Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/820

798 meet the demands of the public schools. On this account the teacher is reasonably certain of finding and holding a place in his profession if he enters it properly prepared; and the governments of these countries can say that no teacher shall engage in the practice of his profession until he shall have had the normal school or training-seminary preparation, which is provided free, under the provision that the beneficiary shall devote himself during his life, or a certain portion of it, to the work of teaching in the public institutions of the country. In our own country teaching is not yet regarded as a profession to any great extent; and a majority of those engaged in it do not continue in it for a long time, perhaps not more than two or three years. The greater number of teachers are women whose tenure of office in the schools is tentative, depending upon the time when they shall find more attractive life work; while most of the men who enlist under the banner of the schoolmaster do so only as preliminary to engaging in other and more remunerative professions when fortune favors. This uncertainty in things makes a thorough and systematic training of teachers in anything like completeness impossible in our own country at the present time. However, so thoroughly is it recognized by those familiar with the question that teaching is an art to be improved upon by special study, even by those possessing the most favorable endowments, that provisions are made for some professional training of every candidate for a place as master in the schools. This is done through teachers' institutes in all the States, summer schools, teachers' training classes in the high schools, normal schools, and departments and chairs of pedagogy in the universities; and by means of these agencies almost every teacher receives more or less professional instruction which enables her to grasp the problem she is to undertake in the management of a school in a more skilled and scientific manner. But, while not disparaging the work done by any and all of these agencies, it must still be said that it is to our normal schools that we must look for anything like that preparation and training which must be demanded of our teachers before our schools shall be able to realize adequately those ends for which they are established and maintained.

Something has been written against the normal-school idea by those who feel that the art of teaching successfully must spring up spontaneously out of the teacher's nature, since if it comes in any other way, through study and apprenticeship, it will be stilted, forced, and unnatural; and it is further urged that teachers who are thus made are more harmful than none at all. It has been held in some quarters that the normal school puts into the hands of its students a system of artificial makeshifts that prevent the outworking of individuality, and reduce all