IV

But what has all this to do with school supervision? As I view it, the

supervisor of schools as the overseer and director of the educational

process, is just now confronted with two great problems. The first of

these is to keep a clear head in the present muddled condition of

educational theory. From the very fact of his position, the supervisor

must be a leader, whether he will or not. It is a maxim of our

profession that the principal is the school. In our city systems the

supervising principal is given almost absolute authority over the school

of which he has charge. In him is vested the ultimate responsibility for

instruction, for discipline, for the care and condition of the material

property. He may be a despot if he wishes, benevolent or otherwise.

With this power goes a corresponding opportunity. His school can stand

for something,--perhaps for something new and strange which will bring

him into the limelight to-day, no matter what its character; perhaps for

something solid and enduring, something that will last long after his

own name has been forgotten. The temptation was never so strong as it is

to-day for the supervisor to seek the former kind of glory. The need was

never more acute than it is to-day for the supervisor who is content

with the impersonal glory of the latter type.

I admit that it is a somewhat thankless task to do things in a

straightforward, effective way, without fuss or feathers, and I suppose

that the applause of the gallery may be easily mistaken for the applause

of the pit. But nevertheless the seeker for notoriety is doing the cause

of education a vast amount of harm. I know a principal who won ephemeral

fame by introducing into his school a form of the Japanese jiu-jitsu

physical exercises. When I visited that school, I was led to believe

that jiu-jitsu would be the salvation of the American people. Whole

classes of girls and boys were marched to the large basement to be put

through their paces for the delectation of visitors. The newspapers took

it up and heralded it as another indication that the formalism of the

public school was gradually breaking down. Visitors came by the

hundreds, and my friend basked in the limelight of public adulation

while his colleagues turned green with envy and set themselves to

devising some means for turning attention in their direction.

And yet, there are some principals who move on in the even tenor of

their ways, year after year, while all these currents and

countercurrents are seething and eddying around them. They hold fast to

that which they know is good until that which they know is better can be

found. They believe in the things that they do, so the chances are

greatly increased that they will do them well. They refuse to be bullied

or sneered at or laughed out of court because they do not take up with

every fancy that catches the popular mind. They have their own

professional standards as to what constitutes competent

schoolmanship,--their own standards gained from their own specialized

experience. And somehow I cannot help thinking that just now that is the

type of supervisor that we need and the type that ought to be

encouraged. If I were talking to Chinese teachers, I might preach

another sort of gospel, but American education to-day needs less

turmoil, less distraction, fewer sweeping changes. It needs to settle

itself, and look around, and find out where it is and what it is trying

to do. And it needs, above all, to rise to a consciousness of itself as

an institution manned by intelligent individuals who are perfectly

competent themselves to set up craft standard and ideals.

IV

[Transcriber's note: This is a typographical error in

the original, and should read "V"]

But in whatever way the supervisor may utilize the opportunity that his

position presents, his second great problem will come up for solution.

The supervisor is the captain of the teaching corps. Directly under his

control are the mainsprings of the school's life and activity,--the

classroom teachers. It is coming to be a maxim in the city systems that

the supervisor has not only the power to mold the school to the form of

his own ideals, but that he can, if he is skillful, turn weak teachers

into strong teachers and make out of most unpromising material, an

efficient, homogeneous school staff. I believe that this is coming to be

considered the prime criterion of effective school supervision,--not

what skill the supervisor may show in testing results, or in keeping his

pupils up to a given standard, or in choosing his teachers skillfully,

but rather the success with which he is able to take the teaching

material that is at his hand, and train it into efficiency.

A former Commissioner of Education for one of our new insular

possessions once told me that he had come to divide supervisors into two

classes,--(1) those who knew good teaching when they saw it, and (2)

those who could make poor teachers into good teachers. Of these two

types, he said, the latter were infinitely more valuable to pioneer work

in education than the former, and he named two or three city systems

from which he had selected the supervisors who could do this sort of

thing,--for there is no limit to this process of training, and the

superintendent who can train supervisors is just as important as the

supervisor who can train teachers.

It would take a volume adequately to treat the various problems that

this conception of the supervisor's function involves. I can do no more

at present than indicate what seems to me the most pressing present need

in this direction. I have found that sometimes the supervisors who

insist most strenuously that their teachers secure the coöperation of

their pupils are among the very last to secure for themselves the

coöperation of their teachers.

And to this important end, it seems to me that we have an important

suggestion in the present condition of the classroom teacher as I have

attempted to describe it. As a type, the classroom teacher needs just

now some adequate appreciation and recognition of the work that she is

doing. If the lay public is unable adequately to judge the teacher's

work, there is all the more reason that she should look to her

supervisor for that recognition of technical skill, for that

commendation of good work, which can come only from a fellow-craftsman,

but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of real

inspiration than the loudest applause of the crowd.

Upon the whole, I believe that the outlook in this direction is

encouraging. While the teacher may miss in her institutes and in the

summer school that sort of encouragement, she is, I believe, finding it

in larger and larger measure in the local teachers' meetings and in her

consultations with her supervisors. And when all has been said, that is

the place from which she should look for inspiration. The teachers'

meeting must be the nursery of professional ideals. It must be a place

where the real first-hand workers in education get that sanity of

outlook, that professional point of view, which shall fortify them

effectively against the rising tide of unprofessional interference and

dictation which, as I have tried to indicate, constitutes the most

serious menace to our educational welfare.

And it is in the encouragement of this craft spirit, in this lifting of

the teacher's calling to the plane of craft consciousness, it is in this

that the supervisor must, I believe, find the true and lasting reward

for his work. It is through this factor that he can, just now, work the

greatest good for the schools that he supervises and the community that

he serves. The most effective way to reach his pupils is through the

medium of their teachers, and he can help these pupils in no better way

than to give their teachers a justifiable pride in the work that they

are doing through his own recognition of its worth and its value,

through his own respect for the significance of the lessons that

experience teaches them, through his own suggestive help in making that

experience profitable and suggestive. And just at the present moment, he

can make no better start than by assuring them of the truth that Emerson

expresses when he defines the true scholar as the man who remains firm

in his belief that a popgun is only a popgun although the ancient and

honored of earth may solemnly affirm it to be the crack of doom.

~VI~