What Is Teaching?

by JACQUES BARZUN

1

EDUCATION comes from within; it is a man’s own doing, or it happens to him — sometimes because of the teaching he has had, sometimes in spite of it. When Henry Adams wrote The Education of Henry Adams, he gave thirty pages out of five hundred to his schooling. Common usage records the same distinction. No man says of another: “I educated him.” It would be offensive and would suggest that the victim was a puppy when first taken in hand. But it is a proud thing to say: “I taught him” — and a wise one not to specify what.

To be sure, there is an age-old prejudice against teaching. Teachers must share with doctors the world’s most celebrated sneers, and with them also the world’s unbounded hero-worship. Always and everywhere, “He is a schoolteacher” has meant “He is an underpaid pitiable drudge.” Even a politician stands higher, because power in the street seems less of a mockery than power in the classroom. But when we speak of Socrates, Jesus, Buddha, and “other great teachers of humanity,” the atmosphere somehow changes and the politician’s power begins to look shrunken and mean. Supreme examples show that no limit can be set to the power of a teacher — but, in the other direction, no other career can so nearly approach zero in its effects.

The odd thing is that almost everybody is a teacher at some time or other during his life. Besides Socrates and Jesus, the great teachers of mankind are mankind itself — your parents and mine. First and last, parents do a good deal more teaching than doctoring; yet so natural and necessary is this duty that they never seem aware of performing it. It is only when they have established irremediable habits of speech, thought, and behavior in their offspring, that they discover the teacher as an institution and hire him to carry on the work.

Then begins the fierce, secret struggle out of which education may come — the struggle between home and school, parent and child, child and teacher; the struggle also that lies deep within the parent and within society concerning the teacher’s worth: Is this man of knowledge to be looked up to as wise and helpful, or to be looked down on as at once servile and dangerous, capable and inglorious, higher than the parent, yet lower than the child?

Most people meet this difficulty by alternately looking up and looking down. At best the title of teacher is suspect. I notice that on their passports and elsewhere many of my academic colleagues put down their occupation as Professor or Educator.

Doubtless we shall have to keep the old pugilistic title “Professor,” though I cannot think of Dante in Hell coming upon Brunetto Latini and exclaiming, “Why, Professor!” But we can and must get rid of “Educator.” Imagine the daily predicament: someone asks, “What do you do?” — “I profess and I educate.” It is unspeakable and absurd.

Don’t think this point frivolous, but regard it as a symbol. Consider the American state of mind about Education at the present time. An unknown correspondent writes to me: “Everybody seems to he dissatisfied with education except those in charge of it.” This is a little less than fair, for a great deal of criticism has come from within the profession. But let it stand. Dissatisfaction is the keynote. Why dissatisfaction? Because Americans believe in Education, because they pay large sums for Education, and because Education does not appear to yield results. At this point one is bound to ask: “What results do you expect?”

The replies are staggering. Apparently education is to do everything that the rest of the world leaves undone, Recall the furore over American History. Under new and better management, that subject was to produce patriots — nothing less. An influential critic, head of a large university, wants education to generate a classless society; another asks that education root out racial intolerance (in the third or the ninth grade, I wonder?); still another requires that college courses be designed to improve labor relations. One man, otherwise sane, thinks the solution of the housing problem has bogged down — in the schools; and another proposes to make the future householders happy married couples — through the schools. Off to one side, a well-known company of scholars has got hold of the method of truth and wishes to dispense it as a crisis reducer. “Adopt our nationally advertised brand and avert chaos.”

Then there are the hundreds of specialists in endless “vocations” who want education to turn out practiced engineers, affable hotelkeepers, and finished literary artists. There are educational shops for repairing every deficiency in man or nature: battalions of instructors are impressed to teach Civilian Defense; the FBI holds public ceremonies for its graduates; dogs receive short courses in good manners, and are emulated at once by girls from the age of seven who learn Poise and Personality. Above and beyond all these stand the unabashed peacemakers who want Kitty Smith from Indiana sent to Germany armed with Muzzey’s American History, to undo Hitler’s work.

These are not nightmarish caricatures I have dreamed but things I have recently seen done or heard proposed by representative and even distinguished minds: they are so many acts of faith in the prevailing dogma that education is the hope of the world. Well, you may teach spot-welding in wartime and indeed you must. But education is the hope of the world only in the sense that there is something better than bribery, lies, and violence for righting the world’s wrongs. If this better thing is education, then education is not merely schooling. It is a lifelong discipline of the individual by himself, encouraged by a reasonable opportunity to lead a good life. Education here is synonymous with civilization. A civilized community is better than the jungle, but civilization is a long, slow process which cannot be “given” in a short course.

