Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 74.djvu/598

594 for the fairer division of effort and attention between them. Student-teachers will relieve some members of the faculty from elementary work; it will let others pass over completely into the graduate schools in the course of time. After ten years, a respectable number of student*teachers will be ready to fill purely collegiate professorships.

5. While effecting this differentiation, it will also unify college life. If it does nothing else, it will clarify the aim and policy of each department simply by concentrating attention upon teaching problems. But it may also lead to a more thorough system of faculty advisers than has yet been found feasible. There is no reason why a student-teacher, at least in his third year, could not profitably serve as personal counselor for a few undergraduates. At present, as is generally known, the faculty adviser rarely does more than talk at long intervals with his protégés, and then on nothing more than the narrower questions of electing courses. He has no time for intimacies, as he usually carries from 14 to 16 hours of lectures a week, and has from a dozen to a score of students assigned to him. If, however, there could be an instructor for every thirty or forty students in each of the five chief undergraduate departments, then only six to eight students would have to be assigned to a single adviser.

6. It will help bridge the gap between high school and college. A common and well-grounded complaint to-day is that college teachers are not drawn from the ranks of the better high-school teachers. The trouble has not been with the latter; there has simply been a tradition that a college teacher must be a Ph.D. and a scientific investigator—and few high-school teachers have ever entered either of these select circles. Give the doctorate, though, for mastery of college teaching; and two things will eventually happen. First, many student-teachers upon receiving their degree, will be unable to secure college posts; and so they will then turn to high-school work, against which they will not be prejudiced, as your ordinary Ph.D. is to-day, and for which they will naturally be preferred candidates. Secondly, student-teachers thus installed will not be rooted forever to their high school, for they are known to college professors; they have taught two years in college and have established something of a reputation there which will help the best of them into college chairs some day. It is also possible that a small movement from high school to college will be set up by high-school teachers leaving their work to try for the Ph.D. in the hope of getting permanently into college work. During the next decade, this movement might be considerable, were the student-teacher system generally adopted. There are many excellent teachers in high schools who could teach freshmen and sophomores infinitely better than half the young doctores eruditissimi now thus engaged. And among the younger of them quite a few would prefer college to high school so strongly that they would be tempted to become student-teachers.