Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/644

624 As to how and in what kind of schools this double equipment can best be given—ah! that is another question, beyond the limits of this paper to discuss, and, like all questions that deal with expedients, hard to settle—differing minds will always prefer differing expedients for the same end.

Will the professional training be included in the college curriculum? Has any college yet provided for it? I mean, not simply by a course of lectures on Herbartian Philosophy, but also by a close and vital study of all the conditions of public-school work. It is a healthy sign of the times that the colleges are addressing themselves to pedagogical questions. The combined efforts of all the institutions of learning will be none too effective for the work of public education. But all real aid to public schools must be given in the spirit of those who would build up rather than pull down, who can distinguish in the work of others a right ideal in the midst of the crowding obstacles that prevent the full realization of that ideal, and who do not hold themselves aloof from personal labor as mutual helpers and learners with other earnest and open-minded thinkers who are already carrying the burdens of the work.

Can the normal schools give this double preparation for high-school work, providing the requisite scholarship as well as the practical and professional training? If it be true that they have not heretofore done so, perhaps the importance of the work they have been doing for the elementary schools offers a partial explanation. But it would be a matter of public interest if educationists should really inquire and find out how nearly the best normal schools in their four years' courses reach the standard of the colleges in scholastic attainments, and also how much difficulty there would be in superadding to these courses whatever they may now lack of such attainments. It would certainly seem to be feasible for a State system of public instruction to prepare at least some of the teachers needed for all grades of its own work. To delegate the work for the higher grades entirely to private institutions which have no practical relations with the lower-grade work, would be to establish a break in the public-school system that it would be hard to justify.

But here again the experience of that high-school teacher raises a question. It would almost seem that in the minds of the managers of the agencies such a breach is known to exist; that while the lower schools belong to the masses of the people, the high school is supposed to be intended primarily as a feeder for the colleges, so that to introduce any other than a collegiate element into its teaching force suggests a "poaching upon the college preserves." There is more than a suspicion abroad that the high schools do stand in just this position of uncertainty, whether