Chapter XII: The Ideal Teacher 229 (7)

Now it seemed to me that this school was operated with a minimum of waste or loss. Every item of energy that the pupils possessed was being given to some educative activity. Nothing was lost by conflict between pupil and teacher. Nothing was lost by bursts of anger or by fits of depression. These sources of waste had been eliminated so far as I could determine. The pupils could read well and write well and cipher accurately. They even took a keen delight in the drills. And I found that this phase of their work was enlightened by the modern content that had been introduced. In their handwork and manual training they could see that arithmetic was useful,--that it had something to do with the great big buzzing life of the outer world. They learned that spelling was useful in writing,--that it was not something that began and ended within the covers of the spelling book, but that it had a real and vital relation to other things that they found to be important. They had their dramatic exercises in which they and their fellows, and, on occasions, their parents, took a keen delight, and they were glad to afford them pleasure and to receive congratulations at the close. And yet they found that, in order to do these things well, they must read and study and drill on speaking. They liked to have their drawings inspected and praised at the school exhibitions, but they soon found that good drawing and painting and designing were strictly conditioned by a mastery of technique, and they wished to master technique in order to win these rewards.

Now what was the secret of the efficiency of this school? Not merely the fact that it had introduced certain types of content such as drawing, manual training, domestic science, dramatization, story work,--but also that it had not lost sight of the fundamental purpose of elementary education, but had so organized all of its studies that each played into the hands of the others, and that everything that was done had some definite and tangible relation to everything else. The manual training exercises and the mechanical drawing were exercises in arithmetic, but, let me remind you, there were other lessons, and formal lessons, in arithmetic as well. But the one exercise enlightened and made more meaningful the other. In the same way the story and dramatization were intimately related to the reading and the language, but there were formal lessons in reading and formal lessons in language. The geography illustrated nature study and employed language and arithmetic and drawing in its exercises. And so the whole structure was organized and coherent and unified, and what was taught in one class was utilized in another. There was no needless duplication, no needless or meaningless repetition. But repetition there was, over and over again, but always it was effective in still more firmly fixing the habits.

One would be an ingrate, indeed, if one failed to recognize the great good that an extreme reform movement may do. Some very precious increments of progress have resulted even from the most extreme and ridiculous reactions against the drill and formalism of the older schools. Let me briefly summarize these really substantial gains as I conceive them.

In the first place, we have come to recognize distinctly the importance of enlisting in the service of habit building the native instincts of the child. Up to a certain point nature provides for the fixing of useful responses, and we should be unwise not to make use of these tendencies. In the spontaneous activities of play, certain fundamental reactions are continually repeated until they reach the plane of absolute mechanism. In imitating the actions of others, adjustments are learned and made into habits without effort; in fact, the process of imitation, so far as it is instinctive, is a source of pure delight to the young child. Finally, closely related to these two instincts, is the native tendency to repetition,--nature's primary provision for drill. You have often heard little children repeat their new words over and over again. Frequently they have no conception of the meanings of these words. Nature seems to be untroubled by a question that has bothered teachers; namely, Should a child ever be asked to drill on something the purpose of which he does not understand? Nature sees to it that certain essential responses become automatic long before the child is conscious of their meaning. Just because nature does this is, of course, no reason why we should imitate her. But the fact is an interesting commentary upon the extreme to which we sometimes carry our principle of rationalizing everything before permitting it to be mastered.

I repeat that the reform movement has done excellent service in extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn adaptive instincts,--play, imitation, and rhythmic repetition. It has erred when it has insisted that we could depend upon these alone, for nature has adapted man, not to the complicated conditions of our modern highly organized social life, but rather to primitive conditions. Left to themselves, these instinctive forces would take the child up to a certain point, but they would still leave him on a primitive plane. I know of one good authority on the teaching of reading who maintains that the normal child would learn to read without formal teaching if he were placed in the right environment,--an environment of books. This may be possible with some exceptional children, but even an environment reasonably replete with books does not effect this miracle in the case of certain children whom I know very well and whom I like to think of as perfectly normal. These children learned to talk by imitation and instinctive repetition. But nature has not yet gone so far as to provide the average child with spontaneous impulses that will lead him to learn to read. Reading is a much more complicated and highly organized process. And so it is with a vast number of the activities that our pupils must master.

