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قراءة كتاب The Vitalized School

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‏اللغة: English
The Vitalized School

The Vitalized School

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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organization, instruction, and discipline, in order that the chief purpose of our schools, “more abundant life,” may be realized?

  • Justify the apparent length of the school day to teachers and pupils, as a means of determining the quality of the work of the school.
  • Some teachers maintain that school is a preparation for life, while the author maintains that “school is life.” Is this difference in the concept of the school a vital one?
  • How may this difference of concept affect the work of the teacher? the attitude of the pupil?
  • What definition of education will best harmonize with the ideals of this chapter?
  • CHAPTER II

    THE TEACHER

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    Teachers contrasted.—The vitalized school is an expression of the vitalized teacher. In the hands of the teacher of another sort, the vitalized school is impossible. Unless she can see in the multiplication table the power that throws the bridge across the river, that builds pyramids, that constructs railways, that sends ships across the ocean, that tunnels mountains and navigates the air, this table becomes a stupid thing, a dead thing, and an incubus upon the spirits of her pupils. To such a teacher mathematics is a lifeless thing, without hope or potency, the school is a mere convenience for the earning of a livelihood, the work is the drudgery of bondage, and the children are little less than an impertinence. The vitalized teacher is different. To her the multiplication table pulsates with life. It stretches forth its beneficent hand to give employment to a million workers, and food to a million homes. It pervades every mart of trade; it loads trains and ships with the commerce of nations; and it helps to amplify and ennoble civilization.

    Vitalized mathematics.—In this table she sees a prophecy of great achievements in engineering, architecture, transportation, and the myriad applications of science. In brief, mathematics to her is vibrant with life both in its present uses and in its possibilities. She knows that it is a part of the texture of the daily life of every home as well as of national life. She knows that it pertains to individual, community, and national well-being. Knowing this, she feels that it is quite worth while for herself and her pupils, both for the present and for the future. She feels that, if she would know life, she must know mathematics, because it is a part of life; that, if she would teach life to her pupils, she must teach them mathematics as an integral part of life; and that she must teach it in such a way that it will be as much a part of themselves as their bodily organs. She wants them to know the mathematics as they know that the rain is falling or that the sun is shining, because the rain, the sunshine, and the mathematics are all elements of life. Her great aim is to have her pupils experience the study just as they experience other phases of life.

    The teacher’s attitude.—Such a teacher with such a conception of life and of her work finds teaching school the very reverse of drudgery. Each day is an exhilarating experience of life. Her pupils are a part of life to her. She enjoys life and, hence, enjoys them. They are her confederates in the fine game of life. The bigness and exuberance of her abundant life enfolds them all, and from the very atmosphere of her presence they absorb life. Their studies, under the influence of her magic, are as much a part of life to them as the air they breathe or the food they eat. No two days are alike in her school, for life to-day is larger than it was yesterday and so presents a new aspect. Her spirit carries over into their spirits the truths of the books, and these truths thus become inherent.

    College influences.—She teaches life, albeit through the medium of subjects and books, because she knows life. Her college work did not consist in the gathering together of many facts, but in accumulating experiences of life. Many of these experiences were acquired vicariously, but they were no less real on that account. Her generous nature was able to withstand the most assiduous efforts of some of her teachers to quench the flames of life that glowed in the pages of books, with the wet blanket of erudition. She was able to relive the thoughts and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their experiences her own. She could reconstitute the emotional life of her authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. Her books were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages.

    Reading and life.—She can teach reading because she can read. Reading to her is an experience in life. The words on the printed page are not meaningless hieroglyphics. They are the electric wires which connect the soul of the author with her own, and through which the current is continually passing. When she reads Dickens, Tiny Tim is never a mere boy with a crutch, but he is Tiny Tim, and, as such, neither men nor angels can supplant him on the printed page. She knows the touch of him and the voice of him. She laughs with him; she cries with him; she prays with him; she lives with him. In her teaching she causes Tiny Tim to stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no rival and no peer. This she can do because he is a part of her life. She has no occasion either to pose or to rhapsodize. Sincerity is its own explanation and justification.

    Power of understanding.—When she reads “Little Boy Blue” she can hear the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes to know the universality of death and sorrow. But she finds faith and hope in the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the mother’s grief. Thus she enters into the feeling of motherhood and so shares the life of all the mothers whose children are her pupils. In every page she reads she crosses anew the threshold of life and gains a knowledge of its joys, its sorrows, its triumphs, or its defeats. In short, she reads with the spirit and not merely with the mind, and thus catches the spiritual meaning of what she reads. She can feel as well as think and so can emotionalize the printed page. Nature has endowed her with a sensory foundation that reacts to the emotional situations that the author produces. Thus she understands, and that is the prime desideratum in reading. And because she understands, she can interpret, and cause her pupils to understand. Thus they receive another endowment of life.

    Books as exponents of life.—She has time for reading as she has time for eating and drinking, and for the same reason. To her they are all coördinate elements of life. She eats, and sleeps, and reads because she is alive; and she is more alive because she eats, and sleeps, and reads. She taps the sources of spiritual refreshment, without parade, and rejoices in the consequent enrichment of her life. She does not smite the rock, but speaks to it, and smiles upon it, and the waters gush forth. She descends into Hades with Dante, and ascends Sinai with Moses, and is refreshed and strengthened by her journeys. She sits enrapt as Shakespeare turns the kaleidoscope of life for her, or stands enthralled by Victor Hugo’s picture of the human soul. Her sentient spirit is ignited by the fires of

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