The world being censorious it is only natural that my professional superiors should be somewhat unwilling to concede my sufficiency in teaching. I am inclined to suspect that I can teach in a manner of speaking. In these days when men and women are free to follow their own counsels such knowledge is not unoften the final proof of truth. It is this consideration that has prompted me to tell how I have been learning to teach.
When, about seventeen years ago, I was first given the post of a teacher in a High School I had certain notions about certain things but I remember that teaching was not one of them. And I am positive that if I was a born teacher I had exhausted the heredity in the early days of my childhood when it was my chief pastime to instruct the pillars in the portico of my house in the letters of my mother tongue. These pupils used to delight the juvenile school master heart by the dumb docility with which they receive the recurring discipline of the cane and the shrill ping of an elongated alphabet and I have an idea that they must be to day if they still exist at all the wisest things in the village where I was born and from where I was banished by a gang of circumstances before I had entered upon my teens. Thus when I became a teacher in later life I was devoid of any instructional fervour in my soul and I am free to confess that I was not troubled by this birreness because when I became one I was more concerned to press a salary into my pocket than to teach anybody anything. This professional position of mine persisted for several years before one fine day I decided that I had learnt to teach! The salary no longer thrills me but an hour of good teaching brings lingering joy and I should not leave teaching today without a feeling of pang.
A seldom studied many books on teaching to learn teaching and in the Training College where I was sent to learn it, I learnt a good many things including the obvious intelligence that at teacher's training college is often not a likely mentor to teach the art of teaching. In fact, I could not to any appreciable extent learn teaching from book or college. I learnt it mainly from my pupils. I taught them the school subjects and they taught me how to teach. I learn it from them still.
I remember the first day of my teaching life. There was a class of about forty little boys with hungry eyes and active tongues. The eyes swallowed me while I struggled the best I could to prevent the ceaseless shower from the tongues. It however, continued with undiminished vigour through the whole period while my agitated manhood strove to get the better of it by alternate harsh and oleaginous injunctions of wisdom. As the battle was raging I became conscious of an ominous figure watching the scene from an evanescent point somewhere in the neighbourhood and it was for me the most decisive bit of last straw that ever broke an honest camel's back. If the school bell by a timely intervention of an over ruling Providence had not taken care to strike at this time putting a peremptory end to the period a panic should have utterly seized me making me fly from the victorious little boys. It was this unforgettable bell that made it possible for me to remain in the teaching profession all these years and too to get to like it so that as I have said I can never think of leaving it without deeply scratching my soul with regrets.
Need I say that I taught nothing during my maiden lesson but all the same the little boys learnt enough and what was more important I soon discovered that I too had learnt some essential things. The boys learnt that if they put their powers together they could summon a storm to beat me to excited foam and I learnt that for me to live it with necessary to preserve at all costs my integrity before them. The problem that vexed me for many days was how I was to achieve this integrity. The Headmaster told me that I must maintain discipline apparently withholding the secret devices by which one could do it.
The next day when I went to the class I was amazed to see the forty little boys determined to teach me a few simple lessons before they let me teach them. One said, "Sir, please do not move about so, but keep standing in the same place." Another infant spirit said, "Please sir, do not run with the words but read slowly." A third boy in a shrill voice cried out, "We like you, sir, you are active and free, please sir, go steady." I listened intently, trying to look as if I did not at all hear the words. On this day I learnt what is perhaps more important than anything else to a young teacher that although the teacher is there to teach the boys the boys are not there solely to learn but also to teach the teacher a few things which are so vital that nobody but themselves can possibly teach him them. I wrote the inference on my heart that day and it perhaps remain there still.
The instinctive counsel that comes from the boys is above price. The younger are the pupils the purer is their instinct and the higher is the advice. Instinct, the elder brother of reason, guides better than thought and is often seen to hold the keys of achievement where reason thought vanquished continues to argue still. At all times unsuppressed little children can tell their needs better than their teachers and this unerring genius of theirs if gently harnessed should prove the greatest contribution of all to the work of the teacher and the development of the school.
It was not long before I learnt another equally important lesson from the same source, not perhaps exactly the same source but the same source at a different point. The civilized man cannot trust his instinct with as much confidence as the savage. There are elements in civilization that go against the grain of Nature tending to disinherit the races that come under its away from her wisdoms. There are elements in educational organizations that foster false tendencies. Enough has been said both dispersively and collectively about them in these pages and no more than a few concluding remarks are perhaps now called for. Examinations as Sir Michael Sadler has put it, are pushing education further and further along the wrong road. Since education comprises all the aspects of life and examinations even at their best can only stand at life's threshold, wherever examinations get the upperhand of education the essential things in education gradually if not all at once go by the board. Self-effort the soul of education is banished and coaching is proclaimed the kind. Pupils no longer learn but stuff themselves with such odds and ends as would enable them to put in a sleek appearance before the new king. Teachers no longer practise the right educative processes but spend themselves in procuring these odds and ends for their pupils. Mathematics is mercilessly reduced to its carefully fed up and trained in a sort of racing stud. Science is boiled down to a concentrated culture of formulas. Language is asked to live in a motley array of questions and answers and grammar the grey-haired tutor of speech appears as a bag of dour or droll tricks. In fact, there remains little of education but both suffer a sea change into something ugly and strange.
