London Normal School - Spectrum Yearbook (London, Ontario Canada)

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PRINCIPAL OF TEACHERS ' COLLEGE You enter your life ' s work at a time when change is rocketting through our world. In some of the sciences more discoveries have been made within the last ten years than in all previous human history. Many of the things we use daily -- among others, commercial television, jet flight, the means of pre- venting polio -- were unknown as recently as your first birthday. So it is right and fitting that much of what you teach children today should differ, not only in what it is made up of, but in how children learn it. You know something of how courses in mathematics and science and social studies are being turned upside down; and you have seen such things as team teaching and programmed learning. It is unlikely that Canadian parents will be content to have their children taught neither more or less than they themselves were taught, and by the same kind of teachers they had themselves when they were young. Yet when all this is accepted, there is an old German proverb that we should remember. It goes something like this: Don ' t throw out the baby along with the bath water. Because some things are old, it does not mean that they are outdated. In fact some of these old things are needed more in today ' s world than ever before. For, you see, servo-mechanisms and computers are after all only tools, and few of us would subscribe altogether to the materialist ' s definition of man as a tool-using animal. Some of us are really frightened today that man, like Mary Shelley ' s Frankenstein, is in danger of being the victim of his mechanical creations. So there are some very old things which young modern teachers might well cherish, and these are really the very things which make man more than a tool-using animal. There are the questions which the ancient Greeks asked about man twenty-five hundred years ago, and which each generation needs to ask of itself again. There are those treasures of literature and the arts which man, if he were only the most dexterous of the apes, could never have risen to. And there is a moral code created by a Man of Bethlehem, whose measure none of us, in the two thousand years since, has ever been able to fill. So all of us, both as persons and as teachers, might pause occasionally among the dizzy wonders of this brave new world, and reflect upon those achievements of the past which are neither outdated nor reactionary, but are indeed needed more today than ever before. F. C. BIEHL

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MINISTER OF EDUCATION It is a pleasure for me, as Minister of Education, to welcome to the teaching profession the 1967 graduates of the London Teachers ' College. You are entering service in the schools of Ontario in an era of great change in thought and practice. The years ahead will, I am sure, provide new, interesting and rewarding avenues for your contribution to education. In but a few months you will take charge of your own classroom. You have been well prepared for the immediate tasks which face you, and you will grow quickly in experience and ability. It is my hope that you will also grow intellectually as you search for improvement in your teaching skills and take advantage of the many cours- es for teachers offered by the Department of Education and the Universities of Ontario. The world of the late neneteen sixties and the early nineteen seventies will demand much of its youth. Your responsibilities as a teacher are increasingly more exacting and more demanding than they were for the teacher of a generation ago. You carry with you into your teaching positions the confidence and the best wishes of the staff of your College and the Department of Education. May your days as a teacher find you dedicated and enthusiastic as you prepare our children for their fu- ture roles as citizens of our great land ! William G. Davis Minister of Education Toronto, December 30, 1966

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VICE-PRINCIPAL OF TEACHERS ' COLLEGE For the past year you have experienced the difficult and often frustrating problems that are only the initial steps in the education of a teacher. Your courage, industry and perseverance that made it possible for you to make the transition from the relative- ly carefree role of a student to the extremely responsible role of a teacher, are the very qualities you must continue to demonstrate as a teacher. You have acquired some skill and some knowledge as a result of your successful year at London Teachers ' College; but you ' ve only begun to learn to be a teacher. Practise your skills and add to their number; husband your knowledge and continuously acquire more; reassess these acquis- itions constantly and so achieve that quality of education that surpersedes both skill and knowledge -- wisdom. The love and the pursuit of knowledge is the basis of wisdom. As a teacher make your love of knowledge and respect for truth so apparent that those you teach will be swept enthusiastically forward in their quest of wisdom. My parting wish for you is that through your own efforts you may one day earn the greatest reward our profession has to offer -- the satisfaction of being a GOOD TEACHER,