“
This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends
to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and
secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and
exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened
by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what
it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation
of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the
good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity
is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher,
is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated,
parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to
absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that
society and enhance the individual's prospects of success.
Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and
disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual
genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt
feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held
up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls
upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting
and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which
the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators
falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance
in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed
in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian
of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all
persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible
for the educator to please the entire society even if he
remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic
and rapidly changing era like the present.
Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that
to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers
mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to
them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents
may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the
first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles
and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all
the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the
world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction
that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his
studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be
able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home
and a bad neighborhood.
It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call
the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so
necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing,
sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next
generation.
”
”