GENERAL PAPEKS 131 
Let us look at the situation at closer range. Let us suppose 
that the teacher was trained to teach chemistry. He will be 
found teaching physiography, physiology, zoology, botany, 
perhaps also physics, in all of which he has had practically no 
preparation! He is fortunate if he is not called upon to teach 
science after preparing himself especially in English or his- 
tory. I know whereof I speak. If you ask the teacher how he 
comes to be so far from home, he responds that he is expected 
to take the work assigned him. Since he had studied some- 
thing of one science, he is expected to know science in general, 
especially if the school cannot afford more than one science 
teacher. Or if the school boasts of a science “faculty,” he 
happened to be the last one engaged and was obliged to take 
what the other science teachers wished upon him. 
But what of the pupil under this regime? Taught by a 
teacher who does not know his subject, who does not dis- 
criminate between the essential and the non-essential (it would 
be laughable, if it were not pitiable, to hear some of the ab- 
surd things stressed in such cases), a teacher who is merely 
holding his job until he can get into a position in which he can 
teach his specialty, the pupil learns science as he too often 
learns algebra and Caesar and composition, as things to receive 
grades upon, to pass off, and never to be bothered with again. 
Nothing of science as a life to be lived, a home to be improved, 
a community to be inspired, a great quest to engage in for the 
years to come! Is it not true that only vision and enthusiasm 
on the part of the teacher are at all likely to arouse vision and 
enthusiasm in the pupil, as only life can beget life? 
But this is only one side of the subject. Suppose that the 
student prepared in chemistry gets his chosen job and has 
the opportunity to teach chemistry only; what kind of chem- 
istry shall he teach? Shall he teach it as chemistry adapted 
to the life of the community, or as the ideal philosophy of the 
investigator? Shall it be a chemistry that takes account of 
the child’s point of view, that fits the child’s progress in sci- 
ence, or is the teacher to feel that the first thing to teach the 
pupil is the last thing he himself learned at college? 
Let us understand at this point that it is of no use for us to 
blame the young high school teacher for the situation in which 
he finds himself. He is but adapting himself to conditions as 
