It is most commonly through teaching that the ideal of education is sought to be realized. It is also most commonly through teaching that the same ideal is let, as it were, slip through the fingers. There is something serio-comic in an endeavour that not only fails to attain its object but also seems the best way that could be devised to achieve defeat. It must be interesting to see how we have been fighting to fail.
In teaching, the teacher is the most important element if only because he has to annihilate himself, if only because he must appear to be the least important. This extremely delicate paradoxical part, teacher is called upon to play is seldom played well and the common failure to play it well dooms teaching to sterility.
It is not enough if the teacher pays lip-homage to the principles a rigid adherence to which alone can avert failure. Lip-homage cannot really matter. Everything depends upon the question whether the teacher puts the principles of true teaching into real living practice.
What are these principles?
Firstly, in teaching a subject, the teacher must look out and avoid the ever-tempting danger of teaching it in the ordinary sense of the word. It is easy for the teacher to teach a subject in this sense and fancy that it is teaching, and just because this is so, the danger of false teaching becomes the more difficult to avoid. Most teachers are, therefore, found sooner or later on the wrong side. It is absolutely necessary to distinguish between false and true teaching.
To tell a class everything about a subject false teaching. It may afford information and sometimes even interesting and valuable information possessing more than a passing life, but far from being education, it is exactly that which keeps the young from the path of true teaching. Educationists speak of the educative value of this, that and the other school-sub ject and teachers launch them on the classes stripped of all of this value. The result is inattention languor, futility or the fidgets and the numerous juvenile offences that are so common in schools and happily so rare in homes. The failure of any great ideal is fraught with dangers. The airman attempting the sky cannot afford to play with the balance of his craft. The failure of education which involves the whole field of young human life must make many young minds cruising the air in the early morning of existence crash.
Information is dead matter especially imparted information. The only kind of information that does not gas the mind is what is got from self-effort. The young must gather it for themselves. They cannot be given it in their own interests. Given information acts like an anaesthetic on the young mind encumbering its natural movements and does not stimulate it to effort once. The enticing halo of light and shade in all the objects we really see arises from our own responses to them. These haloes come one after another urging us to go forward and increase effort. This is the secret of all doings in life great as well as small of failure no less than of success. And strictly speaking there is no failure in life. The immediate emptiness in which effort often seems to end is an illusion for there is no effort but has its effort. So the object of teaching in schools must always be to start self-action to keep it hitched to higher and higher aspirations.
In true teaching the teacher does not tell, but the class learns all the time. The teacher may speak and ask and often even tell but the class never stops from learning. The class never stops from seaching, finding gathering. The teacher stands in the background watching ready to pursuade any of the little labourers that stray to return to the right road. That is why in all rights teaching its inspirer lives in an all important insignificance if not in a glorious anonymity. The greater thing in teaching is that the pupils must learn and sincere in these days they seldom learn teaching has become singularly barren of fruit.
How does the average teacher of today carry on his work? If one need not mincel matters he crams his note book with all into his pupils as into so many empty jars not perhaps pours them out into his pupils but ask them to fill their note books porarily transfer the stagnant material to their heads to be emptied out as occasion requires. This is pure travesty of teaching, a mockery of education and the thing often begins at the lowest class and continues right up to the highest. I knew a very popular lecturer in mathematics who used to learn by rote the solutions of common class problems till the small hours of the morning so that he might write then out the next day on the black board in front of his class whose sole job in life as far as thing subject was connected was to take them down to be mugged up afterwards. This lecturer was a splendid success in life. I knew an immensely popular high school teacher who used to ram the necessary wisdom into his pupils by the sheer power of accumulated repetition. He was constantly made a much envied victim of the highest sounding plaudits and his students came with flying colours through the examinations. Popularity is often like a jest-book which is not meant to be taken seriously. But the popularity that falls to the lot of crammers and coaches is a grim joke. It leads to fatal emulation and poor education in doomed. What greater proof is required to show the deep degradation that teaching has undergone than that even mathematics is carefully stripped of its thought stimulating properties and is served out like cold mutton.
It is not teaching where the teacher thus bosses a dead show. In true teaching first of all the teachers is at once all and nothing. He is nothing because he is not immediately concerned with the operations of the young minds before him, and he is all because he is ultimately responsible for the result of these very operations. This is no doubt a task calling for the greatest circumspection an extremely delicate work in which one is continually called upon to state on thin ice. There are indeed very good reasons why teaching should fail, but it does not do to find reasons for a calamity of ameliorate the sufferers. We must at least try not to accept calamity as the normal condition of life and that is why the teacher should seize the first great principle in teaching that teaching is not filling the young with information.
Secondly, in teaching the pupils must work. This may seem too platitudinous and is in a way included in what has been said above. But the evil of made-easy education has gone so far that even a very platitude needs to be re-stated. True work implies volition attention perseverance and aim. True work is the mine from which right character is obtained. In true work are joy, stimulation and satisfaction. If education ought to form a wise preparation for life it must mean a well ordered system of work to whose who come to receive its benefits. For life at least of the happy useful type is sustained by work. Life's demands must often try our composure must often call forth our highest capacity for output. Life does not grant amnesty to the idlers and we should be the enemies of the young to give them the luxuries of a happy go lucky existence just when they ought to cultivate habits of industry and determination of attention and thought. The flipperty-flopperty attitude that is so common in the school going population of day to day is not conducive to the growth of the tough fibres with which the texture of real life is woven. But this attitude is not their fault. The flippancy, the inattention the proud indifference to things in general which is often assumed in the hope that it might be what they call liberty the effrontery which is often practised in the hope that it might be want they call independence and the polished inertia which given indolence an easy cloak are not their fault. These are the fruits of a teaching that denies young boys and girls the animation and piquancy of doing things for themselves. These are but the symptoms of the constricted school life where few opportunities are provided for the young to find themselves. A mechanical teaching produces a haughty generation of ineffective youth. A fallen education produces a race of suffering people. We must take the consequences.
A pedagogy extravagantly treated with pepsin will not allow the tender organ of juvenile thought to function and grow strong. Predigested ladlefuls of instruction, thin solutions of education are often more capable of harm than of good. We may give these by way of nourishment as indeed we do and enforce starvation. There is surely a danger in making education too easy for the young and the danger is they will never become educated by means of it. We cannot simply take the bee-line to education.
The pupils must learn. Men and women by themselves are made. They must work. Men and women by themselves discovered. They must write their charts of life themselves. You cannot make them live usefully by merely putting certificates in their hands. You cannot put growth into them by smoothing them all down to one level of approved uniformity by simply trying to straighten them up. It is futile to give. It is dangerous to fill. It is inhuman to jam it in and to ram it in. The only safe, the only right, thing to do is to stand by and to tend when occasion calls the light within themselves. We cannot even kindle their lamp. They must kindle it themselves.
Thirdly in teaching it is not what the teacher does that matters so much as what he is. In fact there is nothing more vital to teaching than what the teacher is. He is the teacher for us who is a true testimony of teaching. The fortunes of teaching are staked on what he might be in one great pitch and toss. And it being so this side of the subject needs to be reserved for fuller treatment in the follow chapter.
True teaching cannot fail. It is false systems wearing the mask of teaching that fail and have failed. It is the doubtful teacher that has failed. It is false instruction that lies defeated and exposed. Teaching is a sovereign remedy. It is the quack methods that are often practised in the name of teaching that fail us in the hour of great expectation. The need is urgent to clear educational ideals of false silt. This is the rask that awaits the the true educational reformer.