II - THREE LAMPS OF TEACHING

To one that is born with a talent for the profession the greater lamps of teaching come unsought. They will have to seek them for long who are not thus born. However, every willing teacher can perhaps be a good teacher as well.

If it is bad to stuff a child with food it is worse to stuff him with easy rudiments mere information or even with learning. The mechanism of physical well being will not long bear the strain of excessive food. Likewise the heaping of information on the child mind must retard its growth and diminish its strength.

He teaches trash who stuffs his pupils but it is a sad temptation and few really overcome it. Many do not know that there it is to battle. With a sepcies of enthusiasm that lends them an air of rightousness, they pile inert matter upon the tender minds because the idea has not simply occurred to them that it may not be quite the right thing to do. It is a cunning enemy that takes us captive without out knowledge.

If teaching is to be steered clear of this danger teachers must be wise. Wisdom is the first great lamp of teaching. It may seem at the first blush that if this is the thing we want it may be next to impossible to find it. The quantity of wisdom that lurks in the unfaqshioned immensity of the universe is ever so small. The wise among the race of men are but a mere handful and their services are needed elsewhere than in the classroom. It may, therefore, be feared that the profession of teaching may have to be content with something less than the illumination of wisdom's lamp. But although wisdom is like a needle in a pottle of hay, every one comes into the world with the instinct of wisdom. And if this instinct frequently languishes in the course of growth, we must quarrel with ourselves not with our Creator. It is the prime duty of the teacher to nourish this inborn instinct of his so that he might be able to show the way it might be nourished to those who come to sit at his feet. The teacher must be wish before anything else. He cannot enter the enchanted realm of children's thoughts without first getting hold of the lamp of wisdom.

If the teacher is not wise, the class is either crushed under his dominance or abandoned to the confusions of an over free pline. Both are best feared enemies of education. He that is not wise is often invicible unwise, and although the effects of the teahcer's imperfections may not be so immediately visible as those of some other people's more prominentl,y placed in society, they touch human welfare, by no means less. The teacher must cultivate his instinct of wisdom and grow it into a shining lamp if teaching is to bear good fruit.

Wisdom rises from the experiences of the physical and mental senses of man. Wisdom is the child of abundant life. It is not to be gained from the ordinary renunciations, from the ordinary inhibitions that we sometimes like to impose on ourselves. The narrow outlooks the curious obsessions the obstinate obliquities that we often come across at every turn spring from restricted experience from limited life. The teacher whose job is to tell others the way to live must have a view of things embracing the whole of life in most of its aspects. He must have a sense of the diverse experiences that fall commonly to the lot of men. It is from such sense that wisdom rises.

But the teacher is most commonly the one who has often the least of this sense. He most commonly puts on the man of retired life, shuns observation and is even loth to observe. He often lives as it were in a kind of backwater way from the living currents fed by the eternal and everyday forces of life. He does not usually know that abnndance of life which comes from broad sympathies and wakeful impulses. He usually lives an exclusive life, and often cherishes in a manner of speaking a communalism of intellect which is not always intellectual. It must seem stange if one thinks about it that the work of preparing youngsters for life is entrusted to elders whose knowledge of it is often so restricted.

It is a false theory that would have the teacher live unmingled with society unmingled with the great inoessant vibrations of life. He has greater need than others to know these fully because his lot is cast in an atmosphere where these virations are mostly absent, because he is expected to inroduce the new arrival to these very vibrations. The sectarianism to which the teacher either affectionately clings or is idifferently relegated, is markedly injurious to education. The teaching profession has got to life where the great mass of men live, aspire and do or suffer and die and recover from there that neglected old lamp which is the lamp of wisdom.

We can experience most aspects and attitudes of life without having to go through them ourselves. Imagination, the flying ship, can bring us the prizes of venturesome cruises. Through it we can see such facts of life as are hidden from the physical eye either by wide distances or by blind walls. And if imagination is not enough and if opportunities are none too many to enter into the thick of that throbbing conflict unities, which we call life, there are those who having shot their glances to the outermost frontiers of life's dominion have preserved for us in all its freshness the very experiences we seek. It is by living as simple as life as possible, by thinking, as audaciously as possible, by listening as eagerly as possible to the words of the immortal souls who surely knew life that culture comes that character puts forth its finest shoots that we are enabled to live in the golden felicities of wisdom.