Another increment of progress that the reform movement has given to educational practice is a recognition of the fact that we have been requiring pupils to acquire unnecessary habits, under the impression, that even if the habits were not useful, something of value was gained in their acquisition. As a result, we have passed all of our grain through the same mill, unmindful of the fact that different life activities required different types of grist. To-day we are seeing the need for carefully selecting the types of habit and skill that should be developed in _all_ children. We are recognizing that there are many phases of the educative process that it is not well to reduce to an automatic basis. When I was in the elementary school I memorized Barnes's _History of the United States_ and Harper's _Geography_ from cover to cover. I have never greatly regretted this automatic mastery; but I have often thought that I might have memorized something rather more important, for history and geography could have been mastered just as effectively in another way.

In the third place, and most important of all, we have been led to analyze this complex process of habit building,--to find out the factors that operate in learning. We have now a goodly body of principles that may even be characterized by the adjective "scientific." We know that in habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started in the right way. A recent writer states that two thirds of the difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of this principle. Inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed. How important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate. One writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a large part of the retardation which is bothering us so much to-day. The wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well under way. We are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in drill processes by inadequate methods. Technique is being improved and the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that are demanding admission to the schools.

Again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of motivating our drill work,--of not only reading into it purpose and meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also of engendering in him the _desire_ to form the habits,--to undergo the discipline that is essential for mastery. Here again the reform movement has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated.

All this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while may be acquired without effort. I think that educators are generally agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,--for it subverts a basic principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any other force can alter or reverse. To teach the child that the things in life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach him a lie. Human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not been made at the price of struggle and effort,--at the price of doing things that men did not want to do. Every great truth has had to struggle upward from defeat. Every man who has really found himself in the work of life has paid the price of sacrifice for his success. And whenever we attempt to give our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts and skills that have lifted civilized man above the plane of his savage ancestors, we must expect from them struggle and effort and self-denial.

Let me quote a paragraph from the report of a recent investigation in the psychology of learning. The habit that was being learned in this experiment was skill in the use of the typewriter. The writer describes the process in the following words:

"In the early stages of learning, our subjects were all very much
interested in the work. Their whole mind seemed to be spontaneously
held by the writing. They were always anxious to take up the work
anew each day. Their general attitude and the resultant sensations
constituted a pleasant feeling tone, which had a helpful
reactionary effect upon the work. Continued practice, however,
brought a change. In place of the spontaneous, rapt attention of
the beginning stages, attention tended, at certain definite stages
of advancement, to wander away from the work. A general feeling of
monotony, which at times assumed the form of utter disgust, took
the place of the former pleasant sensations and feelings. The
writing became a disagreeable task. The unpleasant feelings now
present in consciousness exerted an ever-restraining effect on the
work. As an expert skill was approached, however, the learners'
attitude and mood changed again. They again took a keen interest in
the work. Their whole feeling tone once more became favorable, and
the movements delightful and pleasant. The expert typist ... so
thoroughly enjoyed the writing that it was as pleasant as the
spontaneous play activities of a child. But in the course of
developing this permanent interest in the work, there were many
periods in nearly every test, many days, as well as stages in the
practice as a whole, when the work was much disliked, periods when
the learning assumed the rôle of a very monotonous task. Our
records showed that at such times as these no progress was made.
Rapid progress in learning typewriting was made only when the
learners were feeling good and had an attitude of interest toward
the work."[18]

Who has not experienced that feeling of hopelessness and despair that comes at these successive levels of the long process of acquiring skill in a complicated art? How desperately we struggle on--striving to put every item of energy that we can command into our work, and yet feeling how hopeless it all seems. How tempting then is the hammock on the porch, the fascinating novel that we have placed on our bedside table, the happy company of friends that are talking and laughing in the next room; or how we long for the green fields and the open road; how seductive is that siren call of change and diversion,--that evil spirit of procrastination! How feeble, too, are the efforts that we make under these conditions! We are not making progress in our art, we are only marking time. And yet the psychologists tell us that this marking time is an essential in the mastery of any complicated art. Somewhere, deep down in the nervous system, subtle processes are at work, and when finally interest dawns,--when finally hope returns to us, and life again becomes worth while,--these heartbreaking struggles reap their reward. The psychologists call them "plateaus of growth," but some one has said that "sloughs of despond" would be a far better designation.

The progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pass through these sloughs of despond,--to set his face resolutely to the task and persevere. It would be the idlest folly to lead children to believe that success or achievement or even passing ability can be gained in any other manner. And this is the danger in the sugar-coating process.

But motivation does not mean sugar-coating. It means the development of purpose, of ambition, of incentive. It means the development of the willingness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose may be realized, in order that the goal may be attained. It means the creating of those conditions that make for strength and virility and moral fiber,--for it is in the consciousness of having overcome obstacles and won in spite of handicaps,--it is in this consciousness of conquest that mental strength and moral strength have their source. The victory that really strengthens one is not the victory that has come easily, but the victory that stands out sharp and clear against the background of effort and struggle. It is because this subjective contrast is so absolutely essential to the consciousness of power,--it is for this reason that the "sloughs of despond" still have their function in our new attitude toward drill.

But do not mistake me: I have no sympathy with that educational "stand-pattism" that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build solid and comfortable highways across them wherever it is possible to do so. I have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves the placing of artificial barriers in the learner's path. But if I build highways across the morasses, it is only that youth may the more readily traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where struggle is absolutely necessary.

You remember in George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ the story of Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose childhood drill and discipline had found no place. In early womanhood, she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources. In casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some slight training. She sought out her old German music teacher, Klesmer, and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to financial account. Klesmer's reply sums up in a nutshell the psychology of skill:

"Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth.
Whenever an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I
conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius, at
first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving
discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the
juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs
toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles, your
whole frame, must go like a watch,--true, true, true, to a hair.
This is the work of the springtime of life before the habits have
been formed."

And I can formulate my own conception of the work of habit building in education no better than by paraphrasing Klesmer's epigram. To increase in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their own childish experiences the illustrations that will force this lesson home; to supplement, from the stories of great achievements, those illustrations which will inspire them to effort; to lead them to see that Peary conquering the Pole, or Wilbur Wright perfecting the aëroplane, or Morse struggling through long years of hopelessness and discouragement to give the world the electric telegraph,--to show them that these men went through experiences differing only in degree and not in kind from those which characterize every achievement, no matter how small, so long as it is dominated by a unitary purpose; to make the inevitable sloughs of despond no less morasses, perhaps, but to make their conquest add a permanent increment to growth and development: this is the task of our drill work as I view it. As the prophecy of Isaiah has it: "Precept must be upon precept; precept upon precept; line upon line; line upon line; here a little and there a little." And if we can succeed in giving our pupils this vision,--if we can reveal the deeper meaning of struggle and effort and self-denial and sacrifice shining out through the little details of the day's work,--we are ourselves achieving something that is richly worth while; for the highest triumph of the teacher's art is to get his pupils to see, in the small and seemingly trivial affairs of everyday life, the operation of fundamental and eternal principles.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: An address before the Kansas State Teachers' Association, Topeka, October 20, 1910.]

[Footnote 18: W.F. Book, _Journal of Educational Psychology_, vol. i, 1910, p. 195.]

~XII~

THE IDEAL TEACHER[19]

I wish to discuss with you briefly a very commonplace and oft-repeated theme,--a theme that has been handled and handled until its once-glorious raiment is now quite threadbare; a theme so full of pitfalls and dangers for one who would attempt its discussion that I have hesitated long before making a choice. I know of no other theme that lends itself so readily to a superficial treatment--of no theme upon which one could find so easily at hand all of the proverbs and platitudes and maxims that one might desire. And so I cannot be expected to say anything upon this topic that has not been said before in a far better manner. But, after all, very few of our thoughts--even of those that we consider to be the most original and worth while--are really new to the world. Most of our thoughts have been thought before. They are like dolls that are passed on from age to age to be dressed up and decorated to suit the taste or the fashion or the fancy of each succeeding generation. But even a new dress may add a touch of newness to an old doll; and a new phrase or a new setting may, for a moment, rejuvenate an old truth.

