IV

And yet this vow of fidelity and devotion to the spirit of schoolcraft

would be an empty form without the two complementary vows that give it

worth and meaning. These are the vow of poverty and the vow of service.

It is through these that the true craft spirit must find its most

vigorous expression and its only justification. The very corner stone of

schoolcraft is service, and one fundamental lesson that the tyro in

schoolcraft must learn, especially in this materialistic age, is that

the value of service is not to be measured in dollars and cents. In this

respect, teaching resembles art, music, literature, discovery,

invention, and pure science; for, if all the workers in all of these

branches of human activity got together and demanded of the world the

real fruits of their self-sacrifice and labor,--if they demanded all the

riches and comforts and amenities of life that have flowed directly or

indirectly from their efforts,--there would be little left for the rest

of mankind. Each of these activities is represented by a craft spirit

that recognizes this great truth. The artist or the scientist who has an

itching palm, who prostitutes his craft for the sake of worldly gain, is

quickly relegated to the oblivion that he deserves. He loses caste, and

the caste of craft is more precious to your true craftsman than all the

gold of the modern Midas.

You may think that this is all very well to talk about, but that it

bears little agreement to the real conditions. Let me tell you that you

are mistaken. Go ask Röntgen why he did not keep the X-rays a secret to

be exploited for his own personal gain. Ask the shade of the great

Helmholtz why he did not patent the ophthalmoscope. Go to the University

of Wisconsin and ask Professor Babcock why he gave to the world without

money and without price the Babcock test--an invention which is

estimated to mean more than one million dollars every year to the

farmers and dairymen of that state alone. Ask the men on the geological

survey who laid bare the great gold deposits of Alaska why they did not

leave a thankless and ill-paid service to acquire the wealth that lay at

their feet. Because commercialized ideals govern the world that we know,

we think that all men's eyes are jaundiced, and that all men's vision is

circumscribed by the milled rim of the almighty dollar. But we are

sadly, miserably mistaken.

Do you think that these ideals of service from which every taint of

self-seeking and commercialism have been eliminated--do you think that

these are mere figments of the impractical imagination? Go ask Perry

Holden out in Iowa. Go ask Luther Burbank out in California. Go to any

agricultural college in this broad land and ask the scientists who are

doing more than all other forces combined to increase the wealth of the

people. Go to the scientific departments at Washington where men of

genius are toiling for a pittance. Ask them how much of the wealth for

which they are responsible they propose to put into their own pockets.

What will be their answer? They will tell you that all they ask is a

living wage, a chance to work, and the just recognition of their

services by those who know and appreciate and understand.

But let me hasten to add that these men claim no especial merit for

their altruism and unselfishness. They do not pose before the world as

philanthropists. They do not strut about and preen themselves as who

would say: "See what a noble man am I! See how I sacrifice myself for

the welfare of society!" The attitude of cant and pose is entirely alien

to the spirit of true service. Their delight is in doing, in serving, in

producing. But beyond this, they have the faults and frailties of their

kind,--save one,--the sin of covetousness. And again, all that they ask

of the world is a living wage, and the privilege to serve.

And that is all that the true craftsman in education asks. The man or

woman with the itching palm has no place in the schoolroom,--no place in

any craft whose keynote is service. It is true that the teacher does not

receive to-day, in all parts of our country, a living wage; and it is

equally true that society at large is the greatest sufferer because of

its penurious policy in this regard. I should applaud and support every

movement that has for its purpose the raising of teachers' salaries to

the level of those paid in other branches of professional service.

Society should do this for its own benefit and in its own defense, not

as a matter of charity to the men and women who, among all public

servants, should be the last to be accused of feeding gratuitously at

the public crib. I should approve all honest efforts of school men and

school women toward this much-desired end. But whenever men and women

enter schoolcraft because of the material rewards that it offers, the

virtue will have gone out of our calling,--just as the virtue went out

of the Church when, during the Middle Ages, the Church attracted men,

not because of the opportunities that it offered for social service, but

because of the opportunities that it offered for the acquisition of

wealth and temporal power,--just as the virtue has gone out of certain

other once-noble professions that have commercialized their standards

and tarnished their ideals.

This is not to say that one condemns the man who devotes his life to the

accumulation of property. The tremendous strides that our country has

made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type

of genius. Creative genius must always compel our admiration and our

respect. It may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or

pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope;

or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of

gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. Genius is

pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere we of the

common clay must recognize its worth.

The grave defect in our American life is not that we are hero

worshipers, but rather that we worship but one type of hero; we

recognize but one type of achievement; we see but one sort of genius.

For two generations our youth have been led to believe that there is

only one ambition that is worth while,--the ambition of property.

Success at any price is the ideal that has been held up before our boys

and girls. And to-day we are reaping the rewards of this distorted and

unjust view of life.

I recently met a man who had lived for some years in the neighborhood of

St. Paul and Minneapolis,--a section that is peopled, as you know, very

largely by Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants. This man told

me that he had been particularly impressed by the high idealism of the

Norwegian people. His business brought him in contact with Norwegian

immigrants in what are called the lower walks of life,--with workingmen

and servant girls,--and he made it a point to ask each of these young

men and young women the same question. "Tell me," he would say, "who are

the great men of your country? Who are the men toward whom the youth of

your land are led to look for inspiration? Who are the men whom your

boys are led to imitate and emulate and admire?" And he said that he

almost always received the same answer to this question: the great names

of the Norwegian nation that had been burned upon the minds even of

these workingmen and servant girls were just four in number: Ole Bull,

Björnson, Ibsen, Nansen. Over and over again he asked that same

question; over and over again he received the same answer: Ole Bull,

Björnson, Ibsen, Nansen. A great musician, a great novelist, a great

dramatist, a great scientist.

