portunity
to attach it to the only knowledge of it the student has, vague and
general though it be. Highly specialized and dehumanized knowledge is
not as useful for the college teacher as broad and vital knowledge,
which is, of course, much harder to acquire. Even in the case of
"disciplinary" subjects, there is no gain in concealing the human
bearings. The teacher should be trained to seize opportunities in the
classroom and out to help the student, through his subject and his
maturer life experience, to see the bearing of what he is learning on
the life about him and on the life he is to lead. This is the college
teacher's richest opportunity and the opportunity that tries him most
shrewdly. If he is to rise to it, his entire equipment, native and
acquired, must come into play.

What else does the teacher need? So that he may select the best and
continue to improve them, he needs a knowledge of the different
methods and aims in the teaching of his subject, and, so far as
possible, of the results attained by each. Too much of college
teaching is a blind groping, chartless and without compass. Instead of
expecting each inexperienced teacher to start afresh, he should set
out armed with the epitomized and digested teaching experience of
those that have gone before him.

Finally, the teacher needs a sympathetic and expert understanding of
the thinking and feeling of college students. This should be his
controlling interest. The teacher, his interest in his subject, and in
all else except the student, should be instrumental, not final. Every
available strand of continuity between studenthood and teacherhood
should thereafter be preserved.

This need suggests a capital weakness of the training for the
doctorate in philosophy as a preparation for teaching. As it proceeds
it shifts the interest from undergraduate student to scholarly
specialty, and steadily snaps the ties that bound the budding
investigator to his college days. It also explains the greatness of
some college teachers and personalities before the eighties. Their
degrees in arts were their licenses to teach. They suffered no drastic
loss of touch with undergraduate thought and life. In the early years
of their teaching this sympathetic and kindly understanding was fresh
and strong, and they used it in their classroom and wove it into the
tissue of their tutorial activities. A discerning observer of college
faculties can even today discover in them men and w