796 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



THE PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS. 



BY M. V. O'SHEA. 



ONE whose attention has been directed to the great activity 

 which has taken hold of the modern educational world can 

 not but have concluded that teaching has come to be regarded as 

 a more or less difficult art, for which considerable preparation 

 must be made in order that one shall be fitted to do it at all 

 well. The present age has not been heir to such a view as this, 

 however ; for it has been comparatively recent that men have 

 grown to consider the imparting of instruction successfully as an 

 art to be acquired ; they have looked upon it rather as an instinct 

 that is born with its possessor, and that shows itself in some such 

 spontaneous manner as do other characteristics and habits that 

 lie outside of personal thought or control. The maxim that poets 

 are " born, not made," has been applied with much vigor also to 

 the great majority of teachers, who have themselves oftentimes 

 not thought it necessary or expedient to make any definite prepa- 

 ration for their calling, other than to acquire a certain familiarity 

 with the arithmetic or grammar or geography, knowledge of 

 which they innocently hope to pour into their pupils' minds out of 

 their own store of facts in these subjects. Educational practice 

 of to-day, however, is not wholly in sympathy with the declara- 

 tion that a teacher's art is born with him and can not be acquired ; 

 for it has provided elaborate means for the making of teachers, or 

 at least for affording them opportunities to greatly improve upon 

 what Nature has done for them. This has grown out of the belief 

 that teaching is founded upon a science, and its successful prac- 

 tice must be acquired by special study and apprenticeship, just as 

 with any other art, like civil engineering or architecture or medi- 

 cine. Confidence in this opinion has spread widely throughout 

 our own and other countries, and has resulted in the vast increase 

 of means whereby every teacher may now have opportunity to 

 become possessed in some measure of those special acquirements 

 which, it is believed, are essential in order that he shall deal 

 wisely with childhood in the schoolroom. 



Previous to the eighteenth century there seems to have been 

 no adequate conception of the training of mind as being amenable 

 to the rules and methods of science. It was probably not thought 

 that the mental life was subject to laws the nature of which could 

 be ascertained, and which would have to be followed if there 

 would be any success in leading the mind to attain those ends 

 which should be kept constantly in view in all educational work. 

 The teacher, then, would be successful according to the measure 

 of his instinctive apprehension of the peculiar nature of each pu- 



