Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/828

804 pupils and to show their skill in questioning. A good many so-called experts consider the ability of the teacher to question logically as the measure of his value. This is a very superficial view of the matter. It has resulted in positive injury to many teachers, and greater injury to more pupils.

Some teachers confess that they are disinclined to allow their pupils to question as a practice, since the questions may be pointless, illogical, and inadequate. That is precisely the kind of work which the school should undertake to remedy. The pupil's questions reveal the condition of his mind quite as much as his answers to the teacher's questions. His anxiety to avoid errors moves him to say what he thinks the teacher desires. When he questions he is thrown off his guard, and his misconceptions, and feebleness or acuteness of mind are revealed inadvertently and the teacher can help just when and where help is needed without undue interference, which is so common in school.

Moreover, these teachers claim that such freedom as this work necessitates might lead to disorder, or what passes for disorder in the opinion of those who judge the order by the degree of stillness and lack of movement prevailing. So they keep the reins taut in their own hands and set up a despotism of varying degrees of severity.

Many an inexperienced teacher, who has learned this method at some training school for teachers, may charge her failure in maintaining order to her persistence in trying to hold a large class of pupils to her questions. Her logical plans and orderly questions are commonly inelastic, unsuitable, monotonous, and sometimes irritating. She bends the wills of her pupils to her own; but there is too much elasticity in their mental habitudes to endure the strain long. In a few days the monotony of a single voice, hardly still during the day, and the vain attempt to "follow my leader" in her set and searching questions result in restlessness, inattention, and disorder. Her pupils can not readily get used to the one-sided game.

The aims which the average teacher finds the most difficult in reaching are, to secure attention, arouse interest, induce spontaneity, elicit independent thought, give enjoyment, and prevent ordinary school work from becoming or appearing a task. This difficulty also may very largely be charged to the traditional mode of questioning. There is seldom any enjoyment in it. Herbert Spencer says: "Experience is daily showing with greater clearness that there is always a method to be found productive of interest—even of delight; and it ever turns out that this is the method proved by all other tests to be the right one."

All teachers unite in extolling spontaneity in the abstract, but almost universally ignore it in their teaching by reason of alleged