John S. Hart

“ But to those who claim to belong to the educated portion of the community, school studies are of right directed more to the development of the mental and moral powers, than to positive acquisition. Your instructors return you to your friends and your home with a mind enlarged, with a taste refined, with a judgment corrected, ready to take your place and act well your part, as an educated woman. But remember, she is not an educated woman, who knows no more this year than she did last. True education is growth, and it never stands still. The tree which has ceased to grow, has begun to decay. ”

“ A great city is just as sacredly bound to provide for its teeming population the light of knowledge, as it is to provide material light for its streets. The one kind of illumination, equally with the other, is an essential part of its police. [Pg 259] No matter what the cost, the dark holes and alleys must be flooded with the light of truth, before which the owls and bats and vampyres of society will be scattered to the winds. A great city without schools would be a hell,—a seething caldron of vice, impurity, and crime. ”

“ A very common feeling at the beginning of a course of study, is a feeling of discouragement. Nearly all the studies are new, and you enter upon each with fresh eagerness. Now, it is in the nature of every study while it is new, to seem boundless. Under the guiding hand of a skilful teacher, its limits and capabilities are stretched out in one direction and another, interminable vistas spread out in the distance, and portentous difficulties rise up before the imagination, until the mind is bewildered. ”

“ The great majority of those who seek our shores, come here ignorant. With little knowledge of any kind, and with no knowledge whatever of the nature of republican institutions, these men, almost at once, are made sharers of the popular sovereignty, with all its tremendous powers of peace and war, order and anarchy, life and death. Not to have a system of public education, by which these ignorant and dangerous masses shall be enlightened, and shall be assimilated to the rest, and to the better part, of the population, is simply suicidal. Our national life hangs upon our common schools. ”

“ Many speak disparagingly even of memory itself, and profess to think it a faculty of minor importance, regarding its cultivation as savoring of old-fogyism, and sneering at all memoriter exercises among children as the chattering of parrots. It is never without amazement that I hear such utterances. Memory is God's gift, by which alone we are able to retain our intellectual acquisitions. Without it, study is useless, and education simply an impossibility. Without it, there could be no such thing as growth in knowledge. ”

“ So these words which we read, and think we forget, hour by hour, all day long, are continually sinking into the soil of the heart, and influencing imperceptibly the growth of the germs of thought. The aggregate of all these minute, unnoticed influences is prodigious, incalculable.
Whoever can put words together wisely, either by the tongue or the pen, has a precious talent, which he may not innocently lay up in a napkin. The gift, like that of wealth, is not his by right of ownership, but only as a steward. ”

“ The truth is, there is a sort of indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to idiocy. I knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers, gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious self-indulgence. He shut himself up in his room, all day long, day after day, devouring one book after another, until he became almost idiotic by the process, and he finally died of softening of the brain. ”

“ It is a bad sign, though not an uncommon one, to see evidences of cunning in a teacher. Better by far to be outwitted and duped occasionally, than to forfeit that character of perfect sincerity and straightforwardness which secures the confidence of a child. The teacher who would love his children, particularly if he happens to have been entrusted with an unpromising class, must learn to wear the spectacles of charity. He must cultivate the habit of seeing things in their best light. ”

“ I have been a teacher of the young nearly all my life, and as the result of such a life-long professional experience, I have no conviction more abiding than this, that the fear of God is the beginning of knowledge. I believe that mental growth is just as directly the gift of God as bodily growth; that the healthy action of the mind is as much dependent on his good pleasure as the healthy action of the bodily functions. God has not only made one mind superior to another, but of two minds naturally equal, he can, at his sovereign pleasure, make one grow and expand more rapidly than another. ”

“ It is by talking we buy and sell; by talking, the lawyer, the doctor, the minister, the teacher perform the chief of their functions; by talking, the intercourse and machinery of life are chiefly kept in motion. As it was by a word that creation was accomplished, as the worlds came into being and were moulded into shape, not by the hand, but by the omnific voice of God, saying, "Let there be light and there was light," so in this lower sphere of human action, the tongue is mightier than the hand. The moulding, propelling forces of society come from the use of words. ”

“ The teacher who is accustomed to harangue his scholars with a continuous stream of words, no matter how full of weighty meaning his words may be, is yet deceiving himself, if he thinks that his scholars are materially benefited by his intellectual activity, unless it is so guided as to awaken and exercise theirs. If, after a suitable period, he will honestly examine his scholars on the subjects, on which he has himself been so productive, he will find that he has been only pouring water into a sieve. Teaching can never be this one-sided process. ”