No one in his senses would affirm that Schooling is the hope of the world. But to say this is to show up the folly of perpetually confusing education with the work of the schools; the folly of believing against all evidence that by taking boys and girls for a few hours each day, between the ages of seven and twenty-one, our teachers can “turn out” all the human products that we like to fancy when we are disgusted with ourselves and our neighbors.

It is like believing that brushing the teeth is the key to health. No ritual by itself will guarantee anything. Brushing won’t even keep your teeth clean, by itself. There is no key to health and there is none to education. Do you think because you have an expensive school system there will be no more spelling mistakes? Then why suppose that you can eradicate intolerance more easily? Free, compulsory “education” is a great thing, an indispensable thing, but it will not make the City of God out of Public School No. 26.

The whole mass of recrimination, disappointment, and dissatisfaction which this country is now suffering about its schools comes from using the ritual word Education so loosely and so frequently. The idea abets false ambitions. The educator wants to do a big job in the world, so he takes on the task of reorienting Germany and improving human relations. The public at large, bedeviled as it is with these “problems,” is only too glad to farm them out, reserving the right of indignant complaint when the educator breaks down or the Institute for human relations fails to reduce appreciably the amount of wife-beating.

2

SINCE I am tackling the subject of teaching in a somewhat autobiographical manner, I had better say I taught my first class at the age of nine. All I remember about it is that it had to do with arithmetic and that the room seemed filled with thousands of very small children in black aprons. The explanation is that, with the shortage of teachers in France towards the middle of the last war, there were sporadic attempts at establishing the so-called Lancaster system of using older pupils to teach the younger. Lancaster, who lived a hundred years before, was only trying at first to meet the teacher shortage of the Napoleonic Wars, but he became an educational fanatic who believed that “any boy who can read can teach, although he knows nothing about it.” I don’t know what the “it” refers to, whether the art of teaching or the subject matter, but in any case this maxim, like so many others in education, is only half true.

It served, however, to apprentice me to my trade. Not that I stayed very long in it that first time. Still I relapsed, not once but many times, into the habit of teaching. Having learned English and come to this country to rejoin my father, previously sent on a good-will mission, I found myself exchang ing French lessons for further work in reading and speaking American. I had the good fortune to come in contact with a fine group of high school teachers, and since advanced mathematics and beginning philosophy are taught earlier abroad, I was able to tutor boys of my own age in those subjects also.

In my second year in college, I had my first academic offer. I was coaching two graduate students in the French educational theorists on whom they were to be examined — Rabelais, Montaigne, and Rousseau. My students, middle-aged men, apparently spoke of me to their sponsor and I received a note asking me to call on him. He was head of a department in a large university and I thought at the time that he scarcely lived up to the dignity of his position. For when I was announced by his secretary and he saw me, he laughed in my face. He had not been told that I was seventeen, and he was going to offer me an instructorship.

This experience should have soured me against all academic entanglements, but circumstances prevailed. The period just before 1929 in this country, and particularly in the metropolis, offered the active-minded college man innumerable opportunities to achieve financial independence even before the bachelor’s degree. So I found myself writing and tutoring in very profitable fashion before I thoroughly knew that I had chosen the two most back-breaking jobs in the whole world. A group of us students maintained a perfectly legal and honest tutoring mill, whose grist renewed itself as we put the backward rich through the entrance examinations of famous colleges not our own.

School authorities smiled on our work and we ended by taking on all kinds of academic cases. No subjects were barred. If a retired minister came who wanted to read Hamlet in Esperanto (one did) we supplied an instructor who spoke the language like a native. As a subsidiary enterprise we undertook high-class literary hackwork. We compiled statistics, contributed to the lesser encyclopedias, and worked up the raw material for public addresses by public men. We referred to ourselves as Ghosts, Incorporated.

When the time of my graduation came, in 1927, the die was cast. I knew I wanted to keep right on with both types of work, though no longer as piecework. Meanwhile I had formed an attachment to the Muse of History and was encouraged in it, chiefly by two men — Harry James Carman, now Dean of Columbia College, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, then Professor of Economics in that institution and now President of the University of Puerto Rico. The ink on my diploma was not yet dry when the director of the Summer Session asked me whether I was willing to teach an introductory course. I said I should like nothing better. He wanted to know with whom I had taken that same course. I told him. “You can teach it anyway.” That was my hoc age. I have been at it ever since, with breaks for study and travel and excursions into neighboring institutions. It is over a quarter of a century since I first obeyed the summons to teach, and I can only hope the habit has not become a compulsion.