The lamp of wisdom without which teaching must largely remain dim may fill us with a certain gloom because it must seem to lie somewhat out of our reach. It is the inherent nature of good things to cover themselves with rough garbs. If the profession can convince itself of the use of this lamp it can get it also. There is not a school teacher but can live more fully think more darlingly and read more eagerly. There is not one but can aspire to a larger share of the great heritage of knowledge of that wondrous book of experience whose alphabets have been fashioned by time. There is really not one that does not keep alive in some hidden recess of his mind a desire for culture for wisdom and for that power of moving minds which culture and wisdom give. It is in fact for the lamp of wisdom that we are stretching out our bands; but if we would have it, we must go nearer it before we begin streching out our hands.

Why should we light this lamp of wisdom in the temple of learning? Why should the teachers of the very young be so wise, so rich in the possession of knowledge and of the varied experiences of life? They cannot use these high things in their classes for the young.

Why then should they be asked to soar so high and ride the clouds? We have already said that stuffing a young mind with information is worse than stuffing a young child with food. It is the mother that has little to give that gives superfluous and unassimilable food to her child. It is the teacher that has little to give that suppresses the young mind with excessive stuff. Knowledge that has stuck roots in a man's being cannot be given away life a handful of gold. But it is from such knowledge of the realities of things that true teaching like a gragrance framed in a flow of bracing air arises. It is such knowledge mellowed by reflection that can impart to the young those impulses of growth and development which, in common speech we call education. It is in the digressive powers of deep knowledge that true instruction lies. When the teacher lacks the strength and inspiration of living experience he must needs burden himself with endless bites of unorganized information from day to day and posture himself pretentiously before his class. It is thus that opportunities are squandered and teaching becomes an approved tyranny to harass the young.

We must then wind up somewhat in the manner we began. The teacher has need of the mild-hued light that falls from wisdom the first great lamp of teaching. And he will not come by it unless he consents to become an ardent student of life unless he continually pushes forward the borders of his interests. He is the interpreter of the eternal ever changing panorama of life to the young and on his acceptation of the meanings of things largely depends their future. He must eschew nothing from his intellectual domain not even the controversies of politics, which some would from excessive solicitude from the young like the teacher not to touch. He must read and imbibe observe and understand meditate and grow wise. It is the passions that surround him and attain that calm strength which is no less useful in the class room than in the chambers of kings and of rulers of men. In the eye of society today the teacher may be an insignificant figure but he cannot get a larger space in it by simply asking for more. He must rise to his true dignity reach his true stature first hold uprightly the great lamp of wisdom in his hand and then perhaps he will have little need to measure his proportions in the eyes of others. If he achieves the wisdom we have been contemplating if he seizes that shining lamp he will have acquired his place in the sun and in the great scheme of common things.

The genuine lamp of love is truly difficult to come by Snivelling sentimentalisms go about shouting love's speech. It is easy to import some of these spurious things into teaching and fancy that the lamp of love has been brought and kindled. Love is not weakness but the active expression of those high resolves that dwell deep in the consciences of men. Love is not the quavering cry of emotional moods but the conquering voice of good purposes. Love pre-supposes understanding. The teacher must get to know his pupils to love them. If he does not do this he cannot love them either in the only effective way his love of his pupils can function that is in the way of making them better of helping them to see themselves. Every teacher of sorts usually indulges in the love jargon and practises some imitiation of love. Soch love is often even worse than hatred. It only injures the ideal of education. It only helps to make the young slipshod which is about the greatest danger than can overtake them. There is nothing more easy than to insinuate injurious notions into the young in the early blush of promise. Adolescence and the years approaches it are tossed by many errant gales and we cannot trust maudling sentiment to steer young boys and girls safely through them. If love is apt to make the teacher weak instead of giving him additional strength and reinforced resolve it were best to keep that lamp unlighted. The weaker variety of love is fraught with danger to its object. A school treated with such love becomes a clamorous assembly of educational ineptitudes.

