The Ideal Teacher #246937

Teaching will be a profession when we have learned the need of thorough scholarly equipment, and single minded devotion to our daily and hourly duties in the school-room, under the guidance of those larger ideals which the world has set up for the protection of its cherished values. Nothing less than expert knowledge, tempered by a spirit of reverent ministry to those placed under our tuition, will ever make us professional teachers. Teaching will be a fine art when the situations of schoolroom life are made to call for the best in teacher and pupil. In such a soil of noble motivation the highest powers of human beings thrive. The teacher who drives or is driven, who forces himself or his children through stated tasks, without any sense of their significance, will not find teaching congenial. He will never know that absorption which is the essence of art. Half-heartedly he will teach, his other, more imperious impulses beckoning him away to another life. And while he stays, he will know only that pain of conflict which destroys the possibility of happy work. To achieve real success, teaching must be kept an interesting business, where the free impulses of children and teachers are so used as to accomplish useful things happily.