Woz PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 
our classes? It is a curious fact that while all the educa- 
tional world is willing to acknowledge the need for technical 
training in every department, the cause of professional 
training for the teacher meets with very little sympathy ; 
indeed, the majority of teachers are quite hostile to it, - 
covertly if not overtly. 
The untrained teacher has, as a rule, an excellent opinion 
of his own powers; he has never been taught self-criticism, 
and he has to consort persistently with his intellectual 
inferiors, whose attitude to him tends only to foster his own 
self-complacency. Charles Lamb has shown us how difficult 
it is for a teacher to be humble-minded. To assert the need 
for training to one who has dispensed with it with admirable 
results in his own estimation, is to provoke a long and hope- 
less discussion, and to leave the. untrained teacher as con- 
vinced as ever of the truth of the curiously perverted 
version of the old adage about poets, ‘‘ The teacher is born, 
not made.” 
Mr. Thring declared that when he left college, triumphant 
in a successful university career and filled with an intense 
belief in the grand possibilities of the new epoch that was 
dawning for elementary education, he never felt so utterly 
helpless as when he found himself face to face with a large 
class of unruly boys in a national school. His learning 
helped him not at all in restoring order out of chaos; his 
energy and enthusiasm made him determine to undertake 
the laborious work of training himself. He succeeded in 
making himself an admirable teacher; but he did this 
because he had a real genius for teaching, and he did not 
grudge any trouble that would result in profit for his pupils. 
His training cost him much in time and effort; both of 
these he gave freely; but what grieved him was the fact, 
that he soon recognised, that he only gained skill as a 
teacher at the expense of his pupils; and he looked back on 
his early years of teaching with deep regret when he 
realised how much more would these pupils of his -have 
profited if his training had preceded, instead of succeeding, 
his practical work with them. Two lessons he learnt in 
these years which some teachers never Jearn—one was to 
despise mere information, and to distrust all informa- 
tionists—‘‘ who empty knowledge lumps by the wayside, and ° 
call it teaching,” and the other was to discard altogether 
the language of fine words. He felt very keenly that the 
Millenium for teaching would never dawn until “ lesson- 
books and lesson-hearers depart, and reading-books and 
teachers come in—exit paper, enter life.” He realised, as 
none but a genuine teacher can, that teaching is a living, 
