University of California Los Angeles - Bruin Life / Southern Campus Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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development under proper conditions of teaching methods based upon them. This is the sphere of the teachers ' college. No work more needs to be done; no other institution could do it so well. In a word, the teachers ' college should be the educational clearing- house of the State. 5th. Again, there is need of a careful study and a practical working out of the whole problem of rural life and rural education. This involves the related problem of how to make country life — not country life as it is lived on the great landed estates and in the great orchard districts, but on the small farm where the vast majority of farmers live — how to make country life there more economically profitable and more humanly interesting. All through the southern states public schools are found now trying to bring about the solution. Through the agency of the public schools it has been reached already in many of the Mississippi Valley States. It will be reached wherever and whenever through intelligent leadership and assistance, such as it is the mission of the teachers ' college to furnish, rural communities are awakened to the possibilities, social, economical, and educational, which lie undeveloped right at their own doors. The agricultural colleges of the country are doing a great work; but they are really touching only the high spots, and fail utterly to reach the masses of the farming world. Until the gospel of agricultural freedom reaches the farm through the public schools, it will fail to reach them en- tirely; and it will not, therefore, fully emancipate the millions who are now deprived of the full richness of life possible to them, in the very places where life should be richest and most abundant. 6th. Another much desired result which may be confidently expected to follow the establishment, on an efficient basis, of a col- lege for teachers is a marked increase in the number of young men who will be willing to enroll in the ranks of teachers — and this will mean an increase in the strength and virility of public instruction. We know that young men will not, as a rule, take the courses of study which the normal schools offer. Less than three per cent of all the normal school students of California are men. The reason is plain: It is because the normal school graduate is without hope of promotion beyond the graded schools. To get into the high school teaching service, he must graduate from the university and then spend a full year in post graduate study. The high school graduates, therefore, who think of making teaching their profes- sion—and on leaving the high school the number of these is greater

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tainment of its most beneficient purposes, implies intelligent and intimate knowledge of the organization of society itself; an ac- quaintance with its problems and needs, its governing motives and aspirations, its purposes, and the goals of its endeavor; and it also implies a sympathetic appreciation of the relation of educational measures to the other social forces whose aim is human betterment. 3rd. The teachers ' college is the appropriate place also to obtain preparation to teach those arts and sciences and occupa- tions which recent experience has shown to have large educational as well as utilitarian value. With greatest cordiality we must wel- come this extension of educational effort to include the physical as well as the intellectual being; to train for practical efficiency and self-support; to develop the productive as well as the reflective capacities of the student. But is there possible danger that this splendid movement may lose its educational significance and de- generate into a project for the further exploitation of human be- ings for commercial ends? This nation cannot afford to quit the business of making men in order to make even intelligent factory hands and mechanics. Carpentry, masonry, metal working, agri- culture, sewing, cooking, and many other applied arts, as school subjects, have great social value, provided that their educational aspects are not lost sight of or disregarded; and provided that they serve to vitalize the educational curriculum, not to supplant it. To avert such a possibility, teachers of industrial subjects should receive their training in institutions which clearly comprehend the double function of such instruction and by their organization and administration give ample assurance that the utilitarian shall be fostered and that the human and the cultural shall not be neg- lected. 4th. Once more, the college for teachers is needed to serve as a place for the experimental study of teaching. Upon the develop- ment of this most important field of inquiry will, in large part, de- pend the rapidity and soundness of our educational progress. Some discoveries of great value to teaching, like many of our most im- portant inventions, have been, and will continue to be, made by accident. But really great contributions in this realm as well as in that of science and invention have been the result of persistent and patient study and rational experimentation. Unscientific empiricism has always been the bane of education. The time is ripe for the careful testing of newly discovered principles of teaching, for ascertaining which of them have practical value, and for the

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than is commonly supposed — must enter the university in order that they may be prepared to teach where salaries and conditions of service are attractive. But from the moment of entrance to the university, the influences surrounding him all tend to run in other directions than teaching. A score of avenues open up before him, each one of which leads to goals more attractive, socially and finan- cially, than the profession of teaching. So when next we hear from the young man whose original purpose was to become a teacher, we find him preparing to engage in the practice of law or medicine or journalism or pharmacy or politics or engineering or commerce. But now, make it possible for the youth whose high school course has given him a taste for teaching, to enter an insti- tution all of whose influences and occupations tend to foster and strengthen his original purpose instead of quenching it; then ac- cord to that institution support and dignity comparable to that which is granted the university, and not only will the youth stick to his choice of profession, but he will be proud of it and loyal to it. The report of the Bureau of Education for 1911 shows that at the Teachers ' College at Cedar Falls, Iowa, there was one male student for every five female; at Terre Haute, Indiana, one for every five; at Emporia, Kansas, one for every three; at Kirksville, Missouri, one for every two — these are all colleges for teachers. In Cali- fornia, whose normal schools prepare teachers for graded work only, the proportion of male to female students is one to thirty- four. I cannot take time to explain in detail many other valuable functions which it is the business of a teachers ' college to perform; but may I add a single word? We are just beginning to under- stand something of the relation of the physical to the intellectual and the moral, to know that the discovery and correction of bodily defects and abnormalities in the pupil are often prerequisite to the effective application of any of the principles or methods of teach- ing whatever. Like the sanitary prevention of disease, this cor- rective work, when tactfully and intelligently performed promises to become one of the most important and interesting applications of modem science to human welfare. The model school and the de- partment of practice of the teachers ' college would form an ideal laboratory for observation and study in this field, and the results obtained would give new meaning and vitality to educational ad- ministration.