The topic that I wish to treat is this, "The Ideal Teacher." And I may as well start out by saying that the ideal teacher is and always must be a figment of the imagination. This is the essential feature of any ideal. The ideal man, for example, must possess an infinite number of superlative characteristics. We take this virtue from one, and that from another, and so on indefinitely until we have constructed in imagination a paragon, the counterpart of which could never exist on earth. He would have all the virtues of all the heroes; but he would lack all their defects and all their inadequacies. He would have the manners of a Chesterfield, the courage of a Winkelried, the imagination of a Dante, the eloquence of a Cicero, the wit of a Voltaire, the intuitions of a Shakespeare, the magnetism of a Napoleon, the patriotism of a Washington, the loyalty of a Bismarck, the humanity of a Lincoln, and a hundred other qualities, each the counterpart of some superlative quality, drawn from the historic figure that represented that quality in richest measure.

And so it is with the ideal teacher: he would combine, in the right proportion, all of the good qualities of all of the good teachers that we have ever known or heard of. The ideal teacher is and always must be a creature, not of flesh and blood, but of the imagination, a child of the brain. And perhaps it is well that this is true; for, if he existed in the flesh, it would not take very many of him to put the rest of us out of business. The relentless law of compensation, which rules that unusual growth in one direction must always be counterbalanced by deficient growth in another direction, is the saving principle of human society. That a man should be superlatively good in one single line of effort is the demand of modern life. It is a platitude to say that this is the age of the specialist. But specialism, while it always means a gain to society, also always means a loss to the individual. Darwin, at the age of forty, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was a man of one idea. Twenty years before, he had been a youth of the most varied and diverse interests. He had enjoyed music, he had found delight in the masterpieces of imaginative literature, he had felt a keen interest in the drama, in poetry, in the fine arts. But at forty Darwin quite by accident discovered that these things had not attracted him for years,--that every increment of his time and energy was concentrated in a constantly increasing measure upon the unraveling of that great problem to which he had set himself. And he lamented bitterly the loss of these other interests; he wondered why he had been so thoughtless as to let them slip from his grasp. It was the same old story of human progress; the sacrifice of the individual to the race. For Darwin's loss was the world's gain, and if he had not limited himself to one line of effort, and given himself up to that work to the exclusion of everything else, the world might still be waiting for the _Origin of Species_, and the revolution in human thought and human life which followed in the wake of that great book. Carlyle defined genius as an infinite capacity for taking pains. George Eliot characterized it as an infinite capacity for receiving discipline. But to make the definition complete, we need the formulation of Goethe, who identified genius with the power of concentration: "Who would be great must limit his ambitions; in concentration is shown the Master."

And so the great men of history, from the very fact of their genius, are apt not to correspond with what our ideal of greatness demands. Indeed, our ideal is often more nearly realized in men who fall far short of genius. When I studied chemistry, the instructor burned a bit of diamond to prove to us that the diamond was, after all, only carbon in an "allotropic" form. There seems to be a similar allotropy working in human nature. Some men seem to have all the constituents of genius, but they never reach very far above the plane of the commonplace. They are like the diamond,--except that they are more like the charcoal.

I wish to describe to you a teacher who was not a genius, and yet who possessed certain qualities that I should abstract and appropriate if I were to construct in my imagination an ideal teacher. I first met this man five years ago out in the mountain country. I can recall the occasion with the most vivid distinctness. It was a sparkling morning, in middle May. The valley was just beginning to green a little under the influence of the lengthening days, but on the surrounding mountains the snow line still hung low. I had just settled down to my morning's work when word was brought that a visitor wished to see me, and a moment later he was shown into the office. He was tall and straight, with square shoulders and a deep chest. His hair was gray, and a rather long white beard added to the effect of age, but detracted not an iota from the evidences of strength and vigor. He had the look of a Westerner,--of a man who had lived much of his life in the open. There was a ruggedness about him, a sturdy strength that told of many a day's toil along the trail, and many a night's sleep under the stars.

