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Bulletin of The State Teachers College 

Kirksville, Missouri

Vol. XXIII.     DECEMBER, 1923     No. 10

Published by the State Teachers College. Issued Monthly.

Entered as second class mail matter April 29, 1915, at the post office at Kirksville, Missouri, 
under the Act of Congress of August 24, 1912

Accepted for mailing at special rate of postage provided for in section 1103, Act of October 3, 1917, 
authorized July 26, 1919.

ELEMENTS HOSTILE TO THE TEACHERS COLLEGE 
Address by PRESIDENT JOHN R. KIRK, at
A Centennial Celebration of Teacher Training in the United States, Terre Haute, Indiana, Dec. 7, 1923

Teachers colleges are of many types. They vary from the miniature junior college department in middle 
sized cities to the vast aggregation of forces that we call teachers college of Columbia University.

The outstanding type is the state teachers college, product of rapid action during one decade. It is 
unique in educational history. It is largely spontaneous. It is unlooked for outcome in contest between 
its friends and its foes. Its predecessor was the old type normal school, result of brief and hurried 
observations in Germany by Horace Mann eighty odd years ago.

But hostilities are not suspended. In some states the hostile elements are still able to retard and 
obstruct the evolution of the two year normal school into the efficient senior college for teachers.

There was a very virile and active university president. He was hostile to the normal schools of his 
state. In the heat of combat he voiced the fundamental fact. He said: "The preparation of a professional 
teacher except in connection with a college of liberal arts is unthinkable." But he built wiser than he 
knew. He had in mind an all-inclusive university, itself the controlling center, and a dozen distributed 
colleges and feeders. The centralized power of his ideal university was to determine all policies, 
distribute all compensations and control all investments. It was what he said that took effect and not 
what he sought. His utterance became a slogan for the teachers college. His dictum is accepted. 
Preparation of professional teachers except in connection with a college of liberal arts is unthinkable. 
Nobody now desires to think the unthinkable.

Speaking more definitely, the organized teachers college has its basic idea in sound scholarship as the 
foundation for the functioning of studies in education. It is therefore a combination of college of 
liberal arts and college of education closely interrelated.

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But there is a third integral factor in the teachers college. It has varying names and many forms. Its 
highest type is probably the demonstration school in form of several hundred children typifying village 
school or consolidated school with kindergarten, elementary school, junior high school and senior high 
school, whereby the best procedures in public school education may be discovered and put into operation 
by college bred class room teachers on duty in each room all the hours of every day-the purpose being 
to furnish the best possible laboratory of observation and study for all intending teachers.

The state teachers college prepares teachers for the public schools from kindergarten to senior high 
school inclusive. It provides for natural differentiation of talents as talents develop. It undertakes 
to bring up the elementary school teacher and the high school teacher side by side in equal social 
status and equal professional expectancy-their later studies varying as widely as their individual 
needs, tastes and capabilities.

The hostile elements would prematurely, arbitrarily and conventionally differentiate the candidates for 
the teaching profession by compelling them as entering freshmen to choose between elementary school 
teaching and high school teaching before their capabilities are known by themselves or their teachers.

But premature differentiation is the beginning of caste. It sends the intending elementary teachers 
into the two year normal school to commingle by themselves; it forces the filling of their minds unduly 
with dogmas of pedagogics; it gets them hastily installed in elementary schools where meager income is 
likely to keep most of them for the remainder of their lives in condition of arrested development.

The hostile elements have no fear of a caste system. They desire to gather into the colleges under their 
control the prematurely differentiated would-be high school teachers who at graduation may secure well 
salaried positions in high schools with opportunity for rapid advancement, thereby widening the gap 
between themselves and those in the elementary schools.

The history of American education is in the making. In the days of Horace Mann, there was little or no 
college sentiment that wasn’t hostile to the professional preparation of teachers. Even now there is 
reason to fear that many college faculties do not take seriously the professional preparation of their 
own members.

