MICHIGAN ACADEMY OP SCIENCE. 153 



may have been true of many districts and it is possiljly still true of some districts which, 

 recognizing their financial inability to maintain an up-to-date school, take no advantage 

 of a convenient law enabling them to better their financial condition. 



It has doubtless been the purpose of administrative officers to do the best for all con- 

 cerned, but they have been baffled until recently by the circumstances hedging in the 

 country schools. As a consequence, the whole normal school machinery has been largely 

 adapted to the work of providing teachers for graded schools in particular. 



The natural consequences of this plan of work needed but the additional circumstances 

 of the better organization and better wages of village and city schools to make it yield 

 the present unbalanced, unjust and un-American status of 75 per cent of State- trained 

 teachers in the urban schools and less than 2 per cent of State-trained teachers in the 

 rural schools. 



Fortunately for country children normal school training, while it ought to be the best, 

 has not been the only training available for young people desiring to become teachers. 

 The method of practically unguided, experimental practice in real schools has been in 

 operation throughout the years. The time honored, experimental method to which the 

 State is indebted for 98 per cent of its rural teachers has been in a measure successful. 

 This method is familiar to all. By it, at least one-fourth of the total number of country 

 teachers enter the teaching force every year. 



These new teachers are entirely without professional training and a majority of them 

 have never before tried to carry independently any responsibility. They have come up 

 to a minimum standard of scholarship; but their ciualifications in general culture and 

 physical and moral tone, if estimated at all, are largeh^ guessed at from clothing, figure, 

 face and manners. Careful investigation in one county, Calhoun, shows that of fifty-five 

 beginners in one year, twenty-two were graduated from city high schools, nineteen were 

 graduated from village high schools, eight had had part of a high school course and six 

 were graduates of the eight-year common school course. 



During one term of the same j^ear in the same county, the active teaching force of 155 

 rural teachers consisted of fifty beginners, thirty-seven who had had one year, eleven who 

 had had two years, nine who had had three years and forty-eight who had had four or 

 more years of teaching experience. 



There has been a slight increase in the proportion of beginners to the whole number in 

 recent years, but approximately these proportions persist in the county studied; one-third 

 of the rural teaching force with neither special training nor practical experience, one-third 

 who have had from one to three years of largely unobserved and undirected trial; and one- 

 third who have had four or more years of the same sort of training. 



Five years of almost daily observation of the work of these teachers, establishes the con- 

 viction that this independent and largely uncriticised experience may produce a first-class 

 teacher and again it may be practically worthless. The Ijalance turns on the health and 

 temperament of the teacher and his attitude toward his work. The vital element here is 

 the spirit of the teacher. This is the open door through which walk into the school the 

 disorganizing and dissipating power of low ambition and indefinite ideals or the pride in- 

 voking, self arousing power of clear ideals and ennobling ambitions. 



Observation seems to prove that weak and time-wasting work anywhere in the pubHc 

 school system tends to reproduce its kind, but with lessening vitality; while definite and 

 efficient work anywhere in the public school system tends to reproduce its kind with ever 

 increasing vitality and power for good. 



If this is a true general principle its application to the cjuestion under discussion is far- 

 reaching. The poorly trained, undeveloped teacher is handicapping, for all time, the 

 plastic lives he fails to bring to their best possibilities. In like manner the developed, 

 skilled teacher is expanding and re-creating in larger mould the lives before him every day. 



In concluding the discussion of this most used method of preparing teachers for country 

 schools, ignoring the mass of failures and all that these failures have meant in dwarfed arid 

 stunted human souls; it is but justice to state the truth that this method supplemented by 

 county supervision, associations, institutes and reading circles has brought into the ser- 

 vice of the State ^ery many noble men and women, some of whom although in the service 

 but a few j^ears have aroused and safely started in life many of the best men and women 

 in the country's history. 



A better method, better because it keeps the merits of the old method and makes defi- 

 nite additions to them, is now provided in the County Normal Training Classes. Through 

 the great public interest and the activity of the Department of Public Instruction this 

 plan, although only in its second year of application has become fairly well understood 

 throughout the State. 



The eight county classes in operation last year graduated 96 teachers and the twenty 

 classes now at work have a total enrollment of about 300, nearly all of whom will receive 

 certificates next June. There will be thirty of these classes next year with a total enroll- 

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