Description: |
30THE NORMAL ADVANCEsense of doing good to humanity, your wages
will be small indeed. The humblest teacher
can be something better than an earner of
wages or a winner of wealth. Over and above
the daily and hourly sense of helping somebody
to see farther, to think straighter and to be¬
have better, there will occasionally come some¬
thing like the letter I received not long ago
from a former student of this school, now one
of the most eminent scientific men Indiana has
ever sent out. In that letter he expressed his
gratitude that it was from me that he first
caught the scientific spirit. I do not imagine
that this result was due to any extraordinary
gift on my part. He was bound sooner or
later to catch the scientific spirit from some¬
body. It happened that he was ripe for the
new birth, and I rejoice to have been the in¬
strument of his conversion.The years that have passed since I began to
teach have witnessed a great revolution in the
schools. It has been the period of transition
from the old classical training of the mind^ by
means of Greek, Latin, mathematics and
metaphysics to scientific training. Not only
have the natural sciences been introduced into
the curriculum, but the scientific spirit and
method have penetrated and transformed all
subjects, until Latin is sometimes taught more
scientifically than chemistry. The scientific
revolution was not without its absurdities.
When I came to Indiana in 1877 to take the
chair of science in one of the best high schools
of the state, I found it a veritable settee. In
the first year I taught physics, chemistry,
zoology, botany, physical geography and as¬
tronomy, and in the spring term had a class in
civics and in advanced Latin. You can imag¬
ine how they were taught. The second year I
cut my settee in two in the middle, and dis¬
carded one-half. It was still too large, and
you can understand the joy with which I came
to this school to teach only geography.We seem now to be on the eve of another
revolution no less momentous than the scien¬
tific. The keynote of the classical learning
was mental discipline, that of the scientific ismental discipline for economic efficiency.
Now we are to march to the tune of economic
efficiency, discipline or no discipline.. The
home, the family and the- church have laid
upon the school the loads which they can or
will no longer carry. Now industry and busi¬
ness add the burden of teaching vocations and
trades. The school is asked not only to show
young people how to live the kind of a life
that is best worth living, but also to teach
them how to make a living, which is a very
different thing. The story is told of a certain
man concerned in educational matters in Ten¬
nessee who had been converted to the agricul¬
tural point of view. At a meeting up in the
hills he made a speech in which he labored to
convince his audience that every boy and girl
should know how to milk a cow, and to this
end should attend -one-- agricultural college.
When the meeting was thrown open for discus¬
sion, a gaunt old man with hay colored whisk¬
ers arose and said: Stranger, I agree with you
that every boy and girl, black or white, should
know how to milk a cow, but I want to make
a suggestion. Wouldnt it be a good thing for
a college to teach its students something that a
calf couldnt beat em at?I suspect that we are destined in the near
future to teach in school many things that a
calf can beat us*v Lowell said that a university
ought to be a place where one could make a
living digging Greek roots. The public school
is becoming a place where a student can make
his credits by digging dandelion roots or pota¬
toes. It looks to me as though the new voca¬
tional education is destined to involve many
efforts as futile as mine with my six sciences.
Let us try to shut out a vision of the future
when the literary, scientific and professional
departments of this Normal school shall be
only annexes to a farm and a foundry. We are
in the vocational movement, and it is left to
us to work it out, to make it in some measure
what we wish it to be. In time an adjustment
between what the school is expected to do and
what it can do will be reached, and the new
will be an advance upon the old.ATIat |
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Source: |
http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/32470 |
Collection: |
Indiana State University Archives |
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