In a few words he stated the purpose of his visit. He simply wished to do what half a hundred others in the course of the year had entered that office for the purpose of doing. He wished to enroll as a student in the college and to prepare himself for a teacher. This was not ordinarily a startling request, but hitherto it had been made only by those who were just starting out on the highroad of life. Here was a man advanced in years. He told me that he was sixty-five, and sixty-five in that country meant old age; for the region had but recently been settled, and most of the people were either young or middle-aged. The only old men in the country were the few surviving pioneers,--men who had come in away back in the early days of the mining fever, long before the advent of the railroad. They had trekked across the plains from Omaha, and up through the mountainous passes of the Oregon trail; or, a little later, they had come by steamboat from St. Louis up the twelve-hundred-mile stretch of the Missouri until their progress had been stopped by the Great Falls in the very foothills of the Rockies. What heroes were these graybeards of the mountains! What possibilities in knowing them, of listening to the recounting of tales of the early days,--of running fights with the Indians on the plains, of ambushments by desperadoes in the mountain passes, of the lurid life of the early mining camps, and the desperate deeds of the Vigilantes! And here, before me, was a man of that type. You could read the main facts of his history in the very lines of his face. And this man--one of that small band whom the whole country united to honor--this man wanted to become a student,--to sit among adolescent boys and girls, listening to the lectures and discussions of instructors who were babes in arms when he was a man of middle life.

But there was no doubt of his determination. With the eagerness of a boy, he outlined his plan to me; and in doing this, he told me the story of his life,--just the barest facts to let me know that he was not a man to do things half-heartedly, or to drop a project until he had carried it through either to a successful issue, or to indisputable defeat.

And what a life that man had lived! He had been a youth of promise, keen of intelligence and quick of wit. He had spent two years at a college in the Middle West back in the early sixties. He had left his course uncompleted to enter the army, and he had followed the fortunes of war through the latter part of the great rebellion. At the close of the war he went West. He farmed in Kansas until the drought and the grasshoppers urged him on. He joined the first surveying party that picked out the line of the transcontinental railroad that was to follow the southern route along the old Santa Fé trail. He carried the chain and worked the transit across the Rockies, across the desert, across the Sierras, until, with his companions, he had--

"led the iron stallions down to drink
Through the cañons to the waters of the West."

And when this task was accomplished, he followed the lure of the gold through the California placers; eastward again over the mountains to the booming Nevada camp, where the Comstock lode was already turning out the wealth that was to build a half-dozen colossal fortunes. He "prospected" through this country, with varying success, living the life of the camps,--rich in its experiences, vivid in its coloring, calling forth every item of energy and courage and hardihood that a man could command. Then word came by that mysterious wireless and keyless telegraphy of the mountains and the desert,--word that back to the eastward, ore deposits of untold wealth had been discovered. So eastward once more, with the stampede of the miners, he turned his face. He was successful at the outset in this new region. He quickly accumulated a fortune; he lost it and amassed another; lost that and still gained a third. Five successive fortunes he made successively, and successively he lost them. But during this time he had become a man of power and influence in the community. He married and raised a family and saw his children comfortably settled.

But when his last fortune was swept away, the old _Wanderlust_ again claimed its own. Houses and lands and mortgages and mills and mines had slipped from his grasp. But it mattered little. He had only himself to care for, and, with pick and pan strapped to his saddlebow, he set his face westward. Along the ridges of the high Rockies, through Wyoming and Montana, he wandered, ever on the lookout for the glint of gold in the white quartz. Little by little he moved westward, picking up a sufficient living, until he found himself one winter shut in by the snows in a remote valley on the upper waters of the Gallatin River. He stopped one night at a lonely ranch house. In the course of the evening his host told him of a catastrophe that had befallen the widely scattered inhabitants of that remote valley. The teacher of the district school had fallen sick, and there was little likelihood of their getting another until spring.

