TRAINING COLLEGE TEACHERS 589 



— perhaps too well. The collegiate post is approached through the 

 doctorate. In the later stages of this way, he is sometimes allowed to 

 correct examination papers, lead quizes, and, if his professors are kind, 

 even give a course of lectures. But usually this last boon is reserved 

 for the days of assistantship, when, left to his own resources, he takes 

 charge of a brawling roomful of sophomores. Of pedagogy knowing 

 only the name, he sets about instructing by the method of trial and 

 error; and the result is mostly trials and errors. The holy law of in- 

 dividualism locks the door against the professor who might be tempted 

 to stroll into the beginner's class-room and help him along. But, if he 

 were only left alone at his teaching, he might hope to pick up practical 

 wisdom in a few years. He has not even that good fortune, though. 

 If not by word, then by attitude, his colleagues often discourage him 

 from becoming a " mere teacher." There is earnest in the old jest : 

 "A college would be a fine place, but for the students." Our young 

 instructor sees his seniors' names at the head of articles in his technical 

 journals and they spell : " Go thou and do likewise ! " At department 

 conferences, problems of economy and research are broached, but be- 

 yond the broader question of schedules, text-books, periods and general 

 manner of treatment, teaching is untouched: Is it because even the 

 professor thinks his colleague nascitur non fit, and so dares not advise 

 him for fear of insinuating that he is not fit? Be that as it may; 

 pedagogy is suppressed as by a. censor and investigation exalted until 

 the university habit is set in grooves too deep to leave. And the fresh- 

 man is left a foundling in inhospitable or palsied hands. 



The results of this familiar unbalance are so grotesque that the 

 writer, for one, would not believe them save on the evidence of his own 

 eyes and ears. One instructor, whose researches have been a credit to 

 his college, makes his freshmen learn the French for all parts of a full- 

 rigged ship — and this, too, after he has taught several years. A scien- 

 tist, with an important investigation half finished, turns his undergrad- 

 uates into laboratory assistants ; and, when confronted by a complainant 

 committee, is honestly thunderstruck to hear that nobody is getting 

 anything out of his courses. A mathematician of international repute 

 lectures to his beginners on the great controversies of the geometers 

 since Descartes. And a student assures me that, in the second 

 semester of freshman German, he was set to translating " Macbeth " 

 into the tongue of Goethe. 



Let us not berate anybody for such absurdities, least of all the 

 teachers themselves. Their pedagogical ignorance is due neither to 

 slovenliness nor to neglect, but is a more or less inevitable incident in 

 the great turmoil through which all our educational ideals, methods 

 and means have been and still are passing. The hour calls less loudly 

 for criticism than for a remedy. And the sky has cleared enough to 



