CHAPTER XXI

THE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS

CHAPTER XIX set forth the more important of the deficiencies in the personnel of public-school service from the national point of view. Emphasis was there placed chiefly upon (1) the public attitude which looks upon teaching, especially in the lower schools, as a temporary and casual occupation, and which consequently permits this service to be devoid of the recognitions and rewards that its significance to the Nation demands; (2) the results of this attitude as expressed in the present shortage of teachers, the "factory" plan of educational administration, and the relatively low efficiency of the schools as a whole; and (3) the inadequacy of existing agencies for the preparation of teachers, -- an inadequacy due in large part to the public attitude just referred to which naturally minimizes the importance of prolonged and serious preparation and permits four fifths of the teaching positions to be filled by essentially untrained teachers. The present chapter will outline a constructive program for the remedy of this fundamental weakness in American education.

Baldly stated, this program looks forward to a condition so far removed from that which now prevails that

the prospects of its realization may seem to the reader to be hopelessly Utopian. As a matter of fact, the program is far from impracticable; it can be realized with an infinitesimal part of the effort that the people put forth to save democracy; and its realization is an indispensable condition in the paramount task that now lies before the Nation, the task of safeguarding the great gains that have cost so much. It means nothing more revolutionary than to give to every child in the land a teacher who has been especially selected and especially prepared to meet his or her educational needs. Nothing short of this, we may be sure, will meet the educational needs of the Nation.

TEACHING AS NATIONAL SERVICE

This program will involve primarily a complete reversal of the public attitude toward teaching, and especially toward teaching in the elementary graded and rural schools. It is here that the Nation's chief problem lies. The colleges and the universities must not be neglected, nor will they be neglected. They already have the "ear of the people" and they will not sacrifice their interests in any measure by aiding in every possible way the cause of the lower schools. Indeed, until the problem of the lower schools is solved, their own work will be handicapped. To make elementary and secondary education yield the largest possible returns will mean not only a heavier enroll

ment in the higher institutions but a vastly improved student body. The selection of the talent available for "leadership" will operate upon a much wider basis, and it is to the training of leaders that the colleges and universities have always directed their energies.

From the Nation's point of view, however, competent leadership, while an indispensable element in a successful democracy, is only one element. The essential difference between democracy and autocracy lies at precisely this point. The fundamental characteristic of democracy is that its leadership must be continually subject to evaluation by the "rank and file" with whom the final decision on every collective enterprise must rest. The more intelligent this evaluation, the more effective and stable the democracy. Leadership will always emerge; as Galton pointed out fifty years ago, practically nothing short of premature death will keep true genius from coming into its own; and even talent that fails to reach the plane of genius is likely to overcome apparently insuperable handicaps. This does not constitute an argument for the neglect of higher education, for talent and even genius must be trained to insure the most effective results; but to urge higher education as more fundamental than universal elementary education is to deny the first principle of democracy. Leadership will always emerge, but the intelligent evaluation of leadership by the masses of the people depends in every case upon the development

of the highest possible level of trained and informed intelligence among the people as a whole. The fundamental educational problem of democracy is the problem of the common schools. The fundamental problem of the common schools is to insure for every child a competent teacher.

THE PREVAILING NEGLECT OF THE NORMAL SCHOOLS

To establish this principle firmly, it must be crystallized in a tangible form. This can be done most quickly, most readily, and most effectively through measures that will place upon their proper plane the institutions for the preparation of teachers, and especially the institutions that prepare teachers for the elementary and rural-school service, the normal schools.

The outstanding inadequacies of these institutions have already been pointed out.1 These inadequacies are only too consistent with the low status of the teacher's calling, but one way to raise the status is to remove the inadequacies. If the position that we have just taken is valid, if the most important servants of democracy are the teachers of the common schools, then the institutions which train, instruct, and prepare these servants should be the most attractive, the most carefully organized, and relatively the most generously supported of all the institutions of higher and pro1 See Chapter XIX.

fessional education. At the present time, their status is precisely the reverse of this: they are the least attractive of all professional schools; their organization, particularly with respect to their courses of study, is a generation behind that of professional schools in the fields of law, medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, engineering, and nursing; their support from the public treasuries is far less in proportion to their enrollment than that of other professional schools supported by public funds.1

It is very largely because of the meager support of the normal schools that they are so poorly attended, especially in times of material prosperity. In spite of the devotion of their faculties, and in no field of education are the teachers so generally and so thoroughly consecrated to their work, the normal schools are almost everywhere regarded by ambitious youth as "cheap" institutions, to be shunned if one has the barest opportunity to go elsewhere. This is due in part to the unattractiveness of the service for which the normal schools prepare; but it is also due in part to the brief terms, to the low entrance requirements,

1 "It seems, then, that the public provides for those instructors who prepare teachers for the public schools a lower compensation by about one third than it provides for those who prepare professional and technical workers in other fields. It also asks the former to carry a heavier load than the latter, both in terms of periods of classwork each week and in terms of ratio of instructors to students."— N. E. A. Commission Series No. 3, Washington, 1918, p. 9. This pamphlet gives in detail the data upon which this and other conclusions quoted in the present chapter are based.