Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/821

Rh to mere mechanism and parrotlike imitation. "They make fine-working machines of our teachers," some still say, "but we would rather have spontaneous activity, even though ignorant and crude, than the finest action on the part of a machine." This criticism of the normal school has served a wholesome purpose in breaking up any tendency toward mechanism and spiritless, formal methods of teaching which might have been displayed in its earlier inception. It seems to be always true that in the beginning of any great institution like the normal school the letter and not the spirit will be at first emphasized; but in the process of healthy evolution the mechanical part becomes simply the means of expression of the principles and truths underlying. This has, no doubt, been true of the normal school; and, in its steady growth toward a more scientific basis for all it does, it has come to pass that at the present time its work in the training of teachers is made to cover the broadest and fullest possible view of the human being and the purpose of his education. It is recognized that the process of education from first to last is dependent upon laws of the human mind, and it is partly the province of the normal school to determine what those laws are. And further, when the aims and ends of education have been decided upon, the normal school must show what are the simplest, most speedy, and most certain ways of attaining those ends. If we look briefly at the work of the normal school as we have it now, we shall see that the charge of its being unduly mechanical and too feebly scientific can not be applied to it in its present stage of evolution.

The one ruling aim which gives character to the professional work in the normal school is the purpose to awaken in the teacher a consciousness that there is a science of education, and an art of teaching founded upon that science; to arouse in her an earnest, indefatigable ambition to become acquainted with the best in both, and, most important of all, to lead her to realize this in her own work. The distinguishing characteristic of professional instruction, which marks it off from purely academic study, is the attempt to acquaint students with the teaching aspect of subjects of instruction, and to lead them to become students of all the conditions in their schoolrooms that affect the action of the minds of pupils in responding to all the means of stimulation which the teacher consciously makes use of to attain the ends of development. In other words, it is aimed to make the teacher conscious of her art—conscious in the sense that she will intelligently consider the growing, developing mind, acting according to definite, exact laws; and that she will attempt to wisely use the agencies at her disposal in harmony with these laws to accomplish in the most ready manner the highest possible ends of school