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M E A S U R I N G A T E A C H E R ' S A B I L I T Y TO T E A C H
By GORDONH. TRUE
California Agricultural Experiment Station
The w o r d i n g of the subject but r e c e n t l y assigned to the w r i t e r
is such as to suggest a technical t r e a t m e n t t h a t will not be attempted. P r e s e n t ideals of efficiency are responsible f o r the setting up of measures of value f o r every kind of a c t i v i t y and result of effort values t h a t can be added and subtracted, multiplied and divided, reduced to percentages, plotted and graphed,
and visualized until one is led to w o n d e r sometimes if the cubist
a r t i s t and the scientist have not found a common medium of
self-expression.
T h e r e will be no a t t e m p t to f o r m u l a t e definite expressions of
values n o r to p r e s e n t a n y set of conclusions. R a t h e r , the aim
will be to suggest points of view not commonly taken these days
in considering the duties and qualifications of the teachers in
our a g r i c u l t u r a l colleges.
In a recent article Dean E u g e n e D a v e n p o r t takes the position that, in o r d e r to qualify as a t e a c h e r of agriculture, one
should not only have had a f a r m experience, but should have a
deep-seated i n t e r e s t in and love f o r r u r a l life. Personally, I am
inclined on principle to agree with this position. A g r i c u l t u r e is
more t h a n an occupation. It is a life. It is more t h a n a science.
It is an a r t involving in practice the application of most of the
known sciences and, I suspect, some yet unknown.
Dr. L. H. Bailey has r e f e r r e d to f a r m i n g as the most difficult
of occupations, not excepting law, medicine, engineering, divinity, finance, merchandizing, or teaching. And it is f a r easier,
declares a n o t h e r who has had both experiences, to qualify f o r
the degree of doctor of philosophy t h a n to acquire the i n f o r m a tion t h a t will equip one to be a high-grade f a r m e r . In speaking
of the educational effects of seven y e a r s of f a r m i n g a f t e r twenty-five y e a r s of professional life this same w r i t e r says, in an
article in the Atlantic a few y e a r s ago :
"When, during all the days of professional studies, did I so examine
statements, so sift claims and expectations, as I have done in putting my
knowledge to the control of men and events on the farm. If that be not
discipline in the power of original thinking, where shall we receive such
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d i s c i p l i n e ? Or, if it be precise o b s e r v a t i o n or e x a c t m e m o r y t h a t is in
question, w h e r e will you place y o u r s e l f to realize t h e i m p o r t a n c e of t h e s e
i n t e l l e c t u a l disciplines as on a f a r m , w h e r e t h e w r o n g u n d e r s t a n d i n g of a
s i n g l e a s p e c t of a process m a y cost t h e profit of y o u r crop or y o u r h e r d ?
A n d as to t h e m o t i v a t i o n of l e a r n i n g , how c a n a d v e n t i t i o u s prizes, m a r k s , or
d i p l o m a s c o m p a r e in effectiveness w i t h t h e consciousness t h a t u n l e s s this
f a c t he m a s t e r e d that p u r p o s e c a n not b e a t t a i n e d . "
It is with this t h o u g h t of the severe mental t r a i n i n g of f a r m
life in mind t h a t the w r i t e r quotes the London Times as saying,
"The f a r m need f e a r no rival as the mother of men."
Enrolled in our agricultural colleges are something like a million and a q u a r t e r of students, probably one-half of whom have
come f r o m rural homes. In considering w h e t h e r or not there is
a responsibility resting upon these colleges f o r giving a different
sort of t r a i n i n g f o r life t h a n is offered by other colleges and universities, m a y we not give t h o u g h t to a couple of questions t h a t
m i g h t be asked of this million of y o u n g people and their hypothetical replies. The questions m i g h t be "Whence came y o u ? "
and " W h i t h e r goest thou ?" If they knew the fact, half a million
m i g h t answer, "We have come out of t h a t vast source of h u m a n
power f r o m which eighty per cent of American leadership has
ever come. We have come out of the nation's reservoir of t h a t
h u m a n element t h a t shapes the destinies of men and nations."