But I often wonder what originally made the impulse to teach take root. In the lives of so many good men one reads that they “drifted into teaching.” They drift out again. It is clear that teachers are born, not made, and circumstances usually permit rather than compel. It is impossible to think of William James not teaching or of his brother Henry consenting to give a simple explanation.

For many people, doing is far easier than talking about it. From which I conclude that the teaching impulse goes something like this: A fellow human being is puzzled or stymied. He wants to open a door or spell “accommodate.” The would-be helper has two choices. He can open the door, spell the word; or he can show his pupil how to do it for himself. The second way is harder and takes more time, but a strong instinct in the born teacher makes him prefer it. It seems somehow to turn an accident into an opportunity for permanent creation. The raw material is what the learner can do, and upon this the teacher-artist builds by the familiar process of taking apart and putting together.

The teacher must break down the new and puzzling situation into simpler bits and lead the beginner in the right order from one bit to the next. What the simpler bits and the right order are, no one can know ahead of time. They vary for each individual, and the teacher must grope around until he finds a “first step” that the particular pupil can manage. In any school subject, of course, this technique docs not stop with the opening of a door. The need for it goes on and on — as it seems, forever — and it takes the stubbornness of a saint coupled with the imagination of a demon for a teacher to pursue his art of improvisation gracefully, unwearyingly, endlessly.

Nor is this a purely mental task. All the while, the teacher must keep his charge’s feelings in good order. A rattled student can do nothing, and a muddled teacher will rattle or dishearten almost any student. The teacher must not talk too much or too fast, must not trip over his own tongue, must not think out loud — must not forget, in short, that he is handling a pair of runaway horses: the pupil and a dramatic situation.

It is obvious that the relation of teacher to pupil is an emotional one and most complex and unstable besides. To begin with, the motives, the forces that make teaching “go,” are different on both sides of the desk. The pupil has some curiosity and he wants to know what grownups know. The master has curiosity also, but it is chiefly about the way the pupil’s mind — or hand — works. Remembering his own efforts and the pleasure of discovery, the master finds a satisfaction which I have called artistic in seeing how a new human being will meet and make his own some part of our culture — our ways, our thoughts, even our errors and superstitions.

This interest, however, does not last forever. As the master grows away from his own learning period, he also finds that mankind repeats itself. Hence young teachers are best; they are the most energetic, the most intuitive, and the least resented.

For side by side with his eagerness, the pupil feels resentment arising from the fact that the grownup who teaches him appears to know it all. Even under the best conditions of fair play and deliberate spontaneity, the pupil, while needing and wanting knowledge, will hate and resist it. This resistance often makes one feel that the human mind is made of some wonderfully tough rubber, which you can stretch a little by pulling hard, but which snaps back into shape the moment you let go.

The process may be exasperating for the teacher, but consider how the student feels, subjected to daily and hourly stretching. “Here am I,” he thinks, “with my brains nicely organized, — with everything, if not in its place, at least where I can find it, — and you come along with a new and strange item that you want to force into my previous arrangement. Naturally I resist. You persist. I begin to dislike you. But at the same time, you show me aspects of this new fact or idea which in spite of myself mesh in with my existing desires. You seem to know the contents of my mind. You show me the proper place for your contribution to my stock of knowledge. Finally, there is brooding over us a vague threat of disgrace for me if I do not accept your offering and keep it and show you that I still have it when you — dreadful thought! — examine me.

“So I give in, I shut my eyes and swallow. I write little notes about it to myself, and with luck the burr sticks: I have learned something. Thanks to you? Well, not exactly. Thanks to you and thanks to me. I shall always be grateful for your efforts, but do not expect me to love you, at least not for a long, long time. When I am fully formed and somewhat battered by the world and yet not too displeased with myself, I shall generously believe that I owe it all to you. It will be an exaggeration on the other side, just as my present dislike is an injustice. Strike an average between the two and that will be a fair measure of my debt.”

