Shackled Youth - 1921 Author:Edward Yeomans Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill A TEACHER OF HISTORY In writing on these school affairs I am entirely conscious of certain facts: first, that distinguished ability is always rare; sec... more »ond, that the character of the teaching suggested requires a very special kind of teacher — a teacher already endowed with many gifts that have been denied to most people, and therefore to most teachers. And this also is true — that those who have not this endowment can never get it. You can graft a good apple on a poor apple tree, but you cannot graft a good apple on even a good walnut tree or cherry tree. In other words, the species cannot be changed. Operations in normal schools or teachers' colleges will not change the species to which a person belongs. And the grave and overshadowing consideration about a teacher is whether he or she belongs to the teaching species, or is only trying to imitate the habits of that species and thereby draw a salary. The rules of the teaching game are fairly well made out, and are being daily elaborated and extended by pedagogues, by psychologists, by medical experts; and all for good where the intelligence is sound and disinterested. But it will always be true that the imponderable influences of individuals of the actual teaching species will outweigh any set of rules and definitions and methods of teaching. What is this supreme symbol that educational establishments like to use on their stationery? It is one hand holding a torch and another hand open to receive it. If it means anything, it means that something illuminative is passing, or can be passed, from one human being to another — from teacher to scholar. And so it can be. " Wisdom cannot be passed from one having it to another not having it"; but this strange subtle undercurrent, this wind of the spirit which bloweth ...« less