The normal schools of twenty years ago were weak and ill supported. In many states they were repressed 
by hostile higher education institutions. But they represented struggle and yearnings of the people at 
large. They served the common people of the democracy, the people with wishes and hopes and yet inadequate 
power of definite self-expression. But development has come. In spite of limited scholarship in the old 
order of normal schools the elementary teachers that they produced for our country were better teachers 
than the high school teachers that the colleges produced and better teachers than the typical college 
professors. They became a deep-seated practical reality in the consciousness of the people that had 
children, the people that wanted an educated America, and the people that now want better teachers.

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But the hostile elements, though they wage a losing warfare, still struggle to hold their grip on some of 
the states through centralization of political and educational control. They still believe that a partially 
educated person is good enough to teach the children up to and including the last day of the elementary 
school. They think that a college graduate is necessary to teach children on the first day in high school 
whether such college graduate has professional preparation or not.

The earliest open attack upon that Procrustean conception of centralized higher education control was when 
some one in the Council of the National Education Association mentioned that if any teacher needed a college 
education and the initiative and versatility supposed to be acquired through a college education, that person 
was the teacher in the sixth grade and the other elementary school grades. But it soon began to be seen that 
just such qualities as came with college education and professional preparation combined bore fruit in the 
kindergarten and in the primary school.

That wasn’t so many years ago, barely twenty. But ideas need time to penetrate even where consciousness is 
receptive. It was less than ten years ago that the initial practical movement had inception through teachers 
colleges in Cedar Falls, Iowa; Ypsilanti, Michigan; Normal, Illinois; Oxford, Ohio; and Kirksville, Missouri. 
There were five charter members in the American Association of Teachers Colleges. Within a year the membership 
reached 19. There were 167 of the old type of state normal schools. At the present time 91 of them have become 
legalized four-year degree conferring teachers colleges. The remaining 76 are delayed and obstructed by hostile 
elements and those hostile elements in some twenty states are by large preponderance found in colleges and 
universities. Strange as it may seem they are seldom found among any other people. What a comment that is on 
the power of higher education to give discriminating intelligence and develop the ethics of a square deal for 
the people at large.

The standard colleges and the universities have not at any time met the demand or the needs for scholarly 
professional teachers. They can not do it. Some of them recognize the fact and in a very cosmopolitan way 
endorse the teachers college movement as the natural and permanent means of insuring an unfailing supply of 
professional teachers for all the public schools.

The more we study and observe the facts and the more we try out the products of the teacher producing 
institutions, the more certainly the enlightened intelligence of the people settles down to the support of 
many teachers colleges on separate and independent state foundations; and we shall not have to wait long to 
see the great cities and all the cities transforming their junior colleges into senior colleges for teachers 
and for all other professions and occupations.

Ultimately the university will cease to have or to control undergraduate colleges. Those institutions of all 
types will respond to state and community needs as freely as high schools do now. Then the universities will 
become the organized integrations of the graduate colleges of our

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democracy. They will be aggregations of great scholars and research students who will contribute constantly 
to world betterment through the discovery, the simplification, and the dissemination of world knowledge under 
freedom without thought of centralized political control. Then democracy and justice under law will prevail.

The American formula of justice in education is this: The elementary school teacher and the high school teacher 
require:

1. Equal academic scholarship,
2. Equal professional preparation,
3. Equal means of acquiring skill,
4. Equal compensation, for equal service, and
5. Equal opportunity to excel others in efficiency and earning power.

The reactionary elements have no reason for entering the limelight to call us impractical or to mention the 
large numbers of pseudo-teachers with only high school education and the larger numbers in some states without 
high school education.

The formula of justice is not visionary. It is built on bed rock foundations. It does not ignore the army of 
ill qualified persons now engaged in pseudo teaching. It stands for truth and the truth is that an army of 
unequipped and helpless persons can’t help any community or any body even though they be certified to be able