That is a true catastrophe to the ranchers of the high valleys cut off from every line of communication with the outer world. For the opportunities of education are highly valued in that part of the West. They are reckoned with bread and horses and cattle and sheep, as among the necessities of life. The children were crying for school, and their parents could not satisfy that peculiar kind of hunger. But here was the relief. This wanderer who had arrived in their midst was a man of parts. He was lettered; he was educated. Would he do them the favor of teaching their children until the snow had melted away from the ridges, and his cayuse could pick the trail through the cañons?

Now school-keeping was farthest from this man's thoughts. But the needs of little children were very near to his heart. He accepted the offer, and entered the log schoolhouse as the district schoolmaster, while a handful of pupils, numbering all the children of the community who could ride a broncho, came five, ten, and even fifteen miles daily, through the winter's snows and storms and cruel cold, to pick up the crumbs of learning that had lain so long untouched.

What happened in that lonely little school, far off on the Gallatin bench, I never rightly discovered. But when spring opened up, the master sold his cayuse and his pick and his rifle and the other implements of his trade. With the earnings of the winter he made his way to the school that the state had established for the training of teachers; and I count it as one of the privileges of my life that I was the first official of that school to listen to his story and to welcome him to the vocation that he had chosen to follow.

And yet, when I looked at his face, drawn into lines of strength by years of battle with the elements; when I looked at the clear, blue eyes, that told of a far cleaner life than is lived by one in a thousand of those that hold the frontiers of civilization; when I caught an expression about the mouth that told of an innate humanity far beyond the power of worldly losses or misfortunes to crush and subdue, I could not keep from my lips the words that gave substance to my thought; and the thought was this: that it were far better if we who were supposed to be competent to the task of education should sit reverently at the feet of this man, than that we should presume to instruct him. For knowledge may come from books, and even youth may possess it, but wisdom comes only from experience, and this man had that wisdom in far greater measure than we of books and laboratories and classrooms could ever hope to have it. He had lived years while we were living days.

I thought of a learned scholar who, through patient labor in amassing facts, had demonstrated the influence of the frontier in the development of our national ideals; who had pointed out how, at each successive stage of American history, the heroes of the frontier, pushing farther and farther into the wilderness, conquering first the low coastal plain of the Atlantic seaboard, then the forested foothills and ridges of the Appalachians, had finally penetrated into the Mississippi Valley, and, subduing that, had followed on westward to the prairies, and then to the great plains, and then clear across the great divide, the alkali deserts, and the Sierras, to California and the Pacific Coast; how these frontiersmen, at every stage of our history, had sent back wave after wave of strength and virility to keep alive the sturdy ideals of toil and effort and independence,--ideals that would counteract the mellowing and softening and degenerating influences of the hothouse civilization that grew up so rapidly in the successive regions that they left behind. Turner's theory that most of what is typical and unique in American institutions and ideals owes its existence to the backset of the frontier life found a living exemplar in the man who stood before me on that May morning.

But he would not be discouraged from his purpose. He had made up his mind to complete the course that the school offered; to take up the thread of his education at the point where he had dropped it more than forty years before. He had made up his mind, and it was easy to see that he was not a man to be deterred from a set purpose.

I shall not hide the fact that some of us were skeptical of the outcome. That a man of sixty-five should have a thirst for learning was not remarkable. But that a man whose life had been spent in scenes of excitement, who had been associated with deeds and events that stir the blood when we read of them to-day, a man who had lived almost every moment of his life in the open,--that such a man could settle down to the uneventful life of a student and a teacher, could shut himself up within the four walls of a classroom, could find anything to inspire and hold him in the dull presentation of facts or the dry elucidation of theories,--this seemed to be a miracle not to be expected in this realistic age. But, miracle or not, the thing actually happened. He remained nearly four years in the school, earning his living by work that he did in the intervals of study, and doing it so well that, when he graduated, he had not only his education and the diploma which stood for it, but also a bank account.