In an examination ridden atmosphere boys and girls swiftly survive their instinctive yearnings after their true needs and acquire the emollient inability to tell a tox in from loathsome fare. They catch a hectic hunger and keep exposing their mouths for their teachers to pour down hint and information by the pailful so that they are rendered well sodden before the examination arrived. They crave for notes, summaries questions and answers and all the rest of the supposed short cuts to examination passing. Books, however good are thrown into the background and the arrays of active note books jostling the pupils from their seats tell their own story. The shutters are banged down upon the mind and the ceaseless scraping of pencils on innocent paper goes onward the livelong day. The school submerged by such a strange tide becomes the despair of the good teacher. He must obey the tide, sell himself to it or earn the opprobrium of the pupils even more of the powers that be who are more often than not inclined to judge a teacher day by day. He is not wanted and if he went others would not be miserable.
I knew a school which was utterly in a grip of this tide, where from the lowest to the highest class coaching of a particularly ill-bred type had come to fascinate the teachers and the pupils alike, where the anatomy of every poem however simple or beautiful was ruthlessly accomplished even in the classes of the youngest children. It was true that the Headmaster was capable of many lucid intervals. His doubts could not however, always bring themselves off in the midst of the furious office hours of the examinational instruction which was so ardently filling all space in the institution. I am ashamed to confess that although for a long time I was somewhat conscious of a struggle on my part against this onslaught of mock education I often hoisted the white flag to the epidemic deity in the school. Even then, I was no persona grata with the pupils and at one time they rejected me immortalizing a brother in arms. The good Headmaster suddenly developing some of his saving doubts hastened to my rescue and propped me up. He spoke to me on the glories of calf-love and the angilic qualities of attachment to the swinging cradle and the feeding bottle. But these words of consolation were hardly consoling enough to me with a situation on my back. I had not confronted an affair of the kind and this circumstance did not help to assuage me. What the students wanted was meanings of words less correctly than they are given in the dictionary, meanings of sentences in endless vocabulary, vivisection of poems to be immediately followed by their being pilloried in paraphase summaries of stories the expansion of similes into all of their implications of comparison the exploration of all possible questions with exhaustive answers and all the other things that constitute the impressive apparatus of education when education is not in it. They would have all these in black and white and will not be denied. In brief, they would compel me to inflate their exterior memories and leave their inner minds alone.
Thraldom is better than the travail of a thought.
Nonetheless I had to face this music. The Headmaster assured me that I had not known my own powers of conciliation and adjustment. I do not remember what effect this assurance had upon me. But a powerful instinct suddenly overwhelmed all my strength and without knowing what I did I worked up an adequate fury to appear emphatic before the critics. I can recall what I said on the occasion.
"My dear little boys, You have found me insufficient and I am sure I do not want to quarrel with the judgement. You think I cannot distinguish a noun from a verb or put a number of words together. You think I cannot understand a poem and you naturally wonder how I could teach one I am no good. Since you have found out what I am let me tell you what I will not do. I will not pluck the soul from a poem for anybody's sake. I will not give you notes summaries and things since I do not know how to prepare them. I will not give you the meanings of words since I do not know them. It will be your business to look them up in the dictionary. I will teach you nothing and to make the matter worse, I will put you questions. You will have to learn for yourselves. There is plenty of food in the world to go round but many millions of people have to live without enough. Your fate is to be mentally starved although heaps of excellent nourishment lie round. I am sorry I cannot bear you in palanquins to the examination hall. You will have to use your own legs. I will not coddle you but must leave you in hunger and thirst. You will find new and new things as years come and go one of these things will perhaps be that life on his earth is not always easy. We all will have to put up with many things we do not quite like. So then put up with me until you meet better luck."
As I look at the speech now I almost fancy it was but complaint and anger. But its effect was far other than I dreamed. All on a sudden the atmosphere cleared. The faces fell and a good many eyes visibly came near moisture. I had no more trouble with the class and I was for the time being saved the fate of selling myself away to the prevailing dispensation.
The incident taught me a supreme lesson. I must not trim sails to every passing breeze. Examinations or no examinations, I must strive to fly the true educational standard. I should think any teacher must. He may have to fight hard to do that and sometimes he may even be humiliated. But it is exactly for this reason that he must fly it. From battles won the lost came whispered hopes. I learnt this great lesson also from my pupils.
