schools and churches have to stand for their lives, the training schools are the first to feel the headsman's ax.

When legislation, backed by public opinion, shall give these schools authority to exist independent of local committees, we shall look for their permanent establishment and growing usefulness. For the utmost endeavor toward both this legislation and this public opinion, the training school looks to you, gentlemen and ladies of the normal-school section of the National Teachers' Association.

DISCUSSION.

Mr. C. C. Rounds questioned the accuracy of the description of the state normal schools given by the essayist. He maintained that normal classes were not sufficient for the instruction and training of teachers, and the regular normal-school work was necessary.

Mr. E. C. Hewett, of Illinois, advocated the establishment of graded normal schools.

Mr. John Hancock, of Ohio, supported the views of the essayist. He did not believe in the multiplication of normal schools, but wanted a higher standard of admission and a stricter adherence to professional work. He showed the importance of teachers' institutes, and advocated the employment of a professional corps of instructors for institute work.

Mr. Hagar could not agree with the essayist. The training school did not give broad enough culture. The normal-school course should be added; theory and practice should go together.

Mr. Henry B. Buckham, of New York, described the course of instruction carried out in the state normal school at Buffalo, under his superintendence.

Mr. E. A. Sheldon, of New York, could not separate the academic from the professional in normal-school work. The Oswego school was at first wholly professional. Some students entered well qualified for their work, but many came unprepared, and it was found impossible to fill the school with students thoroughly prepared for the duties on which they were to enter.

Miss Lathrop closed the discussion with a few explanatory remarks.

THIRD DAY.

THURSDAY-AUGUST 7th.

The Normal Department met at 3 o'clock, the President in the chair.

Mr. Rounds offered the following resolution:

Resolved, That, in the opinion of the normal section of the National Association, a Practice Department is necessary to the most efficient working of the normal school.

After some discussion, the resolution was passed unanimously.

Mr. Greenough moved that a committee be appointed to prepare a paper for the next meeting of the association "On the modes of conducting practice schools in connection with normal schools."

The motion was adopted, and the chair appointed Messrs. GREENOUGH, MCVICAR and SHELDON.

Mr. H. B. Buckham, of New York, read a paper on the

RELATIVE CONTRIBUTION OF SCHOLARSHIP AND METHODS TO THE POWER OF THE TEACHER.

The need of special preparation for teaching is now generally admitted. Few call it in question that they who are to teach should be educated and trained for this work. This is shown by the establishment and maintenance of normal schools and county institutes and teachers' classes wherever a system of free schools prevails, and by the many anxious discussions of the best means of obtaining better teachers. Most school officers are anxious, or at least willing, to give to the schools under their charge the benefit of all improvements that may be made and the opportunity of instituting and extending judicious experiments in this direction. But even this general necessity of professional training is not admitted by all, as is evinced by the frequent, though not often successful, attacks upon training schools in state legislatures and elsewhere, and by the distrust of them and of their influence upon education expressed with more or less reserve by intelligent men in almost every community; a distrust which is all the more dangerous because it seems to take the form of a conviction that they are only an experiment, which will soon work itself out and prove its own worthlessness in its want of adaptation to the end proposed. This state of things makes the settlement of all particular questions involved in the general question of professional training matter for serious consideration, inasmuch as the wise settlement of them must affect not only the usefulness but also the continued existence of special schools for this training.

Among these questions none, in my judgment, is in itself more important and none farther from definite settlement than the one suggested by the topic chosen for this discussion. The relation of knowledge and of methods of teaching to the power of a teacher, as such, involves the entire work of the normal school. Shall we aim at scholarship as the best and only necessary equipment of the teacher? Shall we say, as many do say, that if one knows a subject he can teach it? to use the favorite expression of some, that if it is in a man to teach, he will find a way for himself, and a better one than can be given him? or shall we direct our efforts to methods as the essential thing, assuming that if one is familiar with the processes of teaching he may be safely trusted to supply himself with the substance of good instruction? Are they separate and independent things-one of which is the peculiar and only province of the academy or college, and the other the peculiar and only province of the normal school? Does one sort of power, and that, in the judgment of many, the best for the purposes of teaching, come from scholarship unadulterated with

