A Serious Charge

Abstract

H rISTORICAL movements have a way of growing regularly for long periods of time, and then, with the injection of a new concept, a period of rapid growth and broad expansion sets in. That is what is now transpiring in the training of teachers. To clarify the concept we may go back to the beginnings of teacher training in America and define the factors which were noticed at that time. In 1829 when Samuel R. Hall wrote his Lectures on School-Keeping, the first American textbook on pedagogy, we find a number of the elements of sound education. Public support of education, now an essential fact in a healthy educational system, one hundred years ago was in its feeble infancy. During this century this practice has steadily developed until now it can be validly claimed that education is the religion of the American people. Support has steadily grown in regular historical sequence without more than occasional eruptions of opposition. We discover, also, that in 1829 the teacher, another essential factor in education, was imperfectly qualified. Many teachers had no education beyond the common schools, and the earliest normal courses consisted of spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, drawing, geography, algebra, physiology, geometry, philosophy, music, and composition, a single omnibus course in theory and practice of teaching, and another in observation-all completed in a year's course of elementary or low secondaryschool level. In one hundred years we have increased the education curriculum to scores of courses, the subject courses to majors of thirty or forty semester-hours, and the whole curriculum to four or five years. Thus, emphasis upon subjects has developed naturally, courses in theory and practice have evolved, and in general the lines laid down in 1829 have been adhered to, perfected, expanded, and improved in regular historical sequence. None of these factors nor all of them combined are evolving in such fashion as to introduce a new era. They are merely growing into the golden age of an ancient erabetter support, better scholarship, better techniques, better buildings, better administration, and, in general, more smoothly running schools, with essential characteristics not radically changed since I829. The factor that is now ushering in the new era in the education of teachers has, in its turn, an ad-