" W h i t h e r go we? We expect in college to find the way," m a n y
will reply.
An examination of the curricula of the various d e p a r t m e n t s of
the institution m a y reveal to the student the fact t h a t certain
m a j o r s lead definitely t o w a r d jobs, and thus the way m a y be
shown. Some, like a senior who comes to our house f o r employmerit, m a y say, "I don't know yet. There are more courses I
w a n t to take a f t e r g r a d u a t i o n - - s o m e psychology, some economics, and more English." "Do you expect to teach? . . . . No, I am
hoping t h a t the State m a y by t h a t time open a new colony for
settlement where I m a y be able to get a f a r m . "
L a s t commencement I sat at a local club dinner beside a m a n
who had finished his first y e a r out of school. He had had one of
those guaranteed jobs, a good, highly-paid position for anyone
his first y e a r out of college. But his interest was in coming back
to school for more work to fit him for a different job. His present position didn't lead anywhere, he felt himself at the end of a
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blind alley, and his t r a i n i n g not broad enough to give him confidence in t r y i n g something different.
I t is an old question, of c o u r s e - - t h a t of w h e t h e r college shall
t r a i n for life or t r a i n f o r a living. The possibilities of election
of courses in most schools leave the choice to the student. The
wisdom of the teacher in offering guidance m a y b e the determ i n i n g f a c t o r - - s h o u l d be, in most cases. W h a t qualifies the
teacher to advise wisely ?
It happens in our own institution t h a t a m a j o r student in
animal h u s b a n d r y is offered a wider choice of electives t h a n
m a j o r s in most of the other lines. The course does not lead
definitely t o w a r d a job unless the student purposely so shapes
his work. Sometimes a boy who has not t h o u g h t this out comes
to me asking w h a t kind of a job he m a y expect upon graduation.
And, somehow, I do not feel apologetic when I reply, "Son, t h a t ' s
up to you." I am willing to back animal h u s b a n d r y as furnishing a culture t h a t does not need a job objective to j u s t i f y its
being taken.
The w r i t e r wishes here to f r a n k l y confess t h a t he is too oldfashioned to enjoy h e a r i n g his colleagues discussing with students the m a t t e r of selling themselves. Of course the business
world wants men qualified to do certain things, and m u s t have
them, but is it the college teacher's job to lead his boys to the
slaughter ? Big business and the big industries are getting t h e m
without our help. Says a m a n u f a c t u r e r of this city who takes
time to t h i n k and write on the subject of education:
"Economic efficiencyand it is working out today puts a premium on mental
deficiency. Speed and efficiency are both sterilized, and nothing grows out
of them that the spirit of man can live on at all. An educational system
that overemphasizes efficiency must needs wreck itself in time. We must
teach a homely philosophy of give and take, a gospel of endurance as contrasted with acquisition, and the truth that life's best values are spiritual
rather than economic. These the school should teach as well as the home.
Not being set down in the curricula they must come out of the background
of experience that is part of the teacher's teaching equipment."
This same m a n of business goes on to say t h a t the heaviest
weights the race has had to c a r r y have been the rigid measuring appliances in the world of spiritual and mental phenomena.
With this t h o u g h t in mind, is it proper to ask if one m a y not
qualify for all the academic degrees t h a t indicate the m a s t e r y
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of a given subject and still be an ignorant person--one unqualified to guide the destinies of young people ? The writer can not
at this point help recalling the boys with whom he sat around the
laboratory tables in the classes of his senior year at the university. Most of them went into professional work, but their approach, as he sees it now looking back over a period of years,
was by two different routes; advanced work as an expression of
definite ambitions in the line of a chosen life work; advanced
work for the sake of the degree that would buy them a job.
Possibly the following may have some significance in this connection.
