique of their craft. This initial mastery has been gained in actual contact with the problems of school work in their practice teaching. They have learned some of the rudiments; they have met and mastered some of the rougher, cruder difficulties. The finer skill, the delicate and intangible points of technique, they must acquire, as all beginners must acquire them, through the strenuous processes of self-discipline in the actual work of the years that are to come. This is a process that takes time, energy, constant and persistent application. All that this school or any school can do for its students in this respect is to start them upon the right track in the acquisition of skill. But do not make the mistake of assuming that this is a small and unimportant matter. If this school did nothing more than this, it would still repay tenfold the cost of its establishment and maintenance. Three fourths of the failures in a world that sometimes seems full of failures are due to nothing more nor less than a wrong start. In spite of the growth of professional training for teachers within the past fifty years, many of our lower schools are still filled with raw recruits, fresh from the high schools and even from the grades, who must learn every practical lesson of teaching through the medium of their own mistakes. Even if this were all, the process would involve a tremendous and uncalled-for waste. But this is not all; for, out of this multitude of untrained teachers, only a small proportion ever recognize the mistakes that they make and try to correct them. To you who are beginning the work of life, the mastery of technique may seem a comparatively unimportant matter. You recognize its necessity, of course, but you think of it as something of a mechanical nature,—an integral part of the day's work, but uninviting in itself,—something to be reduced as rapidly as possible to the plane of automatism and dismissed from the mind. I believe that you will outgrow this notion. As you go on with your work, as you increase in skill, ever and ever the fascination of its technique will take a stronger and stronger hold upon you. This is the great saving principle of our workaday life. This is the factor that keeps the toiler free from the deadening effects of mechanical routine. It is the factor that keeps the farmer at his plow, the artisan at his bench, the lawyer at his desk, the artist at his palette. I once worked for a man who had accumulated a large fortune. At the age of seventy-five he divided this fortune among his children, intending to retire; but he could find pleasure and comfort only in the routine of business. In six months he was back in his office. He borrowed twenty-five thousand dollars on his