IX 

 OBITER DICTA BY AGASSIZ 1 



NEVER try to teach what you yourself do 

 not know, and know well. If your 

 school board insists on your teaching 

 anything and everything, decline firmly to do it. 

 It is an imposition alike on pupils and teacher 

 to teach that which he does not know. Those 

 teachers who are strong enough should squarely 

 refuse to do such work. This much-needed 

 reform is already beginning in our colleges, and 

 I hope it will continue. It is a relic of mediaeval 

 times, this idea of professing everything. When 

 teachers begin to decline work which they can- 

 not do well, improvements begin to come in. 

 If one will be a successful teacher, he must 



1 The first nine of these utterances were taken down by 

 Dr. David Starr Jordan at Penikese, in the summer of 1873, 

 from Agassiz's talks to teachers; see Popular Science Monthly 

 40. 726-727, and Holder, Louis Agassiz, his Life and Works, 

 1893, pp. 173-176. The next five come from the article 

 entitled ' Louis Agassiz, Teacher,' by Professor Burt G. Wilder, 

 in The Harvard Graduate's Magazine, June, 1907, and the 

 last three from Agassiz's posthumous article, ' Evolution and 

 Permanence of Type,' in the Atlantic Monthly, Jan., 1874 

 (vol. 33). 



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