The San Francisco call. [volume] (San Francisco [Calif.]) 1895-1913, 1895-12-25
HIGHEREDUCATION
There Are Many Good Reasons
Why the People at Large
Should Support High
Schools and Colleges.
By MARTIN KELLOGG,
President Of the University OF California.

The fundamental Importance of the
common schools attaches to them great
interest, but it should not cloud the public
mind as to the higher branches.
There are many good reasons why the
people at large should support high school
and college courses. Such support brings
an ample return in the value to the COM
munity of more influential and useful
lives. Only by public support can all have
an equal chance; only thus can the unpol-
ished jewels in poor and industrious fami-
lies be brought to the light and made to
shine in their fit setting OF public promi-
nence and responsibility.
But my present purpose is not general
review OF such reasons, but the considera-
ton of a single point, viz: the absolute
need of the higher education for the ef-
fciency of the lower, There is vital con-
nection between them which often fails to
be recognized. There is long chain of
educational progress, every link of which
is fastened to another. They stand the
strain together. The reason is not far to
seek. Teachers on the lower Levels must
themselves come from the higher levels.
We may start with this statement, to
which all will assent-the teacher must
know more than the pupil. But that
is not enough. The teacher should know
a great deal more than the pupil. This
has not always been acknowledged. In
old-fashioned ungraded schools a young
teacher was often employed whose intel
lectual resources were hardly above those
of the more advanced scholars. The
daughter of an influential man found favor
with the School Committee when she was
just out of the rule of three and the pars-
ing of easy blank verse; very blank it
sometimes was, as in the dreary Course of
Time" A brisk young man, who worked
through the summer on his fathers farm,
sought an engagement for few winter
months, and had to establish an intellec-
tual as well as an official authority over
grown-up boys who were well nigh his
equals. Native force often carried such
teachers through and gave them certain
positive success. But the results of their
teaching were too often very meager.
We have begun to do better now. In
our well-graded schools the smallest chill
dren, we say, must have well-equipped
teachers. They might learn much from
their older brothers and sisters in the
middle grades of the grammar school,
But we insist on something far beyond
that; we require for teaching the lowest
grades grammar-school diploma, and in
addition a course in the normal or the
high school. 1t is seen that all grammar
school teachers, from the lowest grades
up, must have very much more knowledge
of their subjects than their pupils have
In all the subjects which are taught, even
in the lowest grades, the teacher should be
possessed of a thorough knowledge. So
long as the teacher is cropping her way,
uncertain OF her goal, she is unfit to be the
guide of even the youngest children.
Notice, for example, what seems to be the
simple matter of the first reading lessons.
The child will take for a model the
teachers style of reading; her utterance
of sounds and words, her accent, her en-
phasis, her management of pauses, her
soulless or soulful rendering of writer's
thought. If there is defect in those
points the defect will stay by the child
under other teachers and for many long
years.
In arithmetic much time may be lost by
the teachers failure to know the subject
thoroughly, not merely in applying rules
to particular problems, but in understand
ing the reasons of the rules and in explain
ing the reasons to the pupils. 1t takes a
thorough knowledge of subject to give
the teacher herself a clear idea of it.
Without clear ideas of it, she can never
simplify it so as to make it clear to the
pupil. Silas Wright said to his college
chum: 81 have found out what it means
when one says he knows thing, but can
not tell it. The trouble is, he doesn't
know it." a teacher with imperfect
knowledge must have ideas that are vague
and hazy to the pupil. Small children
need the very clearest and simplest ex-
plantations This is a sufficient ground
for the provision in our school law
which favors the assignment of the best
teachers to the lowest school grades.
1t says Cart. XII, 1881: "In all schools
having more than two teachers begin
ners shall be taught by teachers who
have had at least two years experience,
or by normal school graduates; and in
cities such teachers shall rank, in point
of salary, with those of the assistant teach
ers in the highest grade in the grammar
schools" That provision is often inoper-
atl'e, oeCduse ie Y teaCnclo are as mucn In
terested in the younger children as in the
older; they are not enthusiastic kinder
teners. But there is in the law sound
philosophy.
AS we proceed to the upper grades of the
grammar school, the case becomes still
palmer. Here are children with a fair
stock of information and an appreciate
degree of culture. Many of them are taking