3

IF I have dwelt on the emotions of teaching and being taught, it is because many people believe that schooling only engages the mind — and only temporarily at that. “I’ve forgotten,” says the average man, “all I ever learned at school.” And he mentally contrasts this happy oblivion with the fact that he still knows how to open oysters and ride a bicycle. But my description of teaching applies equally to physical things and to metaphysical. We may forget the substance of American History, but we are probably scarred for life by the form and feeling of it as imparted by book and teacher. Why is it that the businessman’s economics and the wellbred woman’s taste in art are normally twenty-five years behind the times? It is that one’s lifelong opinions are those picked up before maturity — at school and college.

This is why a “teacher’s influence” — if he does exert one — is not so big a joke as it. seems. Notice in the lives of distinguished men how invariably there is a Mr. Bowles or a Dr. Tompkins or a Professor Clunk — whom no one ever heard of, but who is “remembered” for inspiring, guiding, and teaching decisively at the critical time. We can all see the mark left by a teacher in physical arts like tennis or music. The pupils of Leopold Auer or Tobias Matthay can be recognized at forty paces by their posture and even in a dark room by the sound they make. For in these disciplines the teacher usually falls back on direct imitation: “Hold your hand like this,” or, more simply, “Watch me.” Well, much good teaching is of the “watch me” order; but the more abstract the knowledge, the less easy it is to imitate the teacher, and the genuine student wants to do the real thing in a real way by himself.

Consequently, the whole aim of good teaching is to turn the young learner, by nature a little copycat, into an independent, self-propelling creature, who can not merely learn but study — that is, work as his own boss to the limit of his powers. This is to turn pupils into students, and it can be done on any rung of the ladder of learning.

When I was a child, the multiplication table was taught from a. printed sheet which had to be memorized one “square” at a time — the one’s and the two’s and so on up to nine. It never occurred to the teacher to show us how the answers could be arrived at also by addition, which we had already studied. No one said, “Look: if four times four is sixteen, you ought to be able to figure out, without aid from memory, what five times four is, because that amounts to four more ones added to the sixteen.” This would at first have been puzzling, more complicated and difficult than memory work; but once explained and grasped, it would have been an instrument for learning and checking the whole business of multiplication. We could temporarily have dispensed with the teacher and cut loose from the printed table.¹

This is another way of saying that the only thing worth teaching anybody is a principle. Naturally principles involve facts and some facts must be learned “bare” because they do not rest on any principle. The capital of Alaska is Juneau and, so far as I know, that is all there is to it; but a European child ought not to be told that Washington is the capital of the United States without fixing firmly in his mind the relation between the city and the man who led his countrymen to freedom. That would be missing an association, which is the germ of a principle. And just; as a complex athletic feat is made possible by rapid and accurate coordination, so all valuable learning hangs together and works by associations which make sense.

Since associations are rooted in habit, and habits in feelings, we can see that anything which makes school seem a nightmare or a joke, which brands the teacher as a fool or a fraud, is the arch-enemy of all learning. It so happens that there is one professional disease, or rather vice, which generates precisely this feeling and whose consequences are therefore fatal. I refer to Hokum — and I hasten to explain what 1 mean. Hokum is the counterfeit of true intellectual currency. It is words without meaning, verbal filler, artificial apples of knowledge. From the necessities of the case, nine tenths of all teaching is done with words, whence the ever present temptation of hokum.

Words should point to things, seen or unseen. But they can also be used to wrap up emptiness of heart and lack of thought. The student accepts some pompous, false, meaningless formula and passes it back on demand, to be rewarded with — appropriately enough — a passing grade. All the dull, second-rate opinions, all the definitions that don’t define, all the moral platitudes that “sound good,” all the conventional adjectives (“gentle Shakespeare”), all the intimations that something must be learned because it has somehow got lodged among learnable things (like the Binomial Theorem or the date of Magna Carta) — all this in all its forms gives off the atmosphere of hokum, which healthy people find absolutely unbreathable.

In a modern play, I think by A. A. Milne, this sehoolmarm vice has been caught and set down in a brief dialogue which goes something like this: —

GOVERNESS: Recite.
PUPIL: “The Battle of Blenheim,” (Lorry pause.)
GOVERNESS: By?
PUPIL: (Silence.)
GOVERNESS: By Robert Southey.
PUPIL: By Robert Southey.
GOVERNESS: Who was Robert Southey?
PUPIL: (Pause.) I don’t know.
GOVERNESS: One of our greatest poets. Begin again.
PUPIL: The Battle of Blenheim by Robert Southey one of our greatest poets.

