He will watch, with care and
interest, the operation of the moral and intellectual causes which he
sets in operation, and find, as he accomplishes his various objects with
increasing facility and power, that he will derive a greater and greater
pleasure from his work.
Now when a teacher thus looks upon his school as a field in which he is
to exercise skill, and ingenuity, and enterprise; when he studies the
laws of human nature, and the character of those minds upon which he has
to act; when he explores deliberately the nature of the field which he
has to cultivate, and of the objects which he wishes to accomplish, and
applies means judiciously and skillfully adapted to the object, he must
necessarily take a strong interest in his work. But when, on the other
hand, he goes to his employment only to perform a certain regular round
of daily toil, undertaking nothing and anticipating nothing but this
dull and unchangeable routine, and when he looks upon his pupils merely
as passive objects of his labors, whom he is to treat with simple
indifference while they obey his commands, and to whom he is only to
apply reproaches and punishment when they do wrong, such a teacher never
can take pleasure in the school. Weariness and dullness must reign in
both master and scholars when things, as he imagines, are going right,
and mutual anger and crimination when they go wrong.
[Illustration: School Master]
Scholars never can be successfully instructed by the power of any dull
mechanical routine, nor can they be properly governed by the blind,
naked strength of the master; such means must fail of the accomplishment
of the purposes designed, and consequently the teacher who tries such a
course must have constantly upon his mind the discouraging,
disheartening burden of unsuccessful and almost useless labor.
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