any admixture of other ingredients; and for this reason can pure scholarship afford to look askance on the teachings of a new and ambitious "philosophy of education" and its formulated practices, saying I, who know much, have no need of you: my learning will carry me through all the difficulties I shall meet; can not one who knows thoroughly instruct well? And does another sort of power, distinct from the first, related to it indeed, but a riper and superior product, alone capable of putting learning to any worthy uses in teaching, come from the study of methods; and can it afford with even covert sneer to look on learning as an almost useless incumbrance, and to pity those who know so much and can do so little with their knowledge? Or, are these two equally important, equally necessary to practical power? As the one grows, if it grow under judicious guidance, does the other keep pace with it? Does each contribute its own peculiar, but scarcely separable, element to a result essentially simple and indivisible? In this result of genuine power to educate other minds, are not these calorific and actinic rays bound together in one, not to be disjoined even for purposes of investigation and experiment, without doing some violence to nature, and capable of producing beautiful and useful products only as they are combined into one life-giving beam?

On these questions opinions differ, and to all appearances differ widely. Men of scholarship-that is, men of liberal education-incline to exalt scholarship to the place of honor and of power in the work of teaching. Many of them look upon the energy and the enthusiasm with which so-called “educators" push their theories of teaching, and the eagerness with which part of the community catch at the "improved ways," as a sort of mania, a folly which will soon run its course, and may, probably will, be the introduction to real and permanent improvements in teaching. But they are kept, in many cases, from joining hands with the reform in its present aspect by two causes: the slight which they judge to be put upon a liberal education by the undue exaltation of methods over learning, and by what appears to them the flippancy and the shallowness of the methods which, as they have seen them practiced by novices, they hold to be mere artificial devices without basis in reason or experience, and not at all justifying the claim to be a veritable novum organum so loudly made for them. And so they ask with honest surprise, if not with real sadness, Are these the instruments by which education, even higher education in colleges and universities, is to be reformed? If so, we stand by the old ways, and we prophesy the return, at no distant day, of a dissatisfied and chastened community to our way of thinking. On the other hand, the apostles of the reform in education tend to the other extreme. They exalt what they call methods to the highest place in this work of teaching. Learning, they say, is dull, amuses itself with curiosities, deals in abstractions, lives in an ideal world far away from the busy haunts of men, does not contribute to the practical spirit of the age-for what absurd vagaries does not that specious phrase offer a ready apology,—does not make boys enterprising men of business, nor girls able to take care of themselves. Learning, as that term has been understood, is well enough for educational mummies, but it needs remodeling before it can rightly teach the generation now rising to the stage of active life.