As this example shows, hokum is subtle and I will forbear to analyze it. It hides in the porous part of solid learning and vitiates it by making it stupid and ridiculous.

4

ANY damn fool,” said the Admiral with a friendly pat on my shoulder, “can teach Naval History.” I knew what he meant by this subtle encouragement, but I disagreed. I had visited a midshipmen’s school and heard a petty officer, who was not a damn fool but not a teacher either, instruct in the subject. He had his nose in a book and was reading aloud: “‘On the eleventh of February, Commodore Ferry made for an anchorage twelve miles farther up Yedo Bay.’ This is important; take it down: ‘On the eleventh — of February — Commodore Ferry — made for an anchorage — ‘ ”

This may have been the Admiral’s idea of a lecture; certainly many people now alive have been taught in this fashion. But it proves nothing except that anything may be done badly. What is bad here is of course the absence of meaningful stress, of drama. Given the three basic ways of conducting a class, success will depend on the degree to which the chosen way has dramatic form.

Let me explain. The three basic ways are the lecture, the discussion group, and the tutorial hour. In a lecture, a silent class is addressed, more or less like a public meeting. In a discussion group, comprising from five or six to not more than thirty students, the members of the class speak freely, putting or answering questions on points which the teacher organizes so ns to form a coherent account of some topic. It may be that for this purpose discussion by the class is broken at intervals by lecturettes from him. In a tutorial hour, the instructor is really holding a conversation, usually with one student, certainly with not more than three or four. This is in the best sense a free-for-all and it presupposes a good stock of knowledge on the part of the students.

I may seem to have left out the recitation class, common to the lower schools, in which every pupil in turn answers a part of the day’s lesson. But this is really a form of examination. Its teaching value is that of any good examination.

If, some few years back, I had listed lectures as a legitimate mode of teaching, I should have been set down by my progressive friends as an old mossback corrupted by university practice. But now several of the progressive colleges have officially restored lecturing — Bennington notably — and I suspect that unofficially they were unable at any time to do altogether without it. Lecturing comes so natural to mankind that it is hard to stop it by edict. It simply turns into bootleg form. Many teachers think that because they sit around a table with only a dozen students they are running a discussion group, but they are lecturing just the same if the stream of discourse flows in only one direction.

Now what makes a lecture legitimate and good? The answer is — a combination of eloquence and personality. The petty officer reading aloud from a book was out of his element. But if Charles Dickens, famous for his public readings, had held that textbook of Naval History, the class would have seen Commodore Perry steaming up the bay in defiance of Japanese orders; they would have known without being told that it was important; they would not have had to take it down. And this is the justification of large-scale lecturing.

The lecture room is the place where drama may properly become theater. This usually means a fluent speaker, no notes, and no shyness about “effects.” In some teachers a large class filling a slopcd-up amphitheater brings out a wonderful power of emphasis, timing, and organization. The speaker projects himself and the subject. The “effects” are not laid on; they are the meaningful stress which constitutes, most literally, the truth of the matter. This meaning — as against fact — is the one thing to be indelibly stamped on the mind, and it is this that the printed book cannot give. That is why their hearers never forgot Huxley lecturing, nor Michelet, nor William James. Plenty of facts can be conveyed, too — the more highly organized the better; but in the hands of a great lecturer it is feelings and principles that illuminate the soul like a perfect play or concert.

To try to abolish the varied forms of lecturing virtuosity in the name of a theory cut to fit more common gifts is surely a mistake. What led to the attempt was that formerly all college teaching was through lectures. Many were bad, and nothing is worse than a bad lecture. Everyone can conjure up from his own past the memory of incoherent mumblings that make time stand still and inspire suicidal thoughts.

At the same time, it is also true that lectures alone will not suffice to teach, for the lecture method assumes that every member of the class comes in the same state of preparation and leaves with the same increment of knowledge. The fact is otherwise. Only individual attention to each student can keep the whole class abreast and truly teach. This is why a normal three-hours-a-week class is usually broken up into small groups for the “third hour” after the two lectures.

Unfortunately, the third hour is too often entrusted to a “section man,” usually a graduate student earning his keep by doing nothing else than this quiz and rehearsing work. This is bad practice. The lecturer should himself be available for questioning by his students; he should himself discover their failures and misconceptions; he should run his whole show as one enterprise and be responsible for conveying his subject to as many men, personally known to him, as possible. If we remember the axiom, Two Minds Sharing One Thought, we can see that teaching by proxy is as impossible as learning by proxy.

