Page:The Teacher's Practical Philosophy.djvu/22

10 of teaching than in the profession of medicine, law, or even of the ministry.

Again, the teacher has the important advantage of having his subjects committed to him at, and during, the formative period of their lives. The immaturity, the crudeness, and rank foolishness of one's pupils is often a severe trial to the teacher of serious purpose. It is also, not infrequently, a bitter disappointment that he can not hurry these youth through the raw and green age of development so fast as seems desirable. But it must not be forgotten that there is another side, and a side of hope to all this. Crudeness and foolishness are symptoms of the age in which the process of education is most appropriate, and its successful progress most reasonable to expect. The age of immaturity is the educable age. And just as the triumph of any artistic effort depends, not solely on the artist's ideal or the artist's skill, but also on the moldableness of the material, in which, by his skill, he must see his ideals more or less fully idealized, so it is preeminently with the art of the so-called "educator."

Another advantage which is really great, but which belongs to our present system of education far less than it should, and to gain more of which it would, in my judgment, be well worth while to sacrifice a number of less important considerations, is this: The teacher's work is, for considerable