Essays on Educational ReformersQuick, Robert Hebert
History
Essays on Educational Reformers
Quick, Robert Hebert
Education -- History; Educators
§ 115. In one respect the analogy between the educator and child and
the gardener and plant, an analogy in which Pestalozzi no less than
Froebel delighted, entirely breaks down. The gardener has to study the
conditions necessary for the health and development of the plant, but
these conditions lie outside his own life and are independent of it. With
the educator it is different. Like the gardener he can create nothing
in the child, but unlike the gardener he can further the development
only of that which exists in himself. He _draws out_ in the young
the intelligence and the sense of what is just, the love of what is
beautiful, the admiration of what is noble, but this he can do only
by his own intelligence and his own enthusiasm for what is just and
beautiful and noble. Even industry is in many cases _caught_ from the
teacher. In a volume of essays (originally published in the _Forum_),
in which some men, distinguished as scholars or in literature in the
United States, have given an account of their early years, we find that
almost in every case they date their intellectual industry and growth
from the time when they came under the influence of some inspiring
teacher. Thus even for instruction and still more for education, the
great force is _the teacher_. This is a truth which all our “parties”
overlook. They wage their controversies and have their triumphs and
defeats about unessentials, and leave the essentials to “crotchety
educationists.” In such questions as whether the Church Catechism shall
or shall not be taught, whether natural science shall or shall not figure
in the time-table (without scientific teachers it can figure nowhere
else), whether the parents or the Government shall pay for each child
twopence or threepence a week, whether the ratepayers shall or shall
not be “represented” among the Managers in “voluntary” schools, in all
questions of this kind _education_ is not concerned; and yet these are
the only questions that we think about. In the end it will perhaps dawn
upon us that in every school what is important for education is not
the time-table but the teacher, and that so far as pupil-teachers are
employed education is impossible. Elsewhere (_infra_ p. 476) I have told
of a man in the prime of life (he seemed between 40 and 50 years old)
whose time was entirely taken up in teaching a large class of children,
boys and girls, of six or seven years. He most certainly could and did
educate them both in heart and mind. He made their lessons a delightful
occupation to them, and he exercised over them the influence of a good
and wise father. Here was the right system seen at its best. I do not
say that all or even most adult teachers would have exercised so good
an influence as this gentleman; but so far as they come up to what they
ought to be and might be they do exercise such an influence. And this of
course can be said of no _pupil_-teacher.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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