Professional development

“ And our most progressive centers are looking upon him as a specialist, an educational expert, and demanding in him an educational and a professional equipment commensurate with the larger, more difficult, and most important work. ”

“ Let the profession of your choice be emphatically your life-work. Direct to its study the best powers of your mind. In your professional career propose to yourself an exalted aim and put in its service a persevering fidelity. ”

“ While training for the profession of learning is regarded as the type of culture, as a liberal education, that of a mechanic, a musician, a lawyer, a doctor, a farmer, a merchant, or a railroad manager is regarded as purely technical and professional. ”

“ To this necessity educators will some day open their eyes, and educational systems will some day conform; meantime, it must be done mainly by individual work. Knowledge, discipline, and technical training of the best sort are accessible on every hand; but the development of the faculty which unites all these in the highest form of activity must be secured mainly by personal effort. ”

“ Of course, to arrange and systematize these actions, to establish the true relations between all these various faculties and powers, and to regulate the obligations and duties by which the exercise of them should be limited and controlled, is a work of time, and is to be effected, not by the operation of any instinct or early intuition, but by a course of development—effected mainly by the progress of growth and experience, though it is to be aided and guided by assiduous but gentle training and instruction. ”

“ These establishments have been founded, commonly, with a professed utilitarian purpose, and have started out with professional training as their chief avowed aim. The purpose made most of in their establishment has commonly been to train young men for proficiency in some gainful occupation ”

“ Add then to the knowledge which you already possess patient study and careful practice, and above all, see that you add to professional ability, the strictest integrity of conduct, without which your career, however brilliant for the time, cannot fail to be attended with disgrace in the end. Recollect the promise which you have just made to maintain on all occasions the purity and reputation of the profession, and never to deviate from the straight path of its honourable exercise. ”

“ Besides, we have changed our notion of what constitutes ‘learning’ and concluded that the man who by experience has learned 212‘life’ may know quite as much as the man who has learned books in the school. But is the difference, then, that the professional man receives a special professional training, while the business man does not? ”

“ It addresses itself “to employers and those in charge of the selection, grading, and promotion of workers of every class, in factories, offices, and stores; to teachers of all grades, from kindergarten to university; to parents who are interested in ascertaining, and watching the growth of their children’s mental development and to young men and young women striving for self-improvement and advancement and desirous of learning something of their own mental capacities and limitations as a guide to the intelligent choice of vocations or professions.” ”

“ It is regarded as the essential training for intellectual, professional and business life, and it is no longer an effort to secure it, but rather to make it of the greatest possible value to the students and to the community. ”

“ When the vocation for which he is naturally best fitted becomes apparent, as it must from the study of the development of the youth and his desires, the school will know, and can give exactly, that training that is necessary for the vocation. ”

“ Now, it is clear that if men are to be selected young for a lifelong career, especially if that career involves responsible administrative work, any acquaintance with the details of the duties to be performed, and any present fitness for the position, are of far less consequence than a thorough education, keen intelligence and capacity for development. ”

“ As has already been said, such education will aim, first of all, at producing the citizen before it aims at producing the lawyer, the engineer, the physician, or any other professional or occupational type. ”

“ Some of the most effective methods include helping educators identify the learning needs of our society; encouraging professional exchanges between teachers, educators, and businesses; contributing expertise, financial resources, and equipment ”

“ By directing the reading, by encouraging an interchange of visits, by organizing clubs for self-improvement, by frequent class and grade and general meetings, the professional spirit may be aroused and the work energized.
Those who show teaching power, versatility, amiability, reliability, steadiness, and growth must be rewarded with the highest positions: those who lack fibre, who have no energy, who are incapable of enthusiasm, who will not work agreeably with their associates, must go upon the retired list. ”

“ Still there have been developed in the other leading professions, those that are regarded as the most reputable and noteworthy, certain recognized principles which serve to guide their members in many ways. The full comprehension of such principles as an authoritative guide tends to a correct measurement of the real value of one's professional work. Likewise, while supplying certain ideals at the outset, they may aid in determining the lines of effort and action which will tend to elevate the profession itself and to the attainment of individual success in its pursuits. ”

“ To-day we see expressions and indications of the new outlook upon every hand, in the greatly increased professional zeal that animates the teacher's calling; in the widespread movement among all civilized countries to raise the standards of teachers, to eliminate those candidates for service who have not subjected themselves to the discipline of special preparation ”

“ The standard of work that ensures a successful professional career is now technically very high and nothing but years of determined study can equip you for equal competition with the rest in the field. ”

“ The qualities which develop in the teacher will develop in the school. To develop these qualities with any degree of uniformity, in a large teaching force, requires steady and uniform treatment through a long course of years under superintendence which is professional, strong, just, and courageous, which has ample assistance and authority, which is worthy of public confidence, and knows how to marshal facts, present arguments, and appeal to the intelligence and integrity of the community with success. ”

