isa-normaladvance-1903-00156

Description:	156THE NORMAL ADVANCE.Teaching as a Profession.In the ideal professional man or woman, selfishness has no part. To perfect ones self in any profession is to lose ones self for the common good ofmankind, to become the agent of higher powersin a service to humanity. The physician, the attorney, the novelist are not mere individuals whosehorizons are bounded by the limits of their particular existences, but are the common property oftheir fellow men, who have a right to demand ofthem the exercise of the functions they havechosen.In teaching, as in no other profession, is thisimmeasurably true. To become an ideal teacher isto lose Self in a service to the pupil to become a living sacrifice at the altar of thought inleading others to think, to feel, to live. It is thegoal of noblest ambitions to become altruistic todie, that others may live. Such was the purposein the life of the worlds greatest teacher, and suchmust be the teachers purpose if she would followhis example.Every teacher must realize at some time that sheis merely an agent being used by some unseenpower for a purpose whose content is measuredonly by the bounds of Eternity. Such a realization comes by inspiration to refine the spirit, toobliterate dross, to drive out pride, and to makeher feel the sacredness of her calling. Until suchinspiration will have come, she will not be nteacher, but a keeper of school not the agent ofa powerful universal force striving to refine themost precious of heavenly legacies, the human soul,but a servant of the State whose duty is to makegood citizens.The true teacher, like a mother, lives to makeherself unnecessary to her pupils. There mustcome a time of graduation when comes separation.In the years preceding that time, the pupil hasbeen a dependent, a follower but at graduationhe is turned loose upon himself, his own master.If he has been rightly taught, the early need of ateacher dissolves itself into a power that rendersthe pupil self-regulating. The life of the teacherenters into his life and becomes the arbiter of bisfate. The whole process is a sort of transmigration of life from one soul to another, wherein theindividuality of the teacher is lost in the life ofthe race.The ideal teacher is necessarily feminine. Masculinity may bend minds to its own will it maybuild a squadron that will sweep the seas it maybridge a river or span a continent it may capturea city or destroy an army but it cannot teach. Inthe presence of a towering will, spontaneity islost, thought is stricken dumb and slinks away.What Hubbard calls the brooding quality is absent.It is self all-assertant, bending everything to itsimperious end. If unrestrained it would make theworld a Calvary whereon would be crucified all individuality. It commands, but cannot teaehf Itwas a Herod who commanded the slaughter of theinnocents but a woman who bore the basket fromthe rushes.But we have long since learned to look to notfor the ideal. To say that a teacher is a man doesnot imply masculinity, nor are women teachers always feminine. Napoleon was a type of masculinity Froebel a type of femininity. The former couldlay nations at his feet, but his children learned tohate him the latter never awed a man into subjection and his pupils adored him. Where Napoleon saw a germ of thought he stamped it out Froebel made it bear a hundred fold.The average teacher is a dreamer, not a doer ofthings. She thinks upon questions of idealty inher school-work, talks glibly and earnestly aboutabstract, far-away nothings, gleaned from somepsychologist or literary light, and forgets aboutthem. With her, the ideal teacher is something towrite about for an institute or to form the subjectof conversation with a fellow worker who persistsin talking shop during meals. At her desk she isperfunctory. Before the drawling sing-song of herreaders, the misapplication of formulae in Arithmetic, or the seemingly utter disregard of herpupils for the future, the ideal slinks into the re-
Source:	http://indstate.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/isuarchive/id/33942
Collection:	Indiana State University Archives

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