5

THE idea of breaking a large class into small groups gives us the second mode of teaching: by means of informal discussion. As a general rule, I believe that all introductory courses should be taught thus. It is expensive but worth it. Only in a small group can the student learn to marshal his thoughts, expose his weaknesses, argue out his beliefs, and gain that familiarity with a given subject which, if not learned early, will never be learned at all.

Handling a discussion group requires a special talent, too. Here the drama is more subtle but equally imperative. The hour’s discussion must not go off in all directions like a leaky hose. It must have a pattern, beginning at a given point and logically reaching another, from which to start again the next day. Now it is relatively easy to impose a pattern on a lecture; the scheme of it can be written out beforehand and even memorized, because no one will interfere with it. But in a discussion, every one of twenty-five or thirty men has a right to shove the tiller in any direction he pleases. Since there must be an atmosphere of freedom, the instructor must not act like a priggish moderator with a gavel. He must be willing to go up side tracks and come back. His imagination must swarm with connecting links, factual illustrations, answers to unexpected questions.

He must, moreover, know how to correct without wounding, contradict without discouraging, coax along without coddling. Every once in a while, a group of men will contain a crank or a fanatic: he must be turned to good teaching use without being made to feel a goat. Every once in a while, the class will want to take the bit in its teeth and hold a political or ethical debate, none too close to the issue. This must be tolerated. Every once in a while, the instructor will feel so strongly on a given matter that he will want to lecture. This must be nipped in the bud.

An advanced discussion group — say twelve men in a senior colloquium in economics meeting for two consecutive hours — is a test of any discussion leader. His role is that of an orchestra conductor, except that neither he nor his men have a score before them. Yet the result of the evening’s noise must be as intelligible as a symphony. Calling on the right man for the right thing, balancing opinions, drawing out the shy and backward, keeping silent so that the group itself will unwind its own errors, — and doing all this in the casual “colloquial” manner which the title of the course prescribes, — is an art that only comes with long practice.

Compared with this the “tutorial” is far simpler though physically more exhausting. Two or three men can talk so fully that errors are quickly corrected and ground is covered faster. The students have probably studied the topic together anyway and they are reporting progress. The instructor usually finds little to amend and therefore feels bound to add, to fill out, to interpret the body of facts. This leads to more questions and he finds himself being pumped absolutely dry. No matter how much he knows or how fully he has thought, he is relentlessly pushed until his back touches the wall of the great absolutes. For students are ever seeking final answers and they know how to ask questions which no wise man would dare answer.

Not all tutors are wise, however, and the principal danger is that unprepared or malicious students will use a common trick to defeat the purpose of the meeting. If a man is known to have some pet view or favorite topic, he will be brought to the brink of it by artful dodges and then pushed over. While he climbs his way out, the students can respectfully daydream. I am told that one man at a Midwestern university can be wound up by his students like a grandfather clock. He runs down daily and hourly on the same topic like a weight on its chain, and no one is the worse, or the better, for the ticking.

I do not know whether this is a saving of energy for him as well as the students, but I do know that the other and truer discharge of duty is a wearing process. At most progressive colleges, at least until recently, teachers were committed to whole days of half-hour tutorials, each with a single student. Every student was at work on a different phase of a given subject and, by virtue of the time and freedom allowed, was ravenous for knowledge. I can guarantee from experience that at the end of such a day the instructor is a gibbering idiot.

The output of words alone, the quick modulations, the sense of multitudinous insistent claims of one’s best thoughts, and what William James called “ having to square oneself with others at every step ” would in time surely kill the poor goose. One perceptive student, commenting on certain events at the time said to me: “At F—— (a progressive school) the teachers die young; at J—— (a nonprogressive one) the students hang themselves. That seems to be the basic difference between oldfashioned and progressive education.”

In all three modes of teaching — by lecture, by discussion, and by tutoring — it is evident that the effective agent is the living person. It is idle to talk about what could be done by gadgets — gramophone disks or sound films. We know just what they can do: the disk brings the music class a whole symphony; the film can bring Chinese agriculture to students in Texas. But this will not replace the teacher, with his knowledge of subject matter and students, his power to lead them, and their response to his mind. Given a mastered subject and a person committed heart and soul to teaching it, a class accustomed to think, attend, and be led, the result will be, under God, as near to the discourse of men and angels as it is fit to go.

(To be continued)