Some War-time Lessons: The Soldier's Standards of Conduct; The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship; What Have We Learned?Keppel, Frederick P. (Frederick Paul)
Philosophy
Some War-time Lessons: The Soldier's Standards of Conduct; The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship; What Have We Learned?
Keppel, Frederick P. (Frederick Paul)
World War, 1914-1918
I don't mean that we should leap from one illogical position clear
across the road into another. Mental measurements are not yet an exact
science, and a man of moderate ability, with a will to succeed, may be a
better academic investment than his more brilliant brother who lacks
that quality; but, by pruning very sparingly (one does not have to chop
down a tree to prune it) the saving in time and energy will be enormous.
Fundamentally the human relationships are what count, the qualities
leading to team play and coöperation, and away from isolation and its
ills. This means that if a faculty is to exercise its leadership, it
must know the student body, it must maintain and develop points of human
touch. Impersonal tests, impersonal records, all that modern practice
and modern science can teach us we must have, but these must be used
only as the framework for what is after all the fundamental thing,
direct human contact between teacher and teacher, teacher and student,
and student and student.
* * * * *
Now as to leadership, and in a university we can identify the leaders
with the teachers, there is no doubt, I think, that the teachers'
profession comes out of the war in a higher place than it went in, and
the scholar goes back to his work with a feeling of confidence in
himself in view of his record in competition and comparison with men in
other callings. I venture to predict that we shall hear a good deal less
frequently in the future the old gibe that the man who could do things
did them and the man who couldn't, taught them. The teachers made good,
not only because of their scholarship, but because of their personality.
I think this experience of the last two years is going to accelerate
greatly the movement which had already started of turning to the
academic world for the man who can do things and do them with other
people. Entirely apart from the contrasts in income, the sheer fun of
executive work, with plenty of money to spend on what you want to get
done, is a pretty strong temptation for a man with a heavy teaching
schedule and an annual department appropriation of say $75. Both the
regular army officers who have made conspicuously good, and the scholars
of the coöperative type who have made conspicuously good, are being
actively bidden for by bankers and manufacturers and all sorts of
people. Neither profession can compete on the purely financial side with
these tempters and, in order to hold their first-rate men, they will
each have to make some greater contribution in the things that money
alone can't buy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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