Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III The Teacher It is not easy to express in precise terms the qualifications of an ideal teacher. Indeed, such qualifications are not fixed in quantity nor invariable in quality. Conditions and relations must be taken into account. If teaching can be reduced to a science—and this can be done only approximately —it still does not follow that scientific tests of qualifications can be applied so as to draw a scale of fitness which is worth much for practical results. The first requisite for success in the teaching profession is a clear apprehension of the end to be secured. This end is mental development, the unfolding of the energies of life implanted in the soul by the Maker of us all. It is mind-building. What the child can best do for a livelihood can be settled later. The great problem that confronts us in all our school systems is, What does the mind need? Having reached the answer to this question, it ought to be comparatively easy to solve the next problem—to find a method of supplying the mind with what it needs; for truth comes in upon us from every side. First. The teacher should be able to train the child to see clearly and sharply. Knowledge should be gained in the schoolroom, but the sharpening ofthe intellectual powers, the invigorating of the thinking faculties, is not less a specific object of school work. It has been said that without the touch of the outer world there can be no awakening of the inner life; and when we say that every child should be trained to see we mean much more than that his vision must be attracted by the panorama of objects that pass by him, more than that all the senses must be impressed. We mean that he must be taught to find not objects only, but objects in their class relations. As these external realities beat in upon... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.