Real love seldom speaks. At any rate, it acts more than it speaks. It does not preach nor does it profess itself. It is often even stern and punishes with seeming severity. Love shows determination, courage and strength first last and all the time. It is the fear of love that can most effectively pull up the origin of most school offences and can put in the seed of brave and noble actions in its place. Where true love rules offences seldom get a chance of life. It is the false love infirm of purpose and shrinking from trouble flying from fear that truckles and sneaks and leads children along altogether wrong and dangerous tracks. When therefore the teacher sets alight the lamp of love he has need to make sure that it is the right lamp that he thus honours.

The third lamp without which the teacher can hardly attain his true stature is the knurled lamp of work. There is a lurking danger in the teaching profession, and it is that it provides opportunities to those who like to avoid work without appearing to do so. It sometimes gives an air of virtue to what is not really different from vegetation. It sometimes covers private indolence with a look of disinterested public service. Every great ideal which the high-souled among man kind has given us is, in some degree, hospitable to spirits that nurse a kind of secret animosity to it. Thus, in the teaching profession, which calls for the utmost powers of the toiling man, are often found individuals with a certain aversion to work, with a certain hankering after idle safety. This is perhaps more or less true of every co-operative effort touching society at large, but the teaching profession is, perhaps, in a special degree, kind to `back-sliders' seeking the time of their lives.

Teachers must be workers in the highest sense, because the happy useful life, to which it is their duty to take the rising generations, is itself purely and completely a product of work. It is the worker who is happy and for whom the world has use. It is only the worker who can inspire the young with the spirit of work. Therefore, the teacher who shuns work is like an idle camp-follower hanging on the army of progress. He is not help but impediment.

Then again work is the great purifier of life, the destroyer of passions, the bringer of inward peace. If the schools of to-day are not free from the jealousies and envies of low natures, it is because there are evading elements of idleness in them which stealthily rouse men to evil little hostilities. Each idle teacher must sooner or later shape into a `sect' and look upon his brothers with suspicious eye. If a school contains some teachers of this type, it must be said to live in a calamity.

In teaching, perfection is not easily attainable. The tree of knowledge has many branches and it grows new ones day by day. The ancient tree with these ever-increasing branches beckons to him, and the more the branches that he gets hold of, the better his teaching would be. It is the full mind that easily enables others to fill their minds themselves. The teacher must really read, voraciously, catch the echoes of the human drama as it unfolds itself from day to day and the whispers of the storied past from which he can draw so much of intellectual riches.

It is not to the askers things are given but to the workers. If, therefore, the teacher wants to teach well, he must work. If he wants to make himself happy with himself, he must, again work. If he wants a larger share of the good things of the world, then again he must work. Let the old rough-sharpen lamp be taken and lighted for, in its light, is the teacher's best sustenance.

Wisdom, love and work are the primary lamps of teaching. Their blended lights must illuminate education if it is ever to rise from the mechanical transformation which it has undergone in modern times.

To the small statured, code-bound, examination-controlled and little-esteemed teachers of to-day, it might seem as if the ideal has been pitched too high. But teachers must first recognise that their teaching has, in the main, proved to be a failure, and, may we not say, that they themselves have proved to be `failures'. From just enough labours and pious expectations from modest desire and secluded life, a melancholy dissatisfaction and bitter discouragement have sprung up, especially in India. To aspire high is perhaps to go a long way from safe but high aspirations, and set determinations are a pre-condition of progress, rich in gifts and generous of good. The settled gloom cannot be dispersed without renewed hopes, new stimulations and fresh efforts. Teaching, in its general sense, is quickening, kindling, courage-giving, inspiring. We cannot dole out mental food and expect good results. `Rationed' education must lead to a knowledge worse than ignorance, to a sense of knowledge that intensifies the mad moments to which mankind has always been subject. The conscience of the time demands broader outlook, greater courage and deeper understanding of human relationships. Unless the teachers make themselves overflow with these conceptions it is difficult to see how education could be rendered in a manner worthy of its name.