He lived in a little cabin by himself, for he wished to be where he would not disturb others when he sang or whistled over his work in the small hours of the night. But his meals he took at the college dormitory, where he presided at a table of young women students. Never was a man more popular with the ladies than this weather-beaten patriarch with the girls of his table. No matter how gloomy the day might be, one could always find sunshine from that quarter. No matter how grievous the troubles of work, there was always a bit of cheerful optimism from a man who had tasted almost every joy and sorrow that life had to offer. If one were in a blue funk of dejection because of failure in a class, he would lend the sympathy that came from his own rich experience in failures,--not only past but present, for some things that come easy at sixteen come hard at sixty-five, and this man who would accept no favors had to fight his way through "flunks" and "goose-eggs" like the younger members of the class. And even with it all so complete an embodiment of hope and courage and wholesome light-heartedness would be hard to find. He was an optimist because he had learned long since that anything but optimism is a crime; and learning this in early life, optimism had become a deeply seated and ineradicable prejudice in his mind. He could not have been gloomy if he had tried.

And so this man fought his way through science and mathematics and philosophy, slowly but surely, just as he had fought inch by inch and link by link, across the Arizona desert years before. It was a much harder fight, for all the force of lifelong habit, than which there is none other so powerful, was against him from the start. And now came the human temptation to be off on the old trail, to saddle his horse and get a pick and a pan and make off across the western range to the golden land that always lies just under the sunset. How often that turbulent _Wanderlust_ seized him, I can only conjecture. But I know the spirit of the wanderer was always strong within him. He could say, with Kipling's _Tramp Royal_:

"It's like a book, I think, this bloomin' world,
Which you can read and care for just so long,
But presently you feel that you will die
Unless you get the page you're reading done,
An' turn another--likely not so good;
But what you're after is to turn them all."

And I knew that he fought that temptation over and over again; for that little experience out on the Gallatin bench had only partially turned his life from the channels of wandering, although it had bereft him of the old desire to seek for gold. Often he outlined to me a well-formulated plan; perhaps he had to tell some one, lest the fever should take too strong a hold upon him, and force his surrender. His plan was this: He would teach a term here and there, gradually working his way westward, always toward the remote corners of the earth into which his roving instinct seemed unerringly to lead him. Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines seemed easy enough to access; surely, he thought, teachers must be needed in all those regions. And when he should have turned these pages, he might have mastered his vocation in a degree sufficient to warrant his attempting an alien soil. Then he would sail away into the South Seas, with New Zealand and Australia as a base. And gradually moving westward through English-speaking settlements and colonies he would finally complete the circuit of the globe.

And the full fruition of that plan might have formed a fitting climax to my tale, were I telling it for the sake of its romance; but my purpose demands a different conclusion. My hero is now principal of schools in a little city of the mountains,--a city so tiny that its name would be unknown to most of you. And I have heard vague rumors that he is rising rapidly in his profession and that the community he serves will not listen to anything but a permanent tenure of his office. All of which seems to indicate to me that he has abandoned, for the while at least, his intention to turn quite all the pages of the world's great book, and is content to live true to the ideal that was born in the log schoolhouse--the conviction that the true life is the life of service, and that the love of wandering and the lure of gold are only siren calls that lead one always toward, but never to, the promised land of dreams that seems to lie just over the western range where the pink sunset stands sharp against the purple shadows.

The ending of my story is prosaic, but everything in this world is prosaic, unless you view it either in the perspective of time or space, or in the contrasts that bring out the high lights and deepen the shadows.

But if I have left my hero happily married to his profession, the courtship and winning of which formed the theme of my tale, I may be permitted to indulge in a very little moralizing of a rather more explicit sort than I have yet attempted.

It is a simple matter to construct in imagination an ideal teacher. Mix with immortal youth and abounding health, a maximal degree of knowledge and a maximal degree of experience, add perfect tact, the spirit of true service, the most perfect patience, and the most steadfast persistence; place in the crucible of some good normal school; stir in twenty weeks of standard psychology, ten weeks of general method, and varying amounts of patent compounds known as special methods, all warranted pure and without drugs or poison; sweeten with a little music, toughen with fifteen weeks of logic, bring to a slow boil in the practice school, and, while still sizzling, turn loose on a cold world. The formula is simple and complete, but like many another good recipe, a competent cook might find it hard to follow when she is short of butter and must shamefully skimp on the eggs.

