Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/818

796

NE whose attention has been directed to the great activity which has taken hold of the modern educational world can not but have concluded that teaching has come to be regarded as a more or less difficult art, for which considerable preparation must be made in order that one shall be fitted to do it at all well. The present age has not been heir to such a view as this, however; for it has been comparatively recent that men have grown to consider the imparting of instruction successfully as an art to be acquired; they have looked upon it rather as an instinct that is born with its possessor, and that shows itself in some such spontaneous manner as do other characteristics and habits that lie outside of personal thought or control. The maxim that poets are "born, not made," has been applied with much vigor also to the great majority of teachers, who have themselves oftentimes not thought it necessary or expedient to make any definite preparation for their calling, other than to acquire a certain familiarity with the arithmetic or grammar or geography, knowledge of which they innocently hope to pour into their pupils' minds out of their own store of facts in these subjects. Educational practice of to-day, however, is not wholly in sympathy with the declaration that a teacher's art is born with him and can not be acquired; for it has provided elaborate means for the making of teachers, or at least for affording them opportunities to greatly improve upon what Nature has done for them. This has grown out of the belief that teaching is founded upon a science, and its successful practice must be acquired by special study and apprenticeship, just as with any other art, like civil engineering or architecture or medicine. Confidence in this opinion has spread widely throughout our own and other countries, and has resulted in the vast increase of means whereby every teacher may now have opportunity to become possessed in some measure of those special acquirements which, it is believed, are essential in order that he shall deal wisely with childhood in the schoolroom.

Previous to the eighteenth century there seems to have been no adequate conception of the training of mind as being amenable to the rules and methods of science. It was probably not thought that the mental life was subject to laws the nature of which could be ascertained, and which would have to be followed if there would be any success in leading the mind to attain those ends which should be kept constantly in view in all educational work. The teacher, then, would be successful according to the measure of his instinctive apprehension of the peculiar nature of each