Education: Teacher-Teaching

Into the learned debate of the Institute for Administrative Officers of Institutions of Higher Learning, held last week at the University of Chicago, came a gaunt pedantic spectre: the Graduate School, by which all prospective teachers must be passed. Formal and informal discussion centred in substance on the thesis: “What can improve Graduate Schools?” Said Professor Frederic Campbell Woodward, Dean of the Faculties and Vice President of the University of Chicago: “There is ample reason to fear that the members of graduate faculties, in large numbers, are still either unaware of the demand [for improvement] or satisfied that nothing sho.uld be done about it.”

Excerpts from noteworthy addresses:

Dr. Leon B. Richardson, professor of chemistry at Dartmouth: “The student . . . forms the idea that an accumulation of pedagogic credits makes a teacher, that untiring industry and uninspired adherence to directions in the solution of some minor problem of research makes a scholar. . . .

“Most serious as a defect … is the loss of a sense of proportion. … If an individual struggles through two laborious years to solve some minor problem in the internal economy of the earthworm, I am ready with congratulations, although my personal interest in earthworms is of the slightest. But no man can work so long and so intently without the tendency coming upon him to magnify his subject, with earthworms rising in his estimation to the status of pythons.”

Dean Gordon Jennings Laing, famed philologist, Professor of Latin at Chicago and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Literature: “No one has the ghost of a chance of being an effective teacher in any grade of school unless he has both a critical and constructive mind. Even though he be famous for the range of his erudition, though he be as full of information as an encyclopedia, as systematic in the organization and conduct of his courses as a railroad time table, yet if he is wholly without the urge to investigation and does nothing to stimulate scholarly or scientific ambition in his students, he can never attain the position of ranking professor.”

“Blind groping . . . gross inefficiency” were two epithets hurled by Professor Charles Hubbard Judd, Director of Chicago’s School of Education. “Educational engineering” was his remedy: He defended Research, cited cases where it has greatly aided teaching methods: 1) At the University of Buffalo, students about to be dismissed for failure were found to have little knowledge of how to study; properly coached, they qualified; 2) History in college was found to repeat 22.8% of high school history. “One historian has discovered that pupils in the ordinary American public schools encounter Christopher Columbus 39 times before they are allowed to escape.”

President Ernest Hatch Wilkins, of Oberlin College: “The technique of the army and navy will hardly serve. Pictorial posters placed about the campus, with instructors detached for recruiting duty, pacing up and down in academic costumes would attract more missiles than missionaries. Teaching must be attractive . . . interesting . . . afford chance for distinction and for service; and it must give promise of financial competence for happy family life.”