6.  What would you expect to gain from a course in school administration?

7.  The president of at least one Ohio college personally inspects and checks up the work of the professors from the standpoint of proper teaching standards, and has them visit one another’s classes for friendly criticism and observation.  He reports improvement in the standard of teaching.  How is his plan applicable in your school?

8.  A city high school principal states that it is not his custom to visit his teachers’ classes; that he knows what is going on and that he interferes only if something is wrong.  What do you think of his practice?  How is the principle applicable in your school?

9.  Do the duties of a superintendent have to do only with curriculum and discipline, or have they to do also with teaching power?

10.  What are some of the ways in which you have known superintendents successfully to increase the teaching power of the teachers?

11.  What things do we need to know about a child in order to utilize his interests?

12.  Distinguish three types of teachers.

13.  What are the objections to teaching the book?

14.  What are the objections to teaching the subject?

15.  What are some items of school work upon which some teachers spend time that they should devote to finding materials suited to the child’s interests?

16.  Can one teacher utilize all of the interests of a child within a nine-month term?  What is the measure of how far she should be expected to do so?

CHAPTER XXI

BEHAVIOR

=Behavior in retrospect.=—­The caption of this chapter implies the behavior of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive.  No sooner has the student arrived at deductions that seem conclusive than exceptions begin to loom up on his speculative horizon that disintegrate his theories and cause him to retrace the steps of his reasoning.  Such a study affords large scope for introspection, but too few people incline to examine their own behavior in any mental attitude that approaches the scientific.  The others seem to think that things just happen, and that their own behavior is fortuitous.  They seem not to be able to reason from effect back to cause, or to realize that there may be any possible connection between what they are doing at the present moment and what they were doing twenty years ago.

=Environment.=—­In what measure is a man the product of his environment?  To what extent is a man able to influence his environment?  These questions start us on a line of inquiry that leads toward the realm of, at least, a hypothetical solution of the problem of behavior.  After we have reached the conclusion, by means of concrete examples, that many men have influenced their environment, it becomes pertinent, at once, to inquire still further whence these men derived the power thus to modify their environment.  We may not be able to reach final or satisfactory answers to these questions, but it will, none the less, prove a profitable exercise.  We need not trench upon the theological doctrine of predestination, but we may, with impunity, speculate upon the possibility of a doctrine of educational predestination.