# The Teacher's Practical Philosophy

THE
TEACHER'S PRACTICAL
PHILOSOPHY
A TREATISE OF EDUCATION AS
A SPECIES OF CONDUCT
(Fifteen Lectures)
BY
GEORGE TRUMBULL LADD, LL.D.
Author of "Elements of Physiological Psychology,"
"Psychology Descriptive and Explanatory,"
"Philosophy of Conduct," etc., etc.
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
NEW YORK AND LONDON
1911
Copyright, 1911, by
FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY
[Printed in the United States of America]
Published September, 1911
PREFACE
The views set forth in this volume are essentially the same as those given to many thousands of teachers and others interested in education, in Japan, Korea, and Hawaii, during the Academic year of 1906-07. Among the Japanese, especially, the interest in the moral aspects and values of the system of public education was at that time intense and pervasive. It embraced not only the teachers as a class and the officers of the Government in the Department of Education, but also the leaders in the army and navy, in business circles, and in civil and social affairs. As instances of this interest I might cite the remark of a vet- eran of the Russo-Japanese war who declared that his principal anxiety in training the nearly thirty thousand recruits under his charge was to give them the right spiritual education; and also the fact that I was repeatedly urged into giving additional courses of lectures on the ethics of business in the Government Commercial Colleges, where ethics is made a required subject of study through one or two years of the course.
In this country there has been slowly gathering the conviction that our system of education, from the public schools of primary grade to the ​Graduate and Professional Schools connected with our Universities, has not been productive, as it should be, of the right sort of men and women to conduct safely and wisely and righteously the affairs of Church and State. And there has been of late, and there still is, much discussion — some of it faultfinding and criminatory — over questions of causes and remedies, and over the general problem of whether our recent movements have been pro- gressive or retrograde. Into this discussion it is not the purpose of this book to enter. Its pur- pose is, the rather, to emphasize the personal and moral elements as those which, broadly understood, must be relied upon to secure the needed improve- ments, if improvements are needed and are to be secured at all. The author believes that the lack of discipline, through moral and religious motives and in accordance with moral and religious ideals, in the home-life, in school and in college, and in society at large, is the prime source of all our national evils so far as they are connected with the educative processes as now in vogue. He also be- lieves that these evils are very deep and large at the present time, and will be most difficult to cure or even greatly to abate under existing conditions such as those with which the individual teacher can not readily cope. But whether his belief and feel- ings of foreboding connected with it are justified or not, it can scarcely fail to come true that any ​earnest and fairly intelligent appeal for added attention to the personal elements and the moral forces and ideals involved in the very process of education will meet with response, equally earnest and intelligent, from numbers of the teachers in our day and land. And if even a few of those belonging to the class of workmen, to whom the author has been proud and glad to belong, are helped in any way by his words, he will be much more than amply rewarded. In bringing these thoughts before those inter- ested in education in this country, the form of spoken lectures has been preserved as best adapted for the familiar style in which they were originally presented. But, of course, in preparing them for an audience in the United States, not only much of the details, and of the illustrative mate- rial, but no inconsiderable part of more important formal matters, has been changed. George Trumbull Ladd.
CONTENTS
Part I. THE FUNCTION OF THE TEACHER
Part II THE EQUIPMENT OF THE TEACHER
Part III THE CHIEF IDEALS OF THE TEACHER
Part IV THE TEACHER'S RELATION TO SOCIETY AND THE STATE
This work was published before January 1, 1929, and is in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago.
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