Craftsmanship in Teaching | Page 6

service. Their delight is in doing, in serving, in producing. But beyond this, they have the faults and frailties of their kind,--save one,--the sin of covetousness. And again, all that they ask of the world is a living wage, and the privilege to serve.
And that is all that the true craftsman in education asks. The man or woman with the itching palm has no place in the schoolroom,--no place in any craft whose keynote is service. It is true that the teacher does not receive to-day, in all parts of our country, a living wage; and it is equally true that society at large is the greatest sufferer because of its penurious policy in this regard. I should applaud and support every movement that has for its purpose the raising of teachers' salaries to the level of those paid in other branches of professional service. Society should do this for its own benefit and in its own defense, not as a matter of charity to the men and women who, among all public servants, should be the last to be accused of feeding gratuitously at the public crib. I should approve all honest efforts of school men and school women toward this much-desired end. But whenever men and women enter schoolcraft because of the material rewards that it offers, the virtue will have gone out of our calling,--just as the virtue went out of the Church when, during the Middle Ages, the Church attracted men, not because of the opportunities that it offered for social service, but because of the opportunities that it offered for the acquisition of wealth and temporal power,--just as the virtue has gone out of certain other once-noble professions that have commercialized their standards and tarnished their ideals.
This is not to say that one condemns the man who devotes his life to the accumulation of property. The tremendous strides that our country has made in material civilization have been conditioned in part by this type of genius. Creative genius must always compel our admiration and our respect. It may create a world epic, a matchless symphony of tones or pigments, a scientific theory of tremendous grasp and limitless scope; or it may create a vast industrial system, a commercial enterprise of gigantic proportions, a powerful organization of capital. Genius is pretty much the same wherever we find it, and everywhere we of the common clay must recognize its worth.
The grave defect in our American life is not that we are hero worshipers, but rather that we worship but one type of hero; we recognize but one type of achievement; we see but one sort of genius. For two generations our youth have been led to believe that there is only one ambition that is worth while,--the ambition of property. Success at any price is the ideal that has been held up before our boys and girls. And to-day we are reaping the rewards of this distorted and unjust view of life.
I recently met a man who had lived for some years in the neighborhood of St. Paul and Minneapolis,--a section that is peopled, as you know, very largely by Scandinavian immigrants and their descendants. This man told me that he had been particularly impressed by the high idealism of the Norwegian people. His business brought him in contact with Norwegian immigrants in what are called the lower walks of life,--with workingmen and servant girls,--and he made it a point to ask each of these young men and young women the same question. "Tell me," he would say, "who are the great men of your country? Who are the men toward whom the youth of your land are led to look for inspiration? Who are the men whom your boys are led to imitate and emulate and admire?" And he said that he almost always received the same answer to this question: the great names of the Norwegian nation that had been burned upon the minds even of these workingmen and servant girls were just four in number: Ole Bull, Bj?rnson, Ibsen, Nansen. Over and over again he asked that same question; over and over again he received the same answer: Ole Bull, Bj?rnson, Ibsen, Nansen. A great musician, a great novelist, a great dramatist, a great scientist.
And I conjectured as I heard of this incident, What would be the answer if the youth of our land were asked that question: "Who are the great men of your country? What type of achievement have you been led to imitate and emulate and admire?" How many of our boys and girls have even heard of our great men in the world of culture,--unless, indeed, such men lived a half century ago and have got into the school readers by this time? How many of our boys and girls