If I can draw any inference from my experience as a teacher for seventeen years what I would first like to say is that stimulating the students to learn provides a more certain way for them to pass examinations than the heavy and almost savage art of stuffing them. Learning is better than mugging-up; teaching is better than coaching. And too, both are so very much easier. It is not perhaps altogether impossible to resist the bad influence of examinations. The student that has tasted the joy of learning and thinking cannot be eager to be crammed. The teacher that has learnt to teach will refuse to coach. Learning and teaching are both difficult to begin and the temptation of turn away is strong. Learning is self-teaching. Teaching is guiding and encouraging self-teaching. Coaching and cramming are evidences of the triumph of the temptation that dogs the beginners in every noble field. The dangers of coaching and cramming are not lessened by the circumstance that they are contagious. If they once get at a class the whole school is imperilled.
I have learnt much from the Headmasters under whom I worked from time to time. It was fortunate that my first Headmaster in spite of all our amicable differences was a gifted man with a genuine love of knowledge which he always attempted to share with others. In teaching he was inimitably digressive humourous, allusive and anecdotal. He could tell a story as naturally as a nightingale can sing and like the nightingale that sings he could not help telling his pupils onw now and then. He gave me a little of his passion for digression humour and story. It served me for a long time but now I find that a storm is blowing and that I must tend it carefully if it is not to be extinguished. Even a story does not always come off nowadays except with very young children, and I know that the happiest thing to do is to teach the little ones leaving the hobbedehoys to repeat.
"Tel me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dreem!"
"Do not tell me in verses suggestive of sadness and gloom that life is as unreal and useless as a dream, which is empty because what we experience in dreams never comes to pass in real life."
or
the various points of resemblance between human hearts and muffled drums till the hair is turned grey. That is what one does in the opposite house while my heart like an infuriated drum tearing its muffle asunder is beating violently at what he does while my pencil sets down his strident industry. That refuses to repeats has not even the modest vertue of being correct refuses to allay the heart's agitation. But I say to myself that a light is the more useful when a drak storm rages over the land. In this faith I must tend my little lamp and the fraction of passion that my first Headmaster gave me from his large stores. That boy still goes on and I cannot now resist pity since he hardly seems to know what he does.
My second Headmaster was also lucky for me. I might have learnt nothing from him but he taught me a lesson or two. He was what they call a disciplinarian and a stickler for the pronunciation of English and the posture of the teacher in the class room and in other places generally. I found him before long hiding a large enough heart at more than the usual distance from his few words and seeing if not searching eyes. He used to be everywhere in the school and his steps were astonishingly apt at velvet pows.
I liked to keep away from him openly at any rate at the beginning of my service under him and he apparently hated me. There was a period in my teaching life when I hovered between teaching and coaching as between life and death. This Headmaster was a hater of coaching, first of all. One day I was telling a story to a class of young boys when the silent chief managed to erect himself behind me. I did not know he was standing there and still less what mouths he was making at me. In the evening he was exhausting his meagre conversation with some of my colleagues when I happened to pass by. He called me. "You were telling a story to those boys this morning" and turning to the others he said, "Something like that would be better than stuffing." It was a tremendous slice of flattery for me from a man of his silence and significant eyes and I passionately fell in love with him for it. There was also a sequel in the shape of several heavy volumes to read. It must have been his maxim that the teacher must cram himself with all knowledge to kindle a love of it in his pupils. He frankly liked his assistants to read ten books to every lesson they taught. His few words were employed in a crusade against stuffing more than in any other cause. He was brave enough to burn the class notes if need were. He has always been brave as one silent men are. "The more one knows the less one teachers and the less one teachers the better one teachers, the greater one moves. Gather much knowledge to give little, to give it well, to give it alive and kicking, to make it stir the mind." This was his meaning if not his meaning if not his words. He was a paradoxical man and since he knew so much and appeared to know so little in his precious little speech, which however never failed to impress the hearer profoundly I was gradually able to give allegiance to his ways and I have had no reason to regret what I did. I know today that I had better know everything to teach anything and this impossible desire never hindered me.
But it is mostly from my own pupils that I have been striving to learn to teach them from their spoken and unspoken counsels from their true instincts, false desires and absurd cravings from their impertinences and disobediences, from their adolescent agitations, from their hostilities and affections. They are the living book of wisdom and theirs will be the last word in the judgement of their teacher. They will say mingled things about him as long as he remains imperfect and as this highest earthly quality is not to be expunged from any profession they will continue to trill in their shrill voices the same ancient tune of praise and blame. I overtook a set of high stepping boys by an oratorical display but I was at the time internally quaking in sight of my own imperfections. It is easy to put the saddle on the wrong horse or to expatiate on the mote in another's eye. The boys may often go wrong logically but they are always right, must be ought to be considered, right by their betters in the schools in which they learn. One may punish them for being wrong but one must obey them for being right. One must obey them always. It is only then that their teachers can learn from them and it is only them that hold the most helpful aid and advice for their teachers. The class room is the true college of teaching and from teaching and seeing and hearing comes the teacher. And fortunately for me I know I have not come yet, even better than my boys, more fortunately.