Now the man whose history I have recounted represents the most priceless qualities of this formula. In the first place he possessed that quality the key to which the philosophers of all ages have sought in vain,--he had solved the problem of eternal youth. At the age of sixty-five his enthusiasm was the enthusiasm of an adolescent. His energy was the energy of an adolescent. Despite his gray hair and white beard, his mind was perennially young. And that is the only type of mind that ought to be concerned with the work of education. I sometimes think that one of the advantages of a practice school lies in the fact that the teachers who have direct charge of the pupils--whatever may be their limitations--have at least the virtue of youth, the virtue of being young. If they could only learn from my hero the art of keeping young, of keeping the mind fresh and vigorous and open to whatever is good and true, no matter how novel a form it may take, they might, like him, preserve their youth indefinitely. And I think that his life gives us one clew to the secret,--to keep as close as we can to nature, for nature is always young; to sing and to whistle when we would rather weep; to cheer and comfort when we would rather crush and dishearten; often to dare something just for the sake of daring, for to be young is to dare; and always to wonder, for that is the prime symptom of youth, and when a man ceases to wonder, age and decrepitude are waiting for him around the next corner.

It is the privilege of the teaching craft to represent more adequately than any other calling the conditions for remaining young. There is time for living out-of-doors, which some of us, alas! do not do. And youth, with its high hope and lofty ambition, with its resolute daring and its naive wonder, surrounds us on every side. And yet how rapidly some of us age! How quickly life seems to lose its zest! How completely are we blind to the opportunities that are on every hand!

And closely related to this virtue of being always young, in fact growing out of it, the ideal teacher will have, as my hero had, the gift of gladness,--that joy of living which takes life for granted and proposes to make the most of every moment of consciousness that it brings.

And finally, to balance these qualities, to keep them in leash, the ideal teacher should possess that spirit of service, that conviction that the life of service is the only life worth while--that conviction for which my hero struggled so long and against such tremendous odds. The spirit of service must always be the cornerstone of the teaching craft. To know that any life which does not provide the opportunities for service is not worth the living, and that any life, however humble, that does provide these opportunities is rich beyond the reach of earthly rewards,--this is the first lesson that the tyro in schoolcraft must learn, be he sixteen or sixty-five.

And just as youth and hope and the gift of gladness are the eternal verities on one side of the picture, so the spirit of service, the spirit of sacrifice, is the eternal verity that forms their true complement; without whose compensation, hope were but idle dreaming, and laughter a hollow mockery. And self-denial, which is the keynote of service, is the great sobering, justifying, eternal factor that symbolizes humanity more perfectly than anything else. In the introduction to _Romola_, George Eliot pictures a spirit of the past who returns to earth four hundred years after his death, and looks down upon his native city of Florence. And I can conclude with no better words than those in which George Eliot voices her advice to that shade:

"Go not down, good Spirit: for the changes are great and the speech
of the Florentines would sound as a riddle in your ears. Or, if you
go, mingle with no politicians on the marmi, or elsewhere; ask no
questions about trade in Calimara; confuse yourself with no
inquiries into scholarship, official or monastic. Only look at the
sunlight and shadows on the grand walls that were built solidly and
have endured in their grandeur; look at the faces of the little
children, making another sunlight amid the shadows of age; look, if
you will, into the churches and hear the same chants, see the same
images as of old--the images of willing anguish for a great end,
of beneficent love and ascending glory, see upturned living faces,
and lips moving to the old prayers for help. These things have not
changed. The sunlight and the shadows bring their old beauty and
waken the old heart-strains at morning, noon, and even-tide; the
little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage
between love and duty; and men still yearn for the reign of peace
and righteousness--still own that life to be the best which is a
conscious voluntary sacrifice."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 19: An address to the graduating class of the Oswego, New York, State Normal School, February, 1908.]