Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

tion, and two thousand are obtained from | state, very similar to many parts of Penn

the Peabody Fund. Not only do the teachers get free tuition, but nearly all of the city boards of education, and many of those in country districts, give each teacher a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of boarding and travel in order that she may attend the school without cost to herself. For some years the city of Columbia, S. C., gave sixteen dollars to every teacher who would attend. Last year each teacher had twenty dollars added to her last check in the hope that she would use it for summer school work. It was an experiment to ascertain how many would attend when they were not required to do so in order to receive the advance.

The sisters in charge of the parochial schools of the Catholic Church spend the greater part of their vacation in some form of preparation for the year's work. Even at the annual retreats time is given to self-examination as a lever to raise the individual to higher planes of effort. The best scholars in the Jesuit and other colleges deliver lectures to fit teachers for work in the elementary schools. What the church does for her teachers, the State can afford to do for its teachers. Experience has shown that

summer

schools do not pay their own way. Those heretofore established in Pennsylvania either did not pay the instructors a fair compensation, or else were conducted at a loss to those in charge. The moderate salary on which the average teacher is compelled to live, does not enable her to pay much tuition. A modest appropriation for the maintenance of one or more summer schools where ambitious teachers can combine study and recreation, would be money wisely applied. The School Department should be allowed to set for the purpose one or more mountate resorts where the temperature will be favorable for intellectual effort during the summer months.

APPROPRIATION IN AID OF HIGH
SCHOOLS.

The small appropriation of $50,000 has stimulated the establishment of high schools in a number of townships. Sixtysix township high schools came up to the legal standard and received their share of aid. This is but a beginning of what cap and ought to be done. We can sometimes see ourselves best in the light of a comparison. Ohio is an agricultural

sylvania. Its report names six hundred and ninety-nine township high schools. There is no reason why the boys and girls in rural districts should have fewer educational advantages than the children of the city. Very many of the successful men of this day were country lads. Trace their career to its beginnings, and you invariably find somewhere a good teacher to whose influence the successful man owes his sense of something to be achieved.

Education is not synonymous with schooling. The pupil gets his education partly at school and partly out of school. Rural life may have educative influences which the city boy does not enjoy, but if the education out of school is not supplemented by proper schooling, the country lad is handicapped in the struggle for the highest success.

The appropriation of fifty thousand dollars was not sufficient to pay the townships the full amount of aid specified in the act of 1895. At the last distribution only seventy-five per cent. of the maximum allowed by law, could be paid. By reason of the new township high schools which are springing into existence, the pro-rata share will be further diminished at the next distribution. It is earnestly recommended that this appropriation be doubled at the next session of the Legislature. This increase will do far more to stimulate progress than an unconditional appropriation of many times the amount for general distribution. The schools make progress whenever the State's money stimulates local sacrifice; they deteriorate whenever the State appropriation is used to reduce local taxation or is squandered in the purchase of fanciful apparatus and other questionable appli

ances.

MINIMUM SALARY.

Something should be done to raise the minimum salary of teachers. Good work cannot be expected from teachers who get less than thirty dollars a month. The teacher who makes a bare living cannot spend money in preparing to teach. Increased appropriations have

not increased the salaries of teachers. This is the experience everywhere. West Virginia has fixed a minimum salary of thirty dollars. Indiana fixed a minimum at forty or forty-five dollars per month, according to the grade of the certificates.

Although there have been efforts to evade this law, yet on the whole it has had very beneficial results. The law has always been a schoolmaster in Pennsylvania. The time has come for the Legislature to consider whether something can be done by legislation to roll off from Pennsylvania the disgrace of the low salaries now paid to teachers in many school districts. We have counties in which the salaries of teachers are equal to those of Massachusetts, New Jersey, and the Middle West, but this only indicates a more lamentable condition in the districts whose average pulls down the figures and gives such a low place in the scale of teachers' salaries to the State that makes the largest common school appropriation.

When the price of living goes up, and wages advance, the people who live on a salary begin to see hard times. The

salaried person is the last to be affected by an increase. The teacher and the preacher have special reason to complain of the recent increase in the price of the necessaries of life. Many of those who teach have others dependent upon them. It is the duty of every citizen to seek to better the condition of the women who teach. They do not organize strikes, and have no opportunity at the ballot-box to insist upon their rights. If they had the suffrage, their votes would in no long time procure more adequate compensation for their services and sacrifices.

THE CURRICULUM OF STUDY.

