Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/26

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EDUCATION AS THE

agent, but that when we are teaching him in class we must deal with him as an inferior, the recipient of our thoughts or knowledge with no independent rights. This objection is true in a limited sense, or rather it represents a subordinate aspect of the truth. What I take to be our true attitude as teachers may be described as follows: We feel ourselves when teaching to be in the presence of certain facts, be they facts of grammar or moral truths, and these facts claim recognition from us and our boys alike. We by hypothesis know the facts better than our boys, and our business is therefore to help them to share our knowledge, or, if possible, to improve upon it. It is not our knowledge as such that we pass on. We have the right to teach only in so far as we are the representatives of the realities around us, the organs of the truth of things through whom this truth is made the property of other minds. We are, therefore, not infallible authorities, but co-workers with our boys in the appreciation of reality. But if this is a true description of our attitude as teachers, clearly it involves the recognition of the boys' personalities; we teach them as individuals like ourselves, members of the same world, with the right, so far as they are capable of it, to an independent assimilation of the truth. No doubt this statement must be modified in the case of teachers of quite young children, but in principle it applies to teachers of every kind.

Again, if we hold fast to the conception of our boys as persons, we can explain the influence exerted by the school's corporate life. If school life does a boy any good