their duties
as teachers, and that little rested, and still in large measure rests,
satisfied with the assumption that by some unexplained and it may be
inexplicable transfer of competence a man closeted and intensively
trained to search for truth in books and laboratories emerges after
three or more years well equipped for divining and developing the
mental processes and interests of freshmen.

Once fairly examined, this assumption lacks plausibility. "We consider
the Ph.D. a scholar's degree and not a teacher's degree," says the
dean of one of our leading graduate schools, and yet preparation for
this scholar's degree has been and is practically the only formal
preparation open to college teachers in this country.

=Equipment needed by college teachers=

It goes without saying that scholarship is one of the basal needs of
college teachers, a scholarship that keeps alive, and is human and
contagious. But it should be remembered that there are several kinds
of scholarship, and it is pertinent to ask what kind college teachers
need. Should they, for instance, model themselves on the broad
shrewdness and alluring scholarly mellowness of James Russell Lowell
or on the untiring encyclopedic exactitude and minuteness of Von
Helmholz? Or is there an even better ideal or ideals _for them_? I
would suggest that the teacher's knowledge of his subject should,
essentially, be of a kind that would keep him in intellectual sympathy
with the undeveloped minds of his students, and this means chiefly two
things. The more points of contact of his knowledge with the past
experience and future plans of his students the teacher has at his
command, the better teacher he will be; for he can use them, not as
resting places, but as points of departure for the development of
phases of his subject outside the students' experience. And secondly,
the teacher should see his subject entire, with its parts, as rich in
number and detail as possible, each in its proper place within the
whole. For the students' knowledge of the subject is vague and
general; he is trying to place it, and many other new things, in some
kind of a coherent setting; in fact, he is in college largely for the
very purpose of working out some sort of rudimentary scheme of things.
The duty of the college teacher is to help him in this quite as much
as to teach him a particular subject. And, besides, each particular
subject can be best taught if advantage is taken of every op