One of the most perplexing educational problems is the making of a satisfactory school curriculum. All are agreed that subjects which have become antiquated should no longer be taught. Equation of payments is based upon methods of conducting business that prevailed several centuries ago. Pure food laws should, in no long time, make alligation a thing of the past. The analysis of puzzling sentences, whose meaning is beyond the grasp of the pupil, is a mere waste of time. It is not a valid argument to say that such subjects must be retained for the sake of mental discipline. The sciences which beget higher forms of mental power can be made to furnish adequate and sufficient materials for thought. Arithmetic and grammar have monopolized the biggest share of time in rural schools. How little arithmetic beyond the fundamental rules does the average farmer use! Mistakes in grammar and

|

exercises in false syntax have no bearing upon his crops. On the other hand, the laws governing the fertility of the land, the growth of crops, the destruction of noxious insects are seldom taught. The practical study of nature's forces and laws should receive more attention, especially in country schools. Experience has shown that satisfactory changes in the curriculum cannot be wrought by the publication and distribution of a syllabus or guide. Teachers cannot impart what they do not know. Systematic study in the field and the laboratory is needed to put content into the most carefully prepared outlines. The work must begin in the Normal school, must be carried forward in teachers' meetings, at institutes and summer schools, and must finally be made to percolate through the township high school into the lower schools and into the every-day life on the farm. The efforts to improve the schools should, above all else, be centered upon the agencies that help to fit the teachers for their work. The continuance of the appropriation making tuition free at the State Normal school is, therefore, of paramount importance. Next to the appropriation for school maintenance, this appropriation is the most important of all the appropriations which will claim the attention of the next Legislature.

Respectfully submitted,

NATHAN C. SCHAEFFER, Superintendent of Public Instruction.

[merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small]
[blocks in formation]

Increase in teachers' wages.

476,536 91

Decrease in cost of buildings, pur

chasing and renting

Increase in cost of fuel, contingencies, debts and interest paid.

Condition of System, not including phia, with Comparisons.

school term in

619,532 40

272,581 17 Philadel

Increase.

17

526 551

per month

Number of pupils in school at end of year

Average attendance

[ocr errors]

Cost of school houses and repairs. Cost of books, fuel, stationery and contingencies

THE

THE TEACHER.

REV. JOHN L. SPALDING.

THE highest social functions are performed not by conquerors, or rulers, or legislators, or the providers of the necessaries, comforts and luxuries of physical life, but by teachers, whether they be mothers, priests, poets, discoverers, inventors, or schoolmasters; and that which is indispensable and of paramount importance in the teacher is not so much knowledge as character, since the 18,458 great purpose and end of education is to form character, and this can be rightly done only by men and women in whom there is a hunger and thirst for human excellence. Others deal with the things that concern life; the teacher with life itself, which it is his business to foster, develop, and produce in higher and higher potency.

.ΟΙ

dc. 602

1,139

[blocks in formation]

Average length of

[blocks in formation]

537

Average salary of

male teachers per

month. . . .

$42 98

[blocks in formation]

$0 84

26

16,207 33 428,119 98

363,802 89 58,484 39

Character is a persistent pursuit of what one believes in, admires, loves, and feels himself able to accomplish. If this is material, he is a matter-of fact man, having the significance and worth of a machine; if it is spiritual, he lives in a world of thought and freedom where all things are possible. One may be drawn to what is useful and pleasant, or he may be over-mastered by a passion for what is true and right, and so be empowered to neglect or scorn what is merely useful

and pleasant. He whose ideal is use and pleasure belongs to the unreasoning crowd; he for whom truth, and justice, and love are the only sufficient ends of life, belongs to the few whose faith and example become light and strength for the purest and the best. If his country be made a desert, if his people be overwhelmed and scattered, he shall abide; for what he believed in and lived by is eternal.

This is the spirit of all genuine teachers. They believe in the good of life and in the surpassing power of right education. Their one aim is to uplift, strengthen, and enlighten men, to enable them to know and love the vital truth which gives the inner freedom that makes man the noblest and most blessed of God's creatures. That one should be poor, should be unrecognized, should have to toil that he may live, is not in their eyes a thing to be dreaded. For them the infinite evil is to be ignorant, is to be base, is to be the slave, not of a tyrant, but of instinct and passion, of lust, and hate, and greed. Poor men have been heroes acclaimed of all the world. Men who have walked and died in obscurity have risen to shine forever, like fixed stars. The divinest Being who has appeared in human form toiled that He might live. But the victims of ignorance, of greed, of hate and dishonesty, though they be kings, though a nation's wealth be heaped about them, are interesting only as a contrast to what constitutes the worth and dignity of man. They are but weeds that prove the soil's fertility. Though the people dream and think and talk of trade and commerce and wages, though they place but a money value on genius, virtue, and beauty, though they consider as naught what cannot be weighed or counted, the God-appointed teacher, with ever-growing insight, sees that the real things whereby man's soul is nourished can neither be weighed nor counted. He is a lover of human perfection, intellectual, moral, and physical. He would give his life to make men wiser and more virtuous. He feels that all values are educational valuesmeans whereby life is sustained, enlarged, and purified; that life itself is enrooted in God, and draws from Him its substance, its energy, its beauty and goodness.

