November 12, 1009] 



SCIENCE 



661 



a liberal and a cordial spirit in his criti- 

 cisms. For the moment he sacrifices the 

 ends of teaching for those of inspiration. 

 If there be any virtue and if there be any 

 praise, he looks on these things; and for 

 his reward the reading of themes, which 

 his friends all think must be deadly bore- 

 dom, rises to the importance of an end in 

 itself. It introduces him to a circle of 

 congenial spirits, each furnishing for his 

 entertainment the best that the mental 

 stores can supply. 



In the mass of material which the 

 teacher reads— not of course without hours 

 of discouragement— one element of inter- 

 est is never lacking. He sees, at least, the 

 working out of his own theories, and he 

 watches a growth, however slow, implanted 

 and tended bj' his own hand. For the rest, 

 though his sympathy is sometimes an ideal 

 state, much of what he reads would be in- 

 teresting in any connection. In his classes 

 he is constantly meeting men who, aside 

 from spelling and the principles of com- 

 position, are better informed than he. 

 These men he encourages to write of what 

 they know. In the past five years I re- 

 member many pieces of work that could 

 hardly have interested me more if they 

 had been literary ventures of my own. 

 One man, not so far removed from boy- 

 hood as to need a razor, wrote for me on 

 the social life of boys, and it happened that 

 his conclusions, largely illustrated from 

 his own experience, were not unlike my 

 own. I suppose I shall never read in print 

 so frank and faithful an account of that 

 period which usually goes unrecorded. I 

 had a long paper on Colorado forest re- 

 serves and timber protection, from the son 

 of a large timber owner. A boy who had 

 been brought up abroad wrote a series of 

 essays on German school life and customs. 

 The thing which perhaps gave me most 

 enjoyment in watching its growth was a 

 fairly complete account of the Fore River 



works at Quiney, ilass. The author was 

 engaged on this the better part of a term, 

 partly in interviewing men and collecting 

 material. I watched his work at every 

 step. In the end he read large extracts to 

 the class and showed the photographs 

 which he had taken. In the public read- 

 ing—and not till then— it dawned upon 

 him that his style was rough, and, whereas 

 at the opening of the term he had no no- 

 tion of turning a sentence, he became in 

 the end, without a hitch in the natiiral de- 

 velopment of his mind, his own critic of 

 style. These men were interesting and in- 

 terested because met on their own ground. 

 I might, if it had seemed expedient, have 

 assigned them subjects in treating which 

 they would have bored both themselves 

 and me to extinction; but on the other 

 hand I should dislike excessively to handle 

 many subjects that they, if they had the 

 upper hand, might assign to me. 



It is not so hard, then, for the teacher to 

 be sj'mpathetic ; but sympathetic he must 

 be at any cost. To secure that end he must 

 in most cases criticize orally, not in writ- 

 ing. The complete explanation in writing 

 of even a minor fault will often require 

 enough red ink to discourage the elect ; and 

 then, ten to one, the fault is no fault at all, 

 but the result of some text-book prin- 

 ciple, too narrowly applied. Oral criti- 

 cism is more expressive, and at the same 

 time more modest. It assumes that all is 

 fundamentally right, ascertains the mean- 

 ing by questions, conceals that usually 

 large part of the difficulty which arises 

 from the critic's own stupidity, and sug- 

 gests a way out of the remaining trouble. 

 All this is no chastisement, but a very hu- 

 man and urbane process ; it is merely what 

 occurs every day when two people talk on 

 a congenial subject and try to arrive at 

 an understanding. 



In the substance of this criticism as well 

 there is a corresponding tempering of the 



