due to genius,--unless we accept George
Eliot's definition of genius as an infinite capacity for receiving
discipline. That teacher's success, by her own statement, is due to a
mastery of technique, gained through successive years of growth checked
by a rigid responsibility for results. She has found out by repeated
trial how to do her work in the best way; she has discovered the
attitude toward her pupils that will get the best work from them,--the
clearest methods of presenting subject matter; the most effective ways
in which to drill; how to use text-books and make study periods issue in
something besides mischief; and, more than all else, how to do these
things without losing sight of the true end of education. Very
frequently I have taken visiting school men to see this teacher's work.
Invariably after leaving her room they have turned to me with such
expressions as these: "A born teacher!" "What interest!" "What a
personality!" "What a voice!"--everything, in fact, except this,--which
would have been the truth: "What a tribute to years of effort and
struggle and self-discipline!"

I have a theory which I have never exploited very seriously, but I will
give it to you for what it is worth. It is this: elementary education
especially needs a literary interpretation. It needs a literary artist
who will portray to the public in the form of fiction the real life of
the elementary school,--who will idealize the technique of teaching as
Kipling idealized the technique of the marine engineer, as Balzac
idealized the technique of the journalist, as Du Maurier and a hundred
other novelists have idealized the technique of the artist. We need some
one to exploit our shop-talk on the reading public, and to show up our
work as you and I know it, not as you and I have been told by laymen
that it ought to be,--a literature of the elementary school with the
cant and the platitudes and the goody-goodyism left out, and in their
place something of the virility, of the serious study, of the manful
effort to solve difficult problems, of the real and vital achievements
that are characteristic of thousands of elementary schools throughout
the country to-day.

At first you will be fascinated by the novelty of your work. But that
soon passes away. Then comes the struggle,--then comes the period, be it
long or short, when you will work with your eyes upon the clock, when
you will count the weeks, the days, the hours, the minutes that lie
b