In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts.  Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by whole bands of children at a time.  The teacher who meets with most success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable.  A teacher should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do herself.  “Come and let me show you how” is an incomparably better stimulus than “Go and do it as the book directs.”  Children admire a teacher who has skill.  What he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate it.  It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her pupils to wake up and take an interest.  She must first take one herself; then her example is effective, as no exhortation can possibly be.

Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual.  And this tone is a mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance to the example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an aggressive and dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on from year to year, so that the new pupils take the cue almost immediately.  Such a tone changes very slowly, if at all; and then always under the modifying influence of new personalities aggressive enough in character to set new patterns and not merely to copy the old.  The classic example of this sort of tone is the often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold’s administration.  He impressed his own character as a model on the imagination of the oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required to impress theirs upon the younger set.  The contagiousness of Arnold’s genius was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school.  It is obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no precepts of detail.  As in so many other fields of teaching, success depends mainly on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception which enable him to seize the right moment and to set the right example.

Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the schoolroom, has often made itself heard.  More than a century ago, Rousseau, in his ‘Emile,’ branded rivalry between one pupil and another as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal education.  “Let Emile,” he said, “never be led to compare himself to other children.  No rivalries, not even in running, as soon as he begins to have the power of reason.  It were a hundred times better that he should not learn at all what he could only learn through jealousy or vanity.  But I would mark out every year the progress he may have made, and I would compare it with the progress of the following years.  I would say to him:  ’You are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped over, there is the burden which you raised.  There is the distance to which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over without losing breath.  See how much more you can do now!’ Thus I should excite him without making him jealous of any one.  He would wish to surpass himself.  I can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his former self.”