;
David Starr Jordan, in a recent article on Louis Agassiz as a
teacher, attempting to explain Agassiz' failure to accept Darwin's theory of evolution, points out the fact seemingly overlooked by the great teacher that while natural selection has
brought about progress in certain lines, yet it is not from the
most highly specialized that the higher forms seem to have
descended. "Natural selection preserves as ancestors those who
run the actual gauntlet of life and retrogression is as evident a
factor in evolution as progress."
In his essay on Education for Democracy, Dallas Lore Sharp
refers to a school of the all brilliant as a group intellectually
overdone, physically underdone, and morally undone, in need of
a surgical operation or possibly a term in jail. If the group forming the cast of characters in the widely read campus novel,
"Grey Towers," is a true picture of university life, then perhaps
Dr. Sharp's terms apply and his suggested remedies are in order.
As I look in upon the abnormal life of men's clubs and then
into the homes of some of our young professors, where two or
three children are the center of a normal family life, I can not
help feeling that when my boy and girls go to college I'd rather
they would be taught by husbands and fathers than by those for
whom these responsibilities have no appeal. Granting the need
of the best trained specialists, can we not also expect of them
that balance of mind, that high idealism, that lofty manhood,
all included in what we mean when we say "character"?
It was the French philosopher Amiel, who said: "And it is
men, not merely things, that you have to take into account when
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creating institutions; it is t h r o u g h men t h e y act and live."
Yeomans says, quoting a n o t h e r : " F o r a school has always been
j u s t a person, is now, and ever shall be. Substitutes are invariably futile." By the magic of intimate friendly intercourse
with a wise and sympathetic teacher who can interpret life and
its arts to his pupils, who asks not good f o r t u n e because he has
good f o r t u n e within himself and distributes it wherever he goes,
you get a school.
It was my privilege once to attend a faculty smoker in honor
of a teacher of note who had j u s t accepted a call to the institution. D u r i n g the evening he was asked by the one presiding to
tell how he made the - graduate, the name of the professor
filling the blank. A terribly e m b a r r a s s i n g situation and a needless one, f o r the man's personality in itself was a clear a n s w e r
to the question. But he replied, with but a moment's hesitation,
" I took the boys fishing."
Not so long ago on a Pullman car a professor acquaintance of
mine fell in with a member of his own faculty whom he had
met occasionally but did not know well. In the general discussion of affairs t h a t followed, my friend was surprised to hear the
other man, apparently a city-born son of foreign parentage,
speaking with an un-American accent, r e f e r to our having too
much government, and later with seeming approval of t h a t travesty on popular government now operating in eastern Europe.
In the n i g h t m y friend awoke from sound sleep with the following sentences going t h r o u g h his mind as definitely as though
they were being read f r o m a t e x t : " F o u r score and seven years
ago our f a t h e r s brought f o r t h on this continent a new nation,
conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition t h a t all
men are created equal. We are now engaged in a g r e a t civil
war, testing w h e t h e r a nation so conceived and so dedicated can
long endure."
The i m m o r t a l i t y of these words was forced on the consciousness of m y friend. But a single one needed to be changed to
make them as t r u e to-day as when spoken at Gettysburg by the
g r e a t e s t American.
Change the f o u r to seven years, and
let us ask ourselves the question, " A r e we not engaged in a w a r
to-day more insidious t h a n t h a t conducted in open battlefields
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with sword and gun, testing w h e t h e r our nation, so conceived
and so dedicated, can long endure?"
H a s the teacher in the agricultural colleges and State universities of America responsibility here, and w h a t should be his
training to meet it?
A b r a h a m Lincoln, whose words quoted above seem to have
been spoken to all people for all time, found his education for
democracy, for individuality, and f o r a u t h o r i t y among the woods
and hills, the streams and open plains of this and a neighboring
State, living with simple people in country life. Supplemented
by w h a t the schools now have to offer, can the teacher find a
surer inspiration to high ideals in his own and his students'
life elsewhere to-day ?