The Teacher-Training Program Re-Examined

Abstract

O UR educational vocabulary carries at least two terms that are becoming obsolescent: with its derivatives pedagogy and pedagogical, and as part of the phrase normal school. The passing of these terms demonstrates a shift of emphasis. We are not giving up the connotations of these words, but we have changed our point of view. The teacher is more than a pedagogue, and the new science of education, together with the art of the teacher, is more than pedagogy. In the same way, every teacher-training institution seeks to do more for its students than to normalize or standardize them. As long as the teacher's training was defined exclusively in terms of specific activities, specific methods of classroom procedure, specific materials and mechanics, specific devices, the content could be expressed adequately by the term pedagogy, and the school that busied itself chiefly with this standardizing was a normal school. The underlying reason for the disuse of the term pedagogy may be found in the growing conviction that teaching is a dignified, a learned profession. As such it is constantly judged by the same standards as the other learned professions, especially law and medicine. The teacher may no longer be merely a technician or mechanician; he must be an educated person who has also mastered the science of education and has acquired the technique of instruction. True, the teacher lags behind the lawyer and the physician in the basal education on which he will erect a professional superstructure. But he is only a quarter-century behind at this date. At the turn of the century the lawyer and the physician were still confusing their basal education with their technical and professional training; if not confusing the two, they were either giving the training without the education, or they were arguing that the education was a by-product of the training. Happily, law and medicine have now reached the more advanced position where education is a prerequisite to the training. Teaching is not so happily situated. There are still those who argue that the teacher is fully equipped for his work when he has mastered the classroom techniques, just as there are those who argue that these techniques appear mysteriously, without special effort, whenever education is adequate.