“ Every day there must be the glow of hard work,—not the exhaustion and languor which arise from too protracted confinement to study,—which have the same debilitating effect upon the mind that a similar process has upon the body,—but vigorous and hardy labor, such as wakens the mind from its lethargy, summons up the resolution and the will, and puts the whole internal man into a state of determined and positive activity. The boy in such a case feels that he is at work. He feels, too, that he is gaining something more than knowledge. ”

“ Only, when the tender heart of youth thus looks up, let it not be into a region filled with clouds and cold, but into a sky everywhere pervaded with a clear, steady, warm sunlight. Let there be no frown upon your brow, no harsh or angry word upon your lips, no exacting sternness in your eye. Let the love which you feel in your heart beam forth naturally and spontaneously in loving looks and words, and you need not fear but that you will meet with a response. ”

“ If you want your class to look at you, you must look at them. The eye has a magic power. It wins, it fascinates, it guides, it rewards, it punishes, it controls. You must learn how to see every child all the time. Some teachers seem to be able to see only one scholar at a time. This will never do. While you are giving this absorbed, undivided attention to one, all the rest are running wild. Neither will it do for the teacher to be looking about much, to see what is going on among the other classes in the room. Your scholars' eyes will be very apt to follow yours. ”

“ On the other hand, a teacher who enjoys the unbounded love of his scholars, may accomplish comparatively little, on account of lacking the other qualities needed for success. The highest measure of success in teaching is attained only where these several conditions meet,—where the teacher has and deserves the full confidence of the scholars, where he has full confidence in himself, is self-reliant and self-asserting, and where at the same time he has the warm affection of his pupils. Love, after all, is the governing power of the human soul, as it is the crowning grace in the Christian scheme. ”

“ He became almost wild at the perfect ease and quietude with which all his efforts were baffled, until at length, fully satisfied that further struggles were useless, he made a complete surrender, and lay down as peaceful and submissive as an infant.
This point is of some importance. I do not underrate the value of kindness and love in any system of government, whether in the household, the school, the stable, the menagerie, or in civil society. But love is not the basis of government. Obedience is yielded to authority, and authority is based on right and power. ”

“ In vain reason forges its bolts, in vain imagination paints its scenes, in vain the senses give us a knowledge of the shapes and forms of external nature, in vain ideas of any sort or from any source come into our minds, unless we have the power to retain and fix them there, and make them a part of our accumulated intellectual wealth. To do this is the office of memory, and whatever increases the activity and power of the memory, gives at once value and growth to every other power. ”

“ Thus, after these pupil-teachers are once familiar with the branches to be taught, and after they have become acquainted with the theory of teaching, as a science, it is surprising how soon, with even a little of this practice-teaching, they acquire the art. If the faculty of teaching is in them at all, a very few experimental lessons, under the eye of an experienced teacher, will develop it.
The fact of possessing within one's self this gift, or power of teaching, sometimes breaks upon the possessor himself with all the force of a surprising and most delightful discovery. ”

“ Deception in regard to your lessons is not viewed, as it should be, in the light of a serious moral delinquency. An ingenuous youth, who would scorn to steal, and scorn to lie anywhere else than at school, makes no scruple to deceive a teacher. Is honesty a thing of place and time? I do not say, I would not trust at my money-drawer the boy who has been cheating at his lessons, because a boy may have been led into the latter delinquency by a false notion of right, which as yet has not affected his integrity in matters of business. But this I do say. Cheating at school blunts the moral sense ”

“ The Sabbath-school teacher may dip deep into biblical lore, he may ransack the commentaries, and may become, as many Sabbath-school teachers are, truly learned in Bible knowledge, and yet be utterly incompetent to teach a class of children. He can no more hit the wandering attention, or make a lodgment of his knowledge in the minds of his youthful auditory, than the mere unskilled possessor of a fowling-piece can hit a bird upon the wing.
The art of teaching is the one indispensable qualification of the teacher. ”

“ So, if languages are your choice, and mathematical study your aversion, take hold of the odious task with steady and sturdy endeavor, and you will soon convert it into a pleasure. The same is true of grammar, of geography, of history, of composition, of rhetoric, of mental and moral science, of elocution,—of every branch. If you are wise, you will give your chief attention in school to those branches for which you feel the least inclination, and in which you find it most difficult to excel. ”

