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
Naturally enough, therefore, the organizers of the extension movement,
despairing of finding among us competent unattached teachers, have
turned at once to the colleges; but the colleges are a very unsafe
support to lean upon. A professor in a university where the studies are
elective has no more superfluous time than a busy lawyer, or doctor, or
business man. Merely to keep up with the literature of a subject, to
say nothing of that research and writing which should enlarge its
limits, is an enormous task. Teaching too is no longer an affair of
text-books and recitations. Leisurely days of routine ease belong to the
past. A professor nowadays must prepare lectures incessantly; must
perpetually revise them; must arrange examinations; direct the reading
of his students; receive their theses; himself read a large part of
their voluminous written work; personally oversee his advanced men;
gather them about him in laboratory, seminary and conference; attend
innumerable committee and faculty meetings; devise legislation for the
further development of his college and department; correspond with
schools and colleges where his students, after taking their higher
degree, may suitably be placed; and if at the end of a hard-worked day
he can find an hour's leisure, he must still keep his door open for
students or fellow-officers to enter. So laborious have become the
duties of a university teacher that few large staffs now go through a
year without one or two of their members breaking down. With the growing
complexity of work it often seems as if the proper business of college
officers, study and teaching, must some day cease altogether, crowded
out by the multifarious tasks with which they are only indirectly
connected. It is useless to say that these things are not necessary.
Whoever neglects them will cease to make his college, his subject and
his influence grow. It is because professors now see that they cannot
safely neglect them that the modern college differs fundamentally from
its humdrum predecessor of a quarter of a century ago. Any movement
which seeks to withdraw a professor's attention from these things, and
induces him to put his soul elsewhere, inflicts on the community a
serious damage. No amount of intellectual stimulus furnished to little
companies here and there can atone for the loss that must fall on
education when college teachers pledge themselves to do serious work in
other places than in their own libraries and lecture rooms. To be an
explorer and a guide in a department of human knowledge is an arduous
profession. It admits no half-hearted service.
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