To form a good teacher, should be added to
this, sincere modesty combined with firmness, liberal views, with a
power and will to liberalize them still further, a good method, and
habits of exact and thorough investigation. In the two last requisites
women are generally deficient, but there are now many shining examples
to prove that if they are immethodical and superficial as teachers,
it is because it is the custom so to teach them, and that when aware
of these faults, they can and will correct them.
The profession is of itself an excellent one for the improvement of
the teacher during that interim between youth and maturity when the
mind needs testing, tempering, and to review and rearrange the
knowledge it has acquired. The natural method of doing this for one's
self, is to attempt teaching others; those years also are the best of
the practical teacher. The teacher should be near the pupil, both in
years and feelings; no oracle, but the eldest brother or sister of the
pupil. More experience and years form the lecturer and director of
studies, but injure the powers as to familiar teaching.
These are just the years of leisure in the lives even of those women
who are to enter the domestic sphere, and this calling most of all
compatible with a constant progress as to qualifications for that.
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