PUBLIC-SCHOOL TEACHER IN A DEMOCRACY 415 



second-rate. This apologetic attitude is directly traceable as a result 

 to an ideal set up by the first universities, and maintained through the 

 centuries with increasing power. The great idea of the colleges and 

 universities has been that learning is the highest aim of education. 

 They have attained their present station as the result of working out 

 that idea. 



In the undergraduate and graduate department of every university 

 in this country to-day, those men who are planning to be teachers are 

 definitely scaled by their professors, by their fellows and by themselves 

 on the basis of their ability as scholars. If they show unusual ability 

 they are set down as future college professors; if less ability, they are 

 scheduled as possible college instructors. The slow ones fall into the 

 heap of future high-school teachers, and are treated accordingly. As 

 long as the present academic and social grading of teachers holds 

 the high schools will have to be content with the less intellectual group, 

 except in the occasional instances where the competition for college 

 positions compels some able young men to take up a high-school career. 

 A high-school faculty then is consciously second-rate, and they will 

 continue to have that feeling, and to hold that place until society 

 advances to the plane of broader and more human, and less exclusively 

 scholastic ideals. 



Naturally, one would expect the high schools themselves to begin 

 their own reformation, but the ideas for it are coming from elsewhere, 

 and the hearing for them will come in all probability from enlightened 

 minds in other fields of education, or in other lines of endeavor. High- 

 school teachers, it is thought, and they are so informed by their superiors, 

 have enough to do to attend strictly to their teaching. As a class high- 

 school principals and teachers alike do not think in any profound way, 

 for they give no proof of understanding the social and political con- 

 ditions under which they work as agents in a democracy. They have 

 no clear and adequate conception of the social and political functions 

 of the school. Their lives are circumscribed and restrained by school 

 laws, and often dulled by the insistent effect of hard, nerve-racking- 

 work. When the scholastic training is completed in some normal school 

 or college, the subsequent thinking of the average teacher is incident 

 to the occasional reading of methods. A very high percentage of 

 teachers in the largest high schools of this country make no study of 

 methods, and of the science of teaching, beyond what is necessary to 

 pass examinations. 



A layman would suppose that in a profession dealing primarily with 

 the training and development of the minds of people one of the 

 best characteristics of a good mind, self-reliance and independence in 

 thinking, ought to be the possession of those who are in a position to 



