The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education

								

it,--an entirely different matter. We teachers are forever taking
thoughts out of our minds and putting them elsewhere. So long as we are
content to keep them in our possession, we are not teachers at all. One
who is interested in laying hold on wisdom is likely to become a
scholar. And while no doubt it is well for a teacher to be a fair
scholar,--I have known several such,--that is not the main thing. What
constitutes the teacher is the passion to make scholars; and again and
again it happens that the great scholar has no such passion whatever.
But even that passion is useless without aid from imagination. At every
instant of the teacher's life he must be controlled by this mighty
power. Most human beings are contented with living one life and
delighted if they can pass that agreeably. But this is far from enough
for us teachers. We incessantly go outside ourselves and enter into the
many lives about us,--lives dull, dark, and unintelligible to any but an
eye like ours. And this is imagination, the sympathetic creation in
ourselves of conditions which belong to others. Our profession is
therefore a double-ended one. We inspect truth as it rises fresh and
interesting before our eager sight. But that is only the beginning of
our task. Swiftly we then seize the lines of least intellectual
resistance in alien minds and, with perpetual reference to these, follow
our truth till it is safely lodged beyond ourselves. Each mind has its
peculiar set of frictions. Those of our pupils can never be the same as
ours. We have passed far on and know all about our subject. For us it
wears an altogether different look from that which it has for beginners.
It is their perplexities which we must reproduce and--as if a rose
should shut and be a bud again--we must reassume in our developed and
accustomed souls something of the innocence of childhood. Such is the
exquisite business of the teacher, to carry himself back with all his
wealth of knowledge and understand how his subject should appear to the
meagre mind of one glancing at it for the first time.
And what absurd blunders we make in the process! Becoming immersed in
our own side of the affair, we blind ourselves and readily attribute to
our pupils modes of thought which are not in the least theirs. I
remember a lesson I had on this point, I who had been teaching ethics
half a lifetime. My nephew, five years old, was fond of stories from the
Odyssey. He would creep into bed with me in the morning and beg for
them. One Sunday, after I had given him a pretty stiff bit of adventure,
it occurred to me that it was an appropriate day for a moral. "Ulysses
was a very brave man," I remarked. "Yes," he said, "and I am very
brave." I saw my opportunity and seized it. "That is true," said I. "You
have been gaining courage lately. You used to cry easily, but you don't
do that nowadays. When you want to cry now, you think how like a baby it
would be to cry, or how you would disturb mother and upset the house;