Basic HTML Version
Preparation
179
They need to be awakened to their responsibilities and possibilities.
Few children have been trained properly at home. Some have been
household pets. Their whole training has been superficial. Allowed
to follow inclination and to shun responsibility, they lack stability,
perseverance, and self-denial. Often they regard all discipline as
unnecessary. Others have been censured and discouraged, arbitrary
restraint and harshness having developed in them obstinacy and
defiance. If these deformed characters are to be reshaped, the work
must, in most cases, be done by teachers.
To accomplish this successfully, they must have the sympathy
and insight that will enable them to trace to their cause the faults
and errors of their students. They also must have the tact, patience,
and firmness that will enable them to impart to each the needed
help. The vacillating and ease loving will need such encouragement
and assistance to stimulate exertion. The discouraged will need
sympathy and appreciation to create confidence and thus inspire
effort.
Teachers often fail of coming sufficiently into social relation with
their students. They manifest too little sympathy and tenderness, and
too much of the dignity of the stern judge. While teachers must be
firm and decided, they should not be exacting or dictatorial. Being
harsh and censorious, standing aloof from their pupils or treating
them indifferently, will close avenues to influence them for good.
Under no circumstances should teachers manifest partiality. To
favor the bright, attractive pupil, and be critical, impatient, or un-
sympathetic toward those who most need encouragement and help,
is to reveal a total misconception of the teacher’s work. It is in deal-
ing with faulty, trying ones that character is tested and it is proved
[174]
whether teachers are really qualified for their work.
Great is the responsibility of those who take upon themselves
the guidance of a human soul. True fathers and mothers count theirs
a trust from which they can never be wholly released. Boys and
girls from their earliest to their latest days feel the power of that tie
which binds them to the parents’ heart. The acts, the words, the very
looks of the parents, continue to mold children for good or for evil.
Teachers share this responsibility. They need constantly to realize its
sacredness and to keep in view the purpose of their work. They are
not merely to accomplish the daily tasks, to please their employers,