Articles

THE CHILDREN - OUR STOCK IN TRADE, OUR ARMY OF POTENTIAL CITIZENS

Our school children with their potentialities for creative endeavor are after all our greatest national asset for on them depends the development of our national resources. Training this army of potential citizens is truly a formidable task to be shared alike by home, school, and community.

Each new generation of children has been called the equivalent of an invasion of savages who must become civilized through the educative process. The children are essentially raw material to be converted by education into a finished product. Like unimproved property, their full value cannot be realized until their traits and capacities are developed. Education is the process that transforms the illiterate, untrained child into a competent, responsible adult with skills and powers that fit him for social participation.

Hence, the school owes every pupil an honest and scientific assessment of his abilities, interests, and expectations. The school should recognize and encourage in children a variety of abilities - verbal, manual, and social. The school should be a place where all kinds of pupils -- book-minded and hand-minded, sociable and shy -- are rewarded for doing well the desirable things they can do best. The school should help pupils to do better all their tasks of growing up.

Toward these goals a primary and a basic need is for teachers to have the kind of knowledge about children which comes from the study of individual pupils as well as the reading of books about human development. Perhaps teachers need to take their pupils as their very own.

The writer noted with interest the genuine concern and new-found interest of her teacher-daughter in borrowing from him a professional book on human development. She came across a portion describing in detail the general and specific characteristics of a particular stage of child development which coincided with the present period of her own son's development. She was struck with surprise on how close if not how identical to reality the description applied to her son.

To know and understand thoroughly our pupils could be the key to all successful and effective teaching. Secondary only to this is the need to study the social environment -- the local community -- which help shape their pupils.

This is the first and basic implication of the realization that our children are our greatest resource -- to study, to understand, and to know them so thoroughly and well that we may know what is best for them and in what manner we may best educate them to their full capacities and potentialities.

OF TEACHERS, TEACHING AND EDUCATION

It is easy and admirable to strive for the ideal but I believe it is more heroic to reconcile things with reality without necessarily surrendering ideals. With such a down-to-earth policy in one's daily rough and tumble of observing, guiding, dealing, even to a certain extent, associating with all kinds of teachers and their teaching as they are and not as they should be, one gets to know many things and many truths about them, about teaching, and about education. Quite in vain I've been seeking a formula for these two considerations. Teachers, it seems, can never be made nor found by prescription, for teaching does not seem to be a matter of specified qualities. Perhaps what we need is a useful set of qualities taken as a whole, To seek, a formula for qualities is to deny the potential abilities of many teachers who combine some of the desirable attributes in different proportions to form composite whole ideal for the position to be filled. We have also confirmed that qualities maybe satisfactory by formula but are sorry failures in application and vice versa. I would, therefore, propose that the most irrefutable rule for qualifications and qualities of teachers is that there shall be no formula for them.

Have we not also observed that, generally teachers who like to teach usually resent systems of training and various artificial forms of certification? With an intelligent teacher, training seems subordinate. Many such teachers who may be unknown in a popular sense may be excellent teachers where their pupils forget them but underatand their sub]ects.

And what about the, teacher who is sometimes handicapped by the knowledge of subject matter but who has, for sheer love of people and children, a knack of isolating only the significant and interpreting the same in relation to and in the light of the past, present, and future experience of his potential wards? Is this not the teacher of whom will be said by bis former pupils in later years, "The big thing was that we have been with him and he with us: that it was his influence that we were inspired to rise beyond our circumstances and live nobler lives; and te would that he were still with us and we with him!"

And if such brand of teachers also walk in a good number among our present crop of teachers as our own observations often confirm, will it not quite suffice to ask one-self when an eager applicant comes up, "Does this person understand and love people and children enough to teach?" For is this not the moral obligation of teaching: to guide and not to steer, to help but not to push, to study but not to indoctrinate, to analyze but not to conclude, to teach but never preach.