The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education — John Shaqi
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
Some discouraged teacher, glad to discover that his past failures have
been due to the absence of sympathetic imagination, may resolve that he
will not commit that blunder again. On going to his class to-morrow he
will look out upon his subject with his pupils' eyes, not with his own.
Let him attempt it, and his pupils will surely say to one another, "What
is the matter to-day with teacher?" They will get nothing from that
exercise. No, what is wanted is not a resolve, but an aptitude. The time
for using vicariousness is not the time for acquiring it. Rather it is
the time for dismissing all thoughts of it from the mind. On entering
the classroom we should leave every consideration of method outside the
door, and talk simply as interested men and women in whatever way comes
most natural to us. But into that nature vicariousness should long ago
have been wrought. It should be already on hand. Fortunate we if our
great-grandmother supplied us with it before we were born. There are
persons who, with all good will, can never be teachers. They are not
made in that way. Their business it is to pry into knowledge, to engage
in action, to make money, or to pursue whatever other aim their powers
dictate; but they do not readily think in terms of the other person.
They should not, then, be teachers.
The teacher's habit is well summed in the Apostle's rule, "Look not
every man on his own things, but every man also"--it is double--"on
the things of others." And this habit should become as nearly as
possible an instinct. Until it is rendered instinctive and passes
beyond conscious direction, it will be of little worth. Let us then,
as we go into society, as we walk the streets, as we sit at table,
practice altruistic limberness and learn to escape from ourselves. A
true teacher is always meditating his work, disciplining himself for his
profession, probing the problems of his glorious art, and seeing
illustration of them everywhere. In only one place is he freed from
such criticism, and that is in his classroom. Here in the moment of
action he lets himself go, unhampered by theory, using the nature
acquired elsewhere, and uttering as simply as possible the fulness of
his mind and heart. Direct human intercourse requires instinctive
aptitudes. Till altruistic vicariousness has become our second
nature, we shall not deeply influence anybody.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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