Book Description

Excerpt from Observation and Practice Teaching in College and University Departments of Education Thanks to the reprehensible blanket system of certification that prevails in nearly all the states, whereby any certificate carries the right to teach in any grade of school, the normal schools are aspiring to train teachers for secondary schools, and in like fashion, the universities are every year sending their students out into the elementary schools. In fact, more than one normal school is covertly if not openly competing with the universities for this opportunity - a course which must sooner or later give rise to unfortunate hard feeling and invidious recriminations. The root of the whole evil lies in the mistaken notion that the secondary teacher has a higher calling than the elementary teacher. Our American teachers ought so to be imbued with the true spirit of democracy that they would steadfastly reject any attempt to inoculate the great teaching body with the serum of such a professional caste spirit. Surely the builder of the superstructure has no more respectable or responsible task than that of the layer of the foundation. That wise old English schoolmaster, Mulcaster, in contending that the early instruction ought to be under the direction of the best teachers who should likewise be most liberally recompensed for their pains, was merely putting in a little different fashion what Plato had maintained two thousand years earlier, that "in every work the beginning is the most important part, especially in dealing with anything young and tender." The kindergartner has as noble a calling as the college professor; the grade teacher is as worthy of respect as the classical teacher in the high school. The existence of these different classes of teachers is merely a practical recognition that the economic principle of the division of labor applies with equal force to the teaching profession. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.