Page:Jesuit Education.djvu/452

432 said: "Immediately after their novitiate they [the young Jesuits] must have the most accomplished professors of Rhetoric [by which word is understood general philological knowledge], men, who not only are altogether eminent in this faculty, but who know how to teach and make everything smooth for the scholars; men of eminent talent and the widest experience in the art; who are not merely to form good scholars, but to train good masters."

But there are other most important regulations concerning the direct training for teaching. Towards the end of the philosophical course, before going to the colleges, there should be an immediate preparation for those who in the near future are to enter on the momentous career of teaching boys. The outline of the Ratio Studiorum of 1586 demands the following course: "It would be most profitable for the schools, if those who are about to be preceptors were privately taken in hand by some one of great experience, and for two months or more were practised by him in the method of reading, teaching, correcting, writing, and managing a class. If teachers have not learned these things beforehand, they are forced to learn them afterwards at the expense of their scholars; and then they will acquire proficiency only when they have already lost in reputation; and perchance they will never unlearn a bad habit. Sometimes such a habit is neither very serious nor incorrigible, if taken at the beginning; but if the habit is not corrected at the outset, it comes to pass that a man, who otherwise would have been most useful, becomes well-nigh useless. There is no describing how much amiss preceptors take it, if they