588 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



TEAINING COLLEGE TEACHERS 



By W. B. PITKIN 



NEW YORK CITY 



YOUE American is quite willing to admit that his children, on com- 

 mencement day, are not what they should be, but he is sure that 

 he and his fellow taxpayers are not to blame. They support twice as 

 many teachers as saloonkeepers. They have built all the machinery of 

 education. Never were more kinds of schools, never better equipment. 

 If, therefore, a college president were to sigh over the scarcity of good 

 instructors, your American would not understand. He would say: 

 You have your buildings and your professors and your students. You offer 

 graduate work for all who would teach. You even have teachers' colleges. And 

 I see many young men of exceptional attainments becoming college instructors 

 every year. 



And probably the college president, too, would join in his mystifica-. 

 tion, or — what amounts to the same thing — repeat " nascitur non fit," 

 and fancy the shortage explained. But the machinery is not complete, 

 as either party may discover when asked to point out the exact process 

 of training college teachers. Suddenly it will appear that there is no 

 such process. 



Every other sort of teacher is being broken in. Normal schools are 

 swiftly filling elementary and high schools with men and women who 

 can manage not only their subjects but also their pupils. A teachers' 

 college prepares its students 



for university and college professorships or instructorships in education; and 

 for work as supervisors, principals and superintendents of schools, and as heads 

 of academic or educational departments in normal and teachers' training 

 schools; as well as professional training, both theoretical and practical, for 

 teachers of both sexes for secondary, grammar and primary schools and 

 kindergartens; and for special teachers of such technical subjects as domestic 

 art, domestic science, fine arts, manual training, music, nature-study and 

 physical education. 



" Professorships in education," but no classes for ordinary professors 

 who would educate ! And so everywhere else. The university special- 

 ist is drilled for research and for the management of graduate classes 

 during the years of his doctorate and later assistantship in laboratory 

 or library. But where does the college teacher, the man who is to 

 teach freshmen English and economics, pick up the tricks of his trade ? 



If he ever picks them up, it is by chance or cleverness and in spite 

 of obstacles. The special knowledge he is to impart he gets well enough 