And so, they would reform, or revolutionize system and methods, do not hes

itate to rend in twain the educational kingdom, confidently challenge comparison of the new with the old, take immediate possession of the common schools, and with the elan of dauntless enthusiasts full of the new wine of the age, summon the ancient seats of learning to surrender at discretion. Now, as a collegebred man, and unconscious of any blush or thought of shame of my educational heraldry and lineage, I say frankly that I put myself in their ranks and wear their badge; for I know well that if these should be dropped out of what power I may have as a teacher to-day--I will be more explicit and say out of what power I may have as a teacher of teachers-the part which the college curriculum with its old-time departments of mathematics, languages and philosophies, with the influence of its instructors, who though in the world could hardly be said to be of the world; with its "still air of delightful studies," with all its humanizing power at that period of life when the gristle of boyhood was hardening into the bone of manhood, there would not be enough left to justify my appearing before this convention as in any sense the representative of any class of teachers. So from this side of my topic I cry to my alma mater, "Salve, magna parens!" In this cry I think most principals and heads of departments in normal schools would join with ready voice; for do we not nearly all hail from college, and do not the few who missed this privilege feel it to be a loss which scarcely any thing else can compensate? do not such in acknowledging the loss of what they were deprived of bear the same testimony which others do in avowing the value of what they received from this source? I have yet to hear a teacher worthy of the name regret his opportunity of a collegiate education or the embarrassment of his acquisitions, but I have heard many a one say that the want of it, or the unfaithful use of it, is irreparable loss to him as a teacher. As a matter of fact, the educational reform, in all its better and more hopeful and more trustworthy parts, is in the hands of men who have been strengthened and sweetened by the discipline and the humanities of a liberal education; by men who have set out in their career of usefulness with the enlarged views, and the sound judgment, and the generous spirit which such education always tends to give; by men who have brought to the work of reform no bigoted prejudice against established institutions and no suspicious distrust of the learning and the culture they give, but in stead a faith kindled at their altars and an enthusiasm inspired by their teachings. And, therefore, when we look for men or for women for any important post, even for a man or a woman to teach methods to teachers, we prefer one who has been liberally educated. Of two candidates equal in all other respects, if that can be, we choose the one whose mind is enlarged and enriched with the most varied scholarship. We pay this instinctive homage to what we know in ourselves to be the source and seat of the larger half of our own power. We recognize the justice of that almost universal sentiment, that scholarship must not be wanting in the teacher. Without it we look for narrowness, for bigotry, for mere mechanism in teaching, and for such meagre education of the pupil as these can produce.

And because of this, I acknowledge an instinctive distrust of those who say much about methods and little about knowledge. I feel that the reform must be radically defective, must be no reform at all, which even appears to put for

ward methods in the place of products; which, with so pert an air as to be some times offensive, challenges attention to its often pedantic, often ludicrous exhibitions of smart contrivances which it parades without a suspicion that they are not what they seem. And when I see them exhibited, and hear their fluent defense and what is said about them by those whose wisdom is undoubted, I discover how little ballast of learning trims and steadies so large a superstructure, and with what corresponding boldness it is assumed to be based on a solid foundation. I almost shrink from contact with them, imagining I hear the old foster-mother saying, with a touch of reproach in her voice, "my teaching should have saved you from this degeneration"; and I turn again to the old ideas and the old ways as at least less open to the distrust of the wise, less exposed to the perversion of the novice, and possibly, all things considered, better for the schools of even this day, and I ask myself if “reform" and "philosophy of education" and "methods of teaching" are mere cant phrases, and whether they can within the present movement in school matters be redeemed from their equivocal position and be made significant of a new departure from which it will not be necessary ere long to turn again.

And, therefore, from this bewilderment and uncertainty turning back to alma mater and her teachings, with an anxiety sharpened by the perplexing problems which throng my present path, and often make me think seldom was man more out of his place than I, asking whether they could fit any man for this work of teaching, I am compelled to answer, and answer seriously, no. They did not even fit me to begin that work, if it were to be any thing more than a mere temporary make-shift. What does the college curriculum-and I use that to represent any courses of study in arts or sciences-do for the teacher, as teacher? What equipment does it give him for the daily work of the ordinary class-room, and what for the organization and hourly management of a large school? What can one learn from it of the thousand things which in the aggregate make the skillful teacher of youth, and distinguish him from the investigator in some special department, or from the learned lecturer in the university? To make the matter personal-for it will have been noticed already that this paper is written from this point of view-what did alma mater give me for use in my first schools? How did she even help me start in the path I have been in ever since? She gave me nothing for direct use, and nothing for immediate guidance. College honors were for those who were held to deserve them; but did they confer authority as a teacher or as a manager of schools? I well remember the chilling tone in which I was told by one man that the "best scholars in college classes did not always make the best teachers, and that college honors would not secure positions"; and the natural thought, if not reply, was, What else have I and a score of others but such promise as this same college standing gives? A degree in the arts was conferred, but the diploma which attests this did not save from examination at the hand of those who could not have construed one line of its text, nor from the criticism in school of men to whom the words Baccalaureus in Artibus were mere cabalistic signs. All that belongs to the profession, or, if that word offends any, to the business of teaching, has been learned from other instructors. And, in saying this, I do not at all arraign the college, nor accuse of any infidelity to promises, or any violation of