Craftsmanship in Teaching | Page 2

cynic pleases to call the illusions
of his youth. And so much do I desire to impress these novitiates into our calling with the
necessity for preserving their ideals that I shall ask them this evening to consider with me
some things which would, I fear, strike the cynic as most illusionary and impractical. The
initiation ceremonies that admitted the young man to the privileges and duties of
knighthood included the taking of certain vows, the making of certain pledges of

devotion and fidelity to the fundamental principles for which chivalry stood. And I
should like this evening to imagine that these graduates are undergoing an analogous
initiation into the privileges and duties of schoolcraft, and that these vows which I shall
enumerate, embody some of the ideals that govern the work of that craft.
II
And the first of these vows I shall call, for want of a better term, the vow of
"artistry,"--the pledge that the initiate takes to do the work that his hand finds to do in the
best possible manner, without reference to the effort that it may cost or to the reward that
it may or may not bring.
I call this the vow of artistry because it represents the essential attitude of the artist
toward his work. The cynic tells us that ideals are illusions of youth, and yet, the other
day I saw expressed in a middle-aged working-man a type of idealism that is not at all
uncommon in this world. He was a house painter; his task was simply the prosaic job of
painting a door; and yet, from the pains which he took with that work, an observer would
have concluded that it was, to the painter, the most important task in the world. And that,
after all, is the true test of craft artistry: to the true craftsman the work that he is doing
must be the most important thing that can be done. One of the best teachers that I know is
that kind of a craftsman in education. A student was once sent to observe his work. He
was giving a lesson upon the "attribute complement" to an eighth-grade grammar class. I
asked the student afterward what she had got from her visit. "Why," she replied, "that
man taught as if the very greatest achievement in life would be to get his pupils to
understand the attribute complement,--and when he had finished, they did understand it."
In a narrower sense, this vow of artistry carries with it an appreciation of the value of
technique. From the very fact of their normal school training, these graduates already
possess a certain measure of skill, a certain mastery of the technique of their craft. This
initial mastery has been gained in actual contact with the problems of school work in
their practice teaching. They have learned some of the rudiments; they have met and
mastered some of the rougher, cruder difficulties. The finer skill, the delicate and
intangible points of technique, they must acquire, as all beginners must acquire them,
through the strenuous processes of self-discipline in the actual work of the years that are
to come. This is a process that takes time, energy, constant and persistent application. All
that this school or any school can do for its students in this respect is to start them upon
the right track in the acquisition of skill. But do not make the mistake of assuming that
this is a small and unimportant matter. If this school did nothing more than this, it would
still repay tenfold the cost of its establishment and maintenance. Three fourths of the
failures in a world that sometimes seems full of failures are due to nothing more nor less
than a wrong start. In spite of the growth of professional training for teachers within the
past fifty years, many of our lower schools are still filled with raw recruits, fresh from the
high schools and even from the grades, who must learn every practical lesson of teaching
through the medium of their own mistakes. Even if this were all, the process would
involve a tremendous and uncalled-for waste. But this is not all; for, out of this multitude
of untrained teachers, only a small proportion ever recognize the mistakes that they make
and try to correct them.

To you who are beginning the work of life, the mastery of technique may seem a
comparatively unimportant matter. You recognize its necessity, of course, but you think
of it as something of a mechanical nature,--an integral part of the day's work, but
uninviting in itself,--something to be reduced as rapidly as possible to the plane of
automatism and dismissed from the mind. I believe that you will outgrow this notion. As
you go on with your work, as you