“ No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside. ”

“ Does not that sound hopeful for our development, and by example, are there not more people in other fields who can give their time, knowledge and experience to the development of something which when it is completed as an institution will belong to you? ”

“ Thus in every department of education the result of the training administered intelligently, and with almost infinite long-sightedness and subtlety during school-days, will be to form character, not by repression of any natural predilection, but by cultivation of mental and moral impulses to good. ”

“ Your professional knowledge and skill will, on the one hand, enable you to drive quacks out of practice, whilst your knowledge of the habits of the people and your sympathy with them will secure you, on the other, a cordial reception in native homes. ”

“ Through common devotion to the best development of the child, through common loyalty to the main aims and methods of the school, our teachers have demonstrated that in education, as in business, the best organization is secured through proper regard for natural divisions of labor, interest, and training. The child secures the advantage in discipline and knowledge of contact with experts in each line, while the individual teachers serve the common thought in diverse ways, thus multiplying and re-inforcing it. ”

“ Gentlemen, a serious duty bearing alike on your professional studies and on the pursuits of your leisure moments is the due and progressive training of your intellectual powers. A serious duty. This training, no longer cribb'd. cabin'd and confin'd by the imperious requirements of examination standards, involves not only the discipline of those faculties whose powers have been cultivated, but also, and more especially of those which are weak or which have been overlooked and neglected. ”

“ You give our people education in schools and colleges; but our people demand a practical training also, and if you put them in those higher posts of responsibility and emolument, you give them that practical training and discipline which is so essential to integrity, honesty, and probity, and a successful discharge of high duty. ”

“ Nay, we know the profession too well; know that their skill, science, and experience will ever be invaluable to mankind; and know also that their only hope of maintaining their present honourable position before the public is by adapting their system to the wants of humanity. ”

“ Mere acquaintance with the subject to be taught is no longer held adequate by people at all intelligent along educational lines. And during the progress of the movement that has demonstrated to us the need of professional preparation, there has been worked out also, along somewhat general lines, the details of this preparation. ”

“ The professional avenues of distinction which, early in the twentieth century, were only three or four, had, by the end of the century, been multiplied tenfold by the birth or creation of new Professions. ”

“ Since this is true, who is better qualified by training, by education, and by experience to conduct this education than the employment supervisor and his assistants? If he is properly chosen for his work, he has a special scientific knowledge of human nature; he knows not only the talents and aptitudes of every member of the force, but also knows the best way for developing and bringing out these talents and aptitudes. He knows for just what vocation each one under his tutelage is suited. ”

“ In all walks of life, in all kinds of labor, this is the beginning of excellence, and proficiency follows in its wake. We talk so much about thoroughness of training, and so little about singleness of purpose. We give to every girl in our public schools the arithmetical knowledge which enables her to stand behind a counter and cast up her accounts. ”

“ He engages that he possesses that reasonable degree of learning, skill, and experience which is ordinarily possessed by the professors of the same art or science, and which is ordinarily regarded by the community or by those conversant with that employment as necessary and sufficient to qualify him to engage in such business. He contracts also to employ reasonable and ordinary care and diligence in the exertion of his skill and application of his knowledge to the matter in which he is employed. ”

“ The choice rests with himself; he will be what he wants to be, or what he is able to be—professor, engineer, physician, member of the bar, an administrator or a functionary. In each of his qualifications he renders an important service to the public, he exercises an honorable profession; let him be competent and expert, that concerns society. ”

“ I thus propose to remove from the science of education matters belonging to much wider departments of human conduct, and to concentrate the view upon what exclusively pertains to education—the means of building up the acquired powers of human beings. The communication of knowledge is the ready type of the process, but the training operation enters into parts of the mind not intellectual—the activities, and the emotions; the same forces, however, being at work.
Education does not embrace the employment of all our intellectual functions. ”

“ The examples we have already given of great workers in various branches of industry, art, and science, render it unnecessary further to enforce the importance of persevering application in any department of life. It is the result of every-day experience that steady attention to matters of detail lies at the root of human progress; and that diligence, above all, is the mother of good luck. Accuracy is also of much importance, and an invariable mark of good training in a man. ”

“ The development of a competent leadership is the all-embracing function of such an institution, but that can not be done save as the institution is, at the same time, thru some or all of [Pg 92] its teachers, keeping fully abreast, or well in the lead, of the discovery of new knowledge and of new applications of knowledge in the various fields of human endeavor. ”

“ Have these institutions succeeded in raising the general level of character and improving the general conditions of life? Can we indulge any sure and certain hope that the work of education will be increasingly fruitful? ”

“ Scientific Management Realizes the Importance of Training the Will. — The most necessary, and most complex and difficult part of Scientific Management, is the training of the will of all members of the organization. ”