Chapter XIV.
Scholarship and Teaching.
The aim proposed by the Ratio Studiorum is a great and noble one, which tasks the undivided energy of able and experienced men. Does the Society fit the teachers for this work? This is a most important question. However good and excellent a system may be, it is of little avail if the teachers know not how to apply it, or if they apply it badly. Professor Münsterberg rightly insists on the truth that all effective school reform must start with a reform of teachers. "Just as it has been said that war needs three things, money, money, and again money, so it can be said with much greater truth that education needs, not forces and buildings, not pedagogy and demonstrations, but only men, men, and again men,—without forbidding that some, not too many of them, shall be women. The right kind of men is what the schools need; they have the wrong kind. They need teachers whose interest in the subject would banish all drudgery, and they have teachers whose pitiable unpreparedness makes the class work either so superficial that the pupils do not learn anything, or, if it is taken seriously, so dry and empty that it is a vexation for children and teachers alike. To produce anything equivalent to the teaching staff from whose guidance I benefited in my boyhood, no one ought to be allowed to teach in a grammar school who has not passed through a college or a good normal school; no one ought to teach
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