The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
But with the third class of doubts the case is different. These relate
to the constitution of the staff of teachers, and here sufficient facts
are at hand to permit a few points to be demonstrated with considerable
certainty. When, for example, we ask from what source teachers are to be
drawn, we are usually told that they must come from college faculties.
If the method of the extension lecturer is to be as thorough as that of
the universities themselves, the lecturers must be experts, not
amateurs; and where except at the colleges does a body of experts exist?
No doubt many well-trained men are scattered throughout the community as
merchants, doctors, school-teachers, and lawyers. But these men, when of
proved power, have more than they properly can attend to in their own
affairs. It seems to be the colleges, therefore, to which the movement
must look for its teachers; and in the experiments thus far made in
this country the extension lecturing has been done for the most part by
college officers. A professor of history, political economy, or
literature has, in addition to his college teaching, also given a course
of instruction elsewhere. This feature of the American system, one may
say with confidence, must prove a constant damage to the work of the
colleges and, if persisted in, must ultimately destroy the extension
scheme itself.
In England the extension teachers are not university teachers. To have
no independent staff for extension work is a novelty of the American
undertaking. The very name, university extension, besides being
barbaric, is in its English employment largely misleading; since neither
the agencies for extending nor indeed, for the most part, the studies
extended, are found at the universities at all. A small syndicate or
committee, appointed from among the university officers, is the only
share the university has in the business. The impression, so general in
this country, that English university teachers are roaming about the
island, lecturing to mixed audiences, is an entire error. The university
teachers stay at home and send other people, their own graduates
chiefly, to instruct the multitude. A committee of them decides on the
qualifications for the work of such persons as care to devote themselves
to itinerant teaching as a profession. For those so selected they
arrange times, places, and subjects; but they themselves do not move
from their own lecture rooms. Nor is there occasion for their doing so.
In the slender development of popular education in England, many more
persons of the upper classes become trained as specialists than can find
places as university teachers. There thus arises a learned and leisured
accumulation which capitally serves the country in case of a new
educational need. On this accumulated stock of cultured men--men who
otherwise could not easily bring their culture to market--the extension
movement draws. These men are its teachers, its permanent teachers,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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