On teaching (plus ca change, plus ca reste la meme): Where to find teachers for performing the immense task of education? That is, we are told, the great difficulty which lies across all attempts at school-reform. Where to find, in fact, some hundred thousand ... who might give a really sound instruction to our children? Surely not in the ranks of that poor army of schoolmasters whom we condemn to teach all their life, from their youth to the grave; who are sent to a village, deprived there of all intellectual intercourse with educated people, and soon accustomed to consider their task as a curse. Surely not in the ranks of those who see in teaching a salaried profession and nothing more. Only exceptional characters can remain good teachers throughout their life, until an advanced age. These precious men and women must therefore constitute, so to say, the elder brethren of the teaching army, the ranks and files of which must be filled with volunteers who are guided in their work by those who have consecrated all their life to the noble task of pedagogy. Young men and women consecrating a few years of their life to teaching -- not because they see in teaching a profession, but because of their being inspired with the desire to help their younger friends in their intellectual development; people in more advanced age who are ready to give a number of hours to teaching in the subjects they best like -- such will be probably the teachers army in a better organised system of education. At any rate, it is not by making teaching a salaried profession that we can obtain a good education for our children, and maintain among pedagogues the freshness and openness of mind which are necessary for keeping pace with the ever-growing needs of science. The teacher will be a real teacher only when inspired with a real love both for children and for the subject he teaches, and this inspiration cannot be maintained for years if teaching is a mere profession. People ready to consecrate their powers to teaching, and quite able to do so, are not wanting even in our present society. Let us only understand how to discover them, to interest them in education, and to combine their efforts; and in their hands, with the aid of more experienced people, our schools will very soon become quite different from what they are now. They will be places where the young generation will assimilate the knowledge and experience of the elder one, and the elder one will borrow from the younger new energy for a common work for the benefit of humanity. P. Kropotkin FOOTNOTES Geographical Education. Report to the council of the Royal Geographical Society, by J. Scott Keltie. London 1885 Geographical Education. Appendix P p.135 Geographical Education, p.25 Handbook of the Agassiz Association, by Harlam H. Ballard. Lenox, Mass 1884
Posted on: Mon, 02 Dec 2013 04:16:25 +0000
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