And I conjectured as I heard of this incident, What would be the answer

if the youth of our land were asked that question: "Who are the great

men of _your_ country? What type of achievement have you been led to

imitate and emulate and admire?" How many of our boys and girls have

even heard of our great men in the world of culture,--unless, indeed,

such men lived a half century ago and have got into the school readers

by this time? How many of our boys and girls have ever heard of

MacDowell, or James, or Whistler, or Sargent?

I have said that the teacher must take the vow of service. What does

this imply except that the opportunity for service, the privilege of

serving, should be the opportunity that one seeks, and that the

achievements toward which one aspires should be the achievements of

serving? The keynote of service lies in self-sacrifice,--in

self-forgetfulness, rather,--in merging one's own life in the lives of

others. The attitude of the true teacher in this respect is very similar

to the attitude of the true parent. In so far as the parent feels

himself responsible for the character of his children, in so far as he

holds himself culpable for their shortcomings and instrumental in

shaping their virtues, he loses himself in his children. What we term

parental affection is, I believe, in part an outgrowth of this feeling

of responsibility. The situation is precisely the same with the

teacher. It is when the teacher begins to feel himself responsible for

the growth and development of his pupils that he begins to find himself

in the work of teaching. It is then that the effective devotion to his

pupils has its birth. The affection that comes prior to this is, I

think, very likely to be of the sentimental and transitory sort.

In education, as in life, we play altogether too carelessly with the

word "love." The test of true devotion is self-forgetfulness. Until the

teacher reaches that point, he is conscious of two distinct elements in

his work,--himself and his pupils. When that time comes, his own _ego_

drops from view, and he lives in and for his pupils. The young teacher's

tendency is always to ask himself, "Do my pupils like me?" Let me say

that this is beside the question. It is not, from his standpoint, a

matter of the pupils liking their teacher, but of the teacher liking his

pupils. That, I take it, must be constantly the point of view. If you

ask the other question first, you will be tempted to gain your end by

means that are almost certain to prove fatal,--to bribe and pet and

cajole and flatter, to resort to the dangerous expedient of playing to

the gallery; but the liking that you get in this way is not worth the

price that you pay for it. I should caution young teachers against the

short-sighted educational theories that are in the air to-day, and that

definitely recommend this attitude. They may sound sweet, but they are

soft and sticky in practice. Better be guided by instinct than by

"half-baked" theory. I have no disposition to criticize the attempts

that have been made to rationalize educational practice, but a great

deal of contemporary theory starts at the wrong end. It has failed to go

to the sources of actual experience for its data. I know a father and

mother who have brought up ten children successfully, and I may say that

you could learn more about managing boys and girls from observing their

methods than from a half-dozen prominent books on educational theory

that I could name.

And so I repeat that the true test of the teacher's fidelity to this vow

of service is the degree in which he loses himself in his pupils,--the

degree in which he lives and toils and sacrifices for them just for the

pure joy that it brings him. Once you have tasted this joy, no carping

sneer of the cynic can cause you to lose faith in your calling. Material

rewards sink into insignificance. You no longer work with your eyes upon

the clock. The hours are all too short for the work that you would do.

You are as light-hearted and as happy as a child,--for you have lost

yourself to find yourself, and you have found yourself to lose yourself.

V

And the final vow that I would have these graduates take is the vow of

idealism,--the pledge of fidelity and devotion to certain fundamental

principles of life which it is the business of education carefully to

cherish and nourish and transmit untarnished to each succeeding

generation. These but formulate in another way what the vows that I have

already discussed mean by implication. One is the ideal of social

service, upon which education must, in the last analysis, rest its case.

The second is the ideal of science,--the pledge of devotion to that

persistent unwearying search after truth, of loyalty to the great

principles of unbiased observation and unprejudiced experiment, of

willingness to accept the truth and be governed by it, no matter how

disagreeable it may be, no matter how roughly it may trample down our

pet doctrines and our preconceived theories. The nineteenth century left

us a glorious heritage in the great discoveries and inventions that

science has established. These must not be lost to posterity; but far

better lose them than lose the spirit of free inquiry, the spirit of

untrammeled investigation, the noble devotion to truth for its own sake

that made these discoveries and inventions possible.

It is these ideals that education must perpetuate, and if education is

successfully to perpetuate them, the teacher must himself be filled with

a spirit of devotion to the things that they represent. Science has

triumphed over superstition and fraud and error. It is the teacher's

duty to see to it that this triumph is permanent, that mankind does not

again fall back into the black pit of ignorance and superstition.

And so it is the teacher's province to hold aloft the torch, to stand

against the materialistic tendencies that would reduce all human

standards to the common denominator of the dollar, to insist at all

times and at all places that this nation of ours was founded upon

idealism, and that, whatever may be the prevailing tendencies of the

time, its children shall still learn to live "among the sunlit peaks."

And if the teacher is imbued with this idealism, although his work may

take him very close to Mother Earth, he may still lift his head above

the fog and look the morning sun squarely in the face.