sman,
but which, when it does come, is worth more in the way of real
inspiration than the loudest applause of the crowd.

Upon the whole, I believe that the outlook in this direction is
encouraging. While the teacher may miss in her institutes and in the
summer school that sort of encouragement, she is, I believe, finding it
in larger and larger measure in the local teachers' meetings and in her
consultations with her supervisors. And when all has been said, that is
the place from which she should look for inspiration. The teachers'
meeting must be the nursery of professional ideals. It must be a place
where the real first-hand workers in education get that sanity of
outlook, that professional point of view, which shall fortify them
effectively against the rising tide of unprofessional interference and
dictation which, as I have tried to indicate, constitutes the most
serious menace to our educational welfare.

And it is in the encouragement of this craft spirit, in this lifting of
the teacher's calling to the plane of craft consciousness, it is in this
that the supervisor must, I believe, find the true and lasting reward
for his work. It is through this factor that he can, just now, work the
greatest good for the schools that he supervises and the community that
he serves. The most effective way to reach his pupils is through the
medium of their teachers, and he can help these pupils in no better way
than to give their teachers a justifiable pride in the work that they
are doing through his own recognition of its worth and its value,
through his own respect for the significance of the lessons that
experience teaches them, through his own suggestive help in making that
experience profitable and suggestive. And just at the present moment, he
can make no better start than by assuring them of the truth that Emerson
expresses when he defines the true scholar as the man who remains firm
in his belief that a popgun is only a popgun although the ancient and
honored of earth may solemnly affirm it to be the crack of doom.

~VI~

EDUCATION AND UTILITY[11]

I

I wish to discuss with you some phases of the problem that is perhaps
foremost in the minds of the teaching public to-day: the problem,
namely, of making education bear more directly and more effectively upon
the work of practical, everyday life. I have no doubt that some of you
feel, when this problem is suggested, very much as I felt when I first
suggested