The normal schools and the training schools and the teachers’ colleges must be the nurseries of craft ideals and standards.  The instruction that they offer must be upon a plane that will command respect.  The intolerable pedantry and the hypocritical goody-goodyism must be banished forever.  The crass sentimentalism by which we attempt to cover our paucity of craft ideals must also be eliminated.  Those who are most strongly imbued with ideals are not those who cheapen the value of ideals by constant verbal reiteration.  Ideals do not often come through explicitly imparted precepts.  They come through more impalpable and hidden channels,—­now through stately buildings with vine-covered towers from which the past speaks in the silence of great halls and cloistered retreats; now through the unwritten and scarcely spoken traditions that are expressed in the very bearing and attitude of those to whom youth looks for inspiration and guidance; now through a dominant and powerful personality, sometimes rough and crude, sometimes warm-hearted and lovable, but always sincere.  Traditions and ideals are the most priceless part of a school’s equipment, and the school that can give these things to its students in richest measure will have the greatest influence on the succeeding generations.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 6:  A paper read before the Normal and Training Teachers’ Conference of the New York State Teachers’ Association, December 27, 1907.]

[Footnote 7:  See Educative Process, New York, 1910, Chapter XX.]

[Footnote 8:  Rowe’s Habit Formation (New York, 1909), Briggs and Coffman’s Reading in Public Schools (Chicago, 1908), Foght’s The American Rural School, Adams’s Exposition and Illustration in Class Teaching (New York, 1910), and Perry’s Problems of Elementary Education (New York, 1910) should certainly be added to this list.]

[Footnote 9:  “It seems to me one of the most pressing problems in pedagogy to-day is that of method....  It is the subject in which teachers of pedagogy in Colleges and Universities are weakest to-day.  Of what practical value is all our study of educational psychology or the history of education, our child study, our experimental pedagogy, if it does not finally result in the devising of better methods of teaching, and make the teacher more skillful and effective in his work.”—­T.M.  BALLIET:  “Undergraduate Instruction in Pedagogy,” Pedagogical Seminary, vol. xvii, 1910, p. 67.]

IV

THE TEST OF EFFICIENCY IN SUPERVISION[10]

I