The Teacher's Philosophy in and Out of School

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE TEACHER'S PHILOSOPHY IN SCHOOL The Personality of the Pupil Over and above the lessons that he learns, or rather in and through them, the pupil is developing his personality. The teacher, however harsh or stupid he may be, cannot altogether prevent this development; but he may do much to repress or pervert it. On the other hand, the wise and sympathetic teacher can do much to make the growing personality strong, sweet, and pure. Personality develops through taking up and making over into an expression of itself, materials which at first are foreign to it. To stimulate, guide, restrain, and, without appearing to do so, for that very reason all the more effectively to control this development, is the teacher's task. As a matter of fact, we recognize five stages in our educational system, ? the primary, the grammar, the high-school, the college, and the university. All these stages involve this same process of taking up and making over into its own substance materials that the outside world presents; and therefore in its broadest sense, the task of the teacher at all stages is the same. Yet the materials taken up, and the methods of appropriating them, are different at these different stages; and at each stage the problem assumes a special form. In the primary school, the teacher's problem is to suggest a series of immediate interests, which appeal to the play and imitative instincts which in these years are the child's chief forms of reaction on his environment. In the lower grammar grades, play-work must give way to sustained efforts at tasks not intrinsically attractive, but which are made artificially preferable through rewards bound up with them, and penalties attached to the opposite alternatives. In the upper grammar grades and in the high school, the indivi...