A Teacher's Reflections

I once asked a foreign woman teacher why she had chosen her profession. She said: because it is the only profession that allows me a vacation of three months every year.

And I asked another, longer in the profession and more devoted to her work, and she said: I incline to intellectual pursuits, so I chose to teach philosophy, because it gives me the chance for discussion and inquiry with girl students who have passed the first part of the baccalaureate and reached a certain measure of intellectual maturity. But I know that I was not created for the rearing of children, nor for the running of schools.

I said to her: Do you not believe that giving oneself to teaching, and confining oneself to it, makes of the teacher a machine turning upon itself, neither growing nor renewing itself? That is why we find many teachers trying to practice some hobby alongside their work, or dividing themselves between teaching and another occupation.

She answered: Teaching, in my view, is a vocation, or a call from on high, like the taking of religious vows. An inclination born with a person, which masters him and absorbs his activity. I know teachers and headmistresses whom the profession so captivated that they devoted to it their lives and their efforts, until it distracted them from every other work. Such women are few. Even so, a person can love the profession of teaching and perform its duties faithfully without giving himself over to it entirely — provided he is of those with a living conscience. As for those who divide themselves between teaching and other work and neglect the profession out of greed for gain, they do wrong to their society.

And I fell to asking myself: why did I choose the profession of teaching?.. In truth I did not choose it; it was simply the only work it was possible for me to take up after leaving school, without additional preparation. And since women's professions in our country are still few in number, teaching remains the most common of them, though it is not the most tempting.

And although it is the oldest of the intellectual professions that woman has practiced among us, we are still beginners in it, few in experience and few in number. If we complain of poverty in capable teachers, specialized in the art of teaching and devoted to it, we are poorer still in women teachers, and in greater need of a sufficient number of women of capacity and specialization.

The profession of teaching is not so arduous as they claim. I read in an American magazine fond of statistics that teaching is among the professions whose members are long-lived. The reason for this, most probably, is that the company of children grants them perpetual youth and infects them with merriment, so that time gains no hold on them and they are not defeated.

The teacher can love his profession and give himself to it if he finds himself in an atmosphere fit for teaching: in a healthful building with spacious rooms, before a harmonious class of no more than twenty-five, when he comes to his work furnished with good preparation and experience, and with a sufficient measure of freedom in his work and good remuneration.

We find him quite the opposite in surroundings unfit for teaching, where various factors stir his aversion to the profession: first and foremost, the meagerness of the salary and the poorness of the reward; second, overwork and injustice; third, the troubles to which those are exposed who labor in a commercial, profit-seeking school, or in a propagandist school (religious or political propaganda), or in a badly run school in which order and exactness have left no trace.

To the obstacles of environment are added the obstacles of the profession or the craft, which confront the teacher when he is ignorant of the principles of the profession or has no inclination toward it; and which confront the teacher of the middle or secondary classes when there come to him boys and girls whose statures have lengthened and whose brains have thickened, because they were not treated with cultivation from childhood — so that he finds treating them, after the time has passed, a hard matter or a kind of impossibility. And the greater part of the blame falls upon the heads of those educators, men and women, who took charge of the child from his fifth or sixth year and did badly in rearing him and in forming his mental powers, so that feebleness and incapacity befell him, until the secondary teacher despaired of him and fell to marveling at the decline of the level of intelligence in the rising generation.

The calamity of teaching among us lies in the weakness of the foundation — in the plan we pursue of despising elementary teaching, and of selecting the teachers least in knowledge and preparation to bear its burdens. Whereas the matter ought to be the reverse, for the secret of learning lies in the foundation, just as the strength of a building lies in its base.

Were it granted you to come into contact with our elementary schools and to test their methods and conditions, you would see that most of them still follow in their teaching the methods of the Middle Ages — that is, they embrace the method of memorization and rote dictation, strengthening the child's memory at the expense of every other of his mental powers, and imposing on him to learn his lessons by heart: to memorize the grammar, the history, the geography, everything — even arithmetic and the models of things. Did we but know that infants and small children in the modern schools are trained in creation and invention from their tenderest years, cooperating with their teachers, women and men, in composing the texts they read, in creating stories, in making up little songs together with their tunes, and in devising little plays and producing them — did we but know this, we would pity these mechanical figures into which the children in our schools are turned.

Have you ever been with a child of two or three years and noticed his desire to assert his existence and to thrust himself into every act done before him — his anger and his shouting when you stretch your hand toward a toy in his hand, meaning to work its mechanism, and he cries out at you: I, I want to work it!

Such is the child's attitude from the moment his eyes open upon what is around him: he wants to do everything himself. How then does he turn, at school, into a dependent child who waits for his teacher or his parents to solve his arithmetic problems for him, to teach him his reading lessons, and to do his grammar exercises for him?

Were I to enumerate all the faces of deficiency, it would take me long. But having pointed to the medieval stamp of these schools, I must repeat another feature akin to that stamp: the predominance of languages over the sciences — languages being of the kind of mechanical, theoretical lessons — the stuffing of the pupil's mind with three languages, or two at the least, and the neglect of practical and manual instruction built upon experiment and the training of the senses. Whereas modern education demands exactly the opposite: it requires the predominance of the sciences and of the laboratory method, and the forming of the scientific, experimental spirit in the child from his first days at school.

Experience has taught me that the teacher's role must be confined to guiding the pupil, spurring him to personal study, and awakening his latent gifts.

I used to admire the girl student who was independent in her work and her thinking, whose personality showed in what she wrote and what she said, and who would dispute what the teacher said — not out of impudence, pretension, and a desire to show off, but out of a passion for going deep and searching things out. And I held little hope for the student who copies what I say, imitates what she hears, and clings blindly to methods and formulas.

It has also become clear to me that excellence in lessons and the winning of first place does not always mean superiority of intelligence and an aptitude for genius; more often it shows the pupil's capacity for memorizing, his appetite for competition, and his bondage to the matter of the book, in a manner that stuffs the brain and weakens the personality. As for true genius, it unfolds after leaving school, and shows itself in its possessor's capacity for creation and for intellectual production that rises above imitation and copying.

Were I asked which of the two kinds of teaching is the better, primary or secondary, I would prefer the first, because the child is then easier to mold, and nearer to simplicity and purity of soul.

And were I given the choice between teaching the secondary classes and directing a number of women teachers, I would prefer teaching to administration, for among the hardest things for a person is the humoring and training of grown people.

"Whoever taught me a letter, I became his slave": a saying that had its magic in times past. As for today, we bury it as we bury other sayings that ran upon the tongues of certain fainthearted folk and were passed around by people without their ever debating their truth or their error.

Nor do I know what factors spread such a saying abroad of old... Was it in an age when the learned were so few that he to whom God had granted the blessing of knowledge felt a crushing debt weighing upon his shoulders toward his teacher? Or was the teacher of yesterday — like the teacher of today — cheated in his wages, so that they tried to console him and cheer him with honeyed words and phrases of veneration, exactly as they do now:
Stand for the teacher, render him full veneration —
The teacher had almost become...!