isa-normaladvance-1914-00030

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
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/32470
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

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