“ No human being can ever enter into ours. Yet, my dear pupil, did it never occur to you, that there is One Mind, and that a mind of infinitely great and transcendent power, to which there is no such barrier, and that this transcendent, all-knowing, all-powerful mind, is continually in direct contact with the very essence of your mind? Can I influence your thinking faculties, and cannot the infinite God, who made those faculties? Can He [Pg 240] who gave our bodies all their power of growth and strength, not give growth and strength to our minds? ”

“ There is something contagious in the fire of intellect. The human mind, as well as the human heart, has a wonderful power of assimilation. Every judicious parent will say: Let not my child be consigned to the care of an ill-informed, dull, spiritless teacher. Let it be his happy lot, if possible, to be under one who has some higher ambition than merely to go through a certain prescribed routine of duties and lessons; one whose face beams with intelligence and whose lips drop knowledge ”

“ Call mightily upon God the Holy Ghost, who is after all the great educator and teacher of the human race. Carry your feeble lamp to the great fountain of light and radiance. Put your heart into full accord and sympathy with that of your dear elder Brother. Wrestle mightily with God in secret, as one that feels the burden of a great want. ”

“ Not only will they study better, and be more attentive, for the sake of pleasing their teacher, but by some mysterious process of the mind, love helps us to understand, as dislike disturbs and beclouds the understanding. When a child has a dislike or prejudice or ill-feeling of any kind against a teacher, or a subject of study, the effect upon the mind of the child is like that produced upon a spring of pure and sparkling water by stirring up the mud and sediment from the bottom. ”

“ Let a child by all means take lessons in writing. Let him learn plain text, German text, round hand, running hand, back hand, and the flourishes. But if he is to become rapidly master of that truly beautiful and most useful accomplishment, let the teacher insist upon his always attending to his manner of writing, and always writing as well as he can. Whether he writes a composition, a sketch, a letter, whenever for any purpose he puts pen to paper, let him be required to form each letter distinctly, to write it gracefully, and to give to his exercise a neat and elegant appearance. ”

“ Committing to memory, which is repulsive drudgery to the man, is the easiest of all tasks to the child. More than this. The things fixed in the memory of childhood are seldom forgotten. Things learned later in life, not only are learned with greater difficulty, but more rapidly disappear. I recall instantly and without effort, texts of Scripture, hymns, catechisms, rules of grammar and arithmetic, and scraps of poetry and of classic authors, with which I became familiar when a boy. But it is a labor of Hercules for me to repeat by memory anything acquired since attaining the age of manhood. ”

“ Teaching children, particularly young children, is like shooting birds on the wing. The moment your bird is in sight, you must fire. The moment you have the child's eye, be ready to speak. This readiness of utterance is a matter to be cultivated. The ripest scholars are often sadly deficient in it. The very habit of profound study is apt to induce the opposite quality to readiness. A teacher who is conscious of this defect, must resolutely set himself to resist it and overcome it. ”

“ It is not always the easiest thing in the world to exercise this love. A teacher may have the charge of a class of children whose appearance, manners, and dispositions are exceedingly forbidding, perhaps even loathsome. Yet observation and study will ordinarily discover some good quality even in the worst and most degraded. A talent for discovering what is good in a child is much more important in the work of elevating him, than the smartness at detecting and exposing his tricks, in which some teachers take pride. ”

“ In a few short years, the idle boys who are now prowling about the streets and alleys of our towns, the wharf-rats of our cities, will be a part of our jurymen. Is it of no consequence to me, whether their minds shall be early trained and disciplined, so that they will be capable of following a train of argument, or of comprehending a statement of facts? How is it possible to administer justice with any degree of fairness and efficiency, where the majority of those who are to constitute the jurymen and the witnesses are stolidly ignorant? ”

“ Many persons read and study voraciously, filling their minds most industriously with knowledge, but such a confusion of ideas prevails throughout their intellectual store-house, that their very wealth is only an embarrassment to them. The very first rule to be observed, therefore, in cultivating the memory, is to reduce our knowledge to some system. Those who are charged with the training of the young should seek not only to store their minds with ideas, but to present these ideas to them in well ordered shapes and forms, and in due logical order and coherence. ”

“ But there is one thing which he wants more than all these, and that is EYES. A good pair of eyes are to the teacher, in the government of his school, worth more than the rod, more than any system of merit or demerit marks, more than keeping in after school, more than scolding, reporting to parents, suspension, or expulsion, more than coaxing, premiums, and bribes in any shape or to any amount. The very first element in school government, as in every other government, is that the teacher should know what is going on in his little kingdom, and for this knowledge he needs a pair of eyes. ”