Address to the graduating class of the State Normal School,
delivered at Emporia, June 11, 1885.
MR. PRESIDENT, AND LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: In one sense, at least, the
State Normal School is the most important of our higher educational
institutions. The others educate, each year, a number of individuals,
and necessarily a limited number, who are, individually, to fill various
positions on life’s battle-field. The State Normal educates the
educators, and thus by its influence, its system, its method and
thought, reaches and shapes the minds of many thousands. There were,
last year, 8,342 teachers in the public schools of Kansas, and they
controlled and instructed an army of 308,600 children—an army larger
than Grant, or Napoleon, or Wellington ever commanded; an army far more
difficult to direct than were theirs; an army whose drill, discipline
and instruction will exercise, through all the coming years, a larger
and a far more important influence over the material and intellectual
well-being of humanity than did the victories of these great commanders.
The office of teacher has not, until late years, been regarded as other
vocations are. Men were educated in law, or medicine, or theology, or
learned the trades of craftsmen, because they expected to make practical
use, during their life-time, of the knowledge and skill they acquired.
But men and women drifted into the school-room as teachers—and in too
many cases still do so—not because they expected to make teaching their
business, but because, for the time being, they could find nothing else
to do. Many of these teachers were and are, undoubtedly, well qualified
for educational work; many of them have achieved marked success in this
work, and, growing to like it, have continued in it. But many others,
and far the largest number, I fear, of those who engage in teaching as a
mere temporary make-shift, do not fairly earn even the poor salaries
they are paid. No one can succeed at anything if he does not put his
heart and mind into his work. “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it
with thy might,” is a lesson which the teacher must take to heart, or
his or her teaching will come to naught.
And surely there can be no more important work than that of an educator
in the schools. Year by year this fact is strengthening in the public
mind, and as a result the teacher is growing in public appreciation and
pecuniary value.
The underlying spirit, the clear purpose of the State Normal, is not to
educate lawyers, or doctors, or ministers, or tradesmen, but to educate,
train and fit men and women for the profession of public educators. They
who enter this Institution with any other purpose in view, are guilty of
a fraud on the generosity of the State. The General Government educates
young men, at West Point and Annapolis, for the army and navy. There is
no law which compels them, after graduation, to enter either branch of
the service. But there is an unwritten code which, appealing to their
personal honor, is stronger than any statute, and which compels these
graduates of the Nation’s schools to serve two years in its army or
navy. They may then resign, but in the event of war, they must promptly
tender their services to the Government.
Some such code of ethics should govern graduates of the State Normal.
They are educated by the State, as teachers, for the purpose of
elevating the standard and qualifications of its public educators, and
they should feel in honor bound to fulfill this implied personal
obligation.
And surely there can be no nobler ambition than to be a really great
teacher—such a teacher, for example, as Arnold of Rugby, or Horace Mann.
To rule and shape human minds, to mould and fashion children and youth
for the highest and noblest duties of life—is not this a work which
should enlist in its service the best heart and brain of all the land?
Last year, in a quiet hamlet in Pennsylvania, an old man died. For more
than sixty years he had been a teacher. He had taught in nearly every
district of the county where his long and useful life was spent, and
half the men of that county, under sixty years of age, have been his
pupils. More fully than any other person I have ever known, he was my
ideal of what a school master should be—the controlling spirit of a
school; its master literally, as well as in name; a firm, strong, just
man, encouraging the diffident, punishing the vicious, and inspiring
all. Fully six feet in stature, angular, with immense reach of arms,
large hands, a noble height and breadth of forehead, and steel-gray eyes
sparkling under bristling eye-brows, the heaviest that ever adorned a
human face—he was, in the school-room, a formidable figure. Even the
later-day “hoodlum,” with his reckless impudence, would have regarded
him with awe. He was a strict disciplinarian. He had no mawkish
sentimentality about corporal punishment. He delighted, I think, to deal
with a vicious, disobedient boy—one of the half-animal and wholly
perverse kind, as full of cruelty and meanness as an egg is of meat.
When one of this class was enrolled among his pupils, it was wonderful
how soon all the perversity of his nature was reduced to subjection.
Yet this old master was not a school-room tyrant. The well-disposed
among his pupils held him in affectionate regard, and even the turbulent
respected the justice of his decisions and the firmness and sincerity of
his rule. He did not take pleasure in inflicting pain. He “trounced” a
bad or unruly boy because he regarded trouncing as a necessary and
wholesome discipline, which would make him a better man and a better
citizen. And the punishments he inflicted were rarely, if ever,
undeserved. He was as just as he was stern.
As an instructor, he had mastered the branches he taught. He rarely held
a book in his hand while hearing a class. With the range of text-books
then in use, he was thoroughly familiar. Every rule or principle or fact
they contained was at his tongue’s end. He had a real love for his work,
and an affectionate interest in the progress of his pupils. The old,
weather-beaten brick school house on the “Commons,” with its rude pine
desks and benches, whittled by the jack-knives of more than one
generation of boys, and its painted black-board on the wall, was the
soul of his earthly interests and ambition.
Amid such surroundings he lived for more than sixty years, engaged in a
laborious, often perplexing and wearisome, but always useful work. He
sent out into the world thousands of men, disciplined, instructed and
moulded by his firm but kindly hands—men who are scattered, to-day, from
ocean to ocean, and many of whom have achieved the most distinguished
success in life. For among his pupils were James G. Blaine, Senator
McMillan, of Minnesota, ex-Congressman Townsend, of Ohio, and a host of
others eminent in law, in medicine, in literature, and in business.
He reached a venerable age, dying at eighty-four. And I am sure that his
pupils, wheresoever they had wandered, received the news of his death
with profound sorrow. For the mention of his name would call up a
thousand recollections of him—of his tall, athletic person, of his
massive head and shaggy eye-brows, of his homely but intellectual face
and his keen and kindly eyes, of his quick, firm, dominating voice, and
of his relish for every physical as well as mental enjoyment. For the
stern master of the school-room was, on the “Commons,” a boy with the
boys—the surest catch, the strongest hand at the bat, and the swiftest
runner of them all. Remembering Master Joshua V. Gibbons thus, is it
strange that his old pupils, grown to manhood and scattered far and
wide, should hold his memory in reverent and tender recollection?
I sincerely hope and trust that the Normal will send out hundreds of
teachers who, though they may lack the ample physical powers of Master
Gibbons, will possess, in full measure, his strong will and just
judgment, his admirable perspicuity and precision as an instructor, his
wide range of information, and, above all, his ardent, inspiring,
never-flagging love for his work. The influence of even a dozen such
teachers, scattered throughout Kansas, would amply repay the State for
all the expenditures it has ever made in behalf of this Institution, and
spread far and wide the reputation of the Normal as a deserving and
useful training school for educators.