THE LETTER KILLETH

The meeting of the Harvard Teachers' Association is a noble attempt to educate the educators. Their discussions will reopen an old question. Granting that teaching methods are not at present ideal, how much can they be improved by papers and discussions on theoretical subjects?

Great emphasis has been placed in this country on the theory of education, on normal schools, and on graduate schools of education. Such theoretical studies of teaching have had a positive value. Educators have thus experimented with and initiated progressive schools. Normal school work, moreover, has given uninsured and mediocre instructors the minimum essentials of teaching and has given the good instructor assistance in redirecting his efforts.

Teaching, however, is an intensely personal matter; it depends on the personality of the instructor and on the depth of his appreciation of his subject. No amount of theorizing can make a good teacher of a man not adapted for his job, while an excessive amount of it may dampen the originality and enthusiasm of a person with a genuine interest in his material. Furthermore, attention to the method, at the expense of the substance of teaching is much like giving courses in expression, as do some mid-western colleges, to students who have nothing to express. True education is an art more than a science. And as an art, although it has definite rules, its meaning and spirit depend on the inspiration of the teacher. Only in rare cases will a teacher gain new inspirational power from the abstract and statistical analysis of theoretical principles.