No genuine teacher has ever been inspired or guided by mechanical ideals. His genius and power spring not from

the arithmetical or logical faculty, but from his capacity for infinite faith, hope, and love, of which are born infinite patience and painstaking. It is his sympathy with all that is human that gives him the insight which imparts the skill to develop what in man is best. Above all, he is attracted to little children whom God sends into his world to awaken sympathy, love, and devotion; whom He showers, like blossoms in spring, to teach us to hope and labor for ever diviner harvests. His spirit is rather that of a generous and dauntless youth than that of a calculating man. calculating man. There is in him something of Plato and vastly more of Christ. He is an idealist, and reveals the soul to itself. His pure eye reflects the azure heavens; the flowers spring from beneath his feet; he is free, tranquil and joyous, at home in his Father's house, though he be beset by enemies and have not where to lay his head. No difficulties affright, no obstacles deter him. certain that the work he does is the noblest task which can be set for man. He, therefore, does it with all his heart, and finds sufficient reward in the doing.From address at the Colonel Parker Memorial Service.

He is

BIRD STUDY IN SCHOOLS.

THE

BY WILSON TOUT.

HE solution of the bird protection problem can never be reached by courts, laws or officers. The small boy is one of the chief offenders, and those in authority seldom attempt to cover or even reach his thoughtless acts of destruction. If all boys could be shown the harmful results of killing birds or destroying their nests, what an army for bird protection there would be within a few years. If the girls were taught the folly of pandering to the demands of fashion when it calls for the sacrifice of countless innocent victims, the game wardens now needed to protect our birds would have to seek some other vocation if they would still prosper. The school is the foundation of reform movements in other lines-why not in this?

The first objection offered to a proposal for having bird study in the schools is that the course is already crowded, and no room remains for a new study. The objection would be rational if it were

proposed to introduce a new study. Birds cannot be studied from books, and very few schools have access to mounted specimens. Saturday excursions, observations on the road to and from school, and in country schools, even at recess and during school hours, will furnish subjects for conversation lessons, and also much needed material for language and composition work. One school I know of organized itself into a club for the study of birds. The children met at four o'clock twice a week and compared notes for about twenty minutes. This did not detract from school work, but rather increased the interest in the regular studies.

Bird study should be begun as soon as the child begins to attend school. The seeming interest of the little tots in their reading and number lessons pales before the glow of wonder and enthusiasm as they tell of fiuding a bird's nest while on the way to school, or hear the story of the birds from their teacher. Let a teacher mention finding a sparrow's nest and the school turns into an experience meeting; each little one having a story of his own to tell. In the country school this is especially true, as the pupils have a better chance to observe birds than the children of cities.

I have had to work out my own plan of bird study in the schools, as I have never chanced to get another's plan. I have had some successes, and some that were not successes, but from these experiences have formed a plan that I believe overcomes most of the difficulties.

Tell the story of how one species of woodpecker got its red head and black and white dress, and have the pupils learn a verse or two from the many that are to be found in the readers and elsewhere. Before the interest lags close the period, always leaving something for the next lesson. At the next lesson, if during the right season, you will have several facts from pupils who have seen and observed a woodpecker during the interim.

In the grammar and high school grades a different plan works better. Here each pupil should have a note book in which should be recorded his own observations. These should include the time of arrival, numbers, nesting, food, departure, acts of depredation, value to man, etc. Every note should be dated to be of value. In the course of a year the pupils will find several dead birds; these should be brought to school for specimens. Shooting birds for specimens should not be tolerated. Last year we had twenty-two birds brought to school for study. Among those brought alive were the barn owl, coot, horned grebe, meadow-lark, barredowl, and flicker. Several different kinds of ducks were brought and a number of dead birds, among them a black-headed grosbeak, golden-crowned warbler, Bohemian waxwing, downy woodpecker, and bittern. Last year we had seventythree birds on our list, and I can answer for every one of them.

Now I believe this to be true bird study, and its utility and common sense are its defense. Only fifteen minutes twice a week was needed to keep the notes, and the time was not missed. An interest was aroused, and the diversion from regular school work was pleasing. Many pupils reported an added pleasure in veritheir notes and observations during the present school year.

In primary grades social talks with the pupils is the best method. Let the pupils talk as much as possible. Take a single bird for a lesson and show a picture. By a judicious use of questions and statements bring out the distinguish-fying ing features of the bird you are studying. I have no patience with the teacher who asks such questions as: How many feet has a bird? What is its body covered with? How many eyes has a bird? What is a bird's nest for? etc. The dull pupil does not learn anything, and the bright boy is disgusted. The pupils will tell about the habits, food, nesting places, eggs, call, etc., of the common birds.

If you are studying a woodpecker, call attention to the peculiarities that distinguish it from other birds; consider its stout, sharp bill, its peculiar feet, its short, stiff tail feathers, its habit of drumming, and its undulating flight.

I have never taught a school where I did not have bird study, and I have never heard an objection. It is not a good plan to announce the first day of school that you intend to introduce bird study. Such a course may arouse opposition. Start it gradually after you have the school well under control, and no one will suspect an innovation until you have the pupils converted and the patrons realize the value in the added interest of the children in their school work. And remember that bird procection should be the the keynote.

The state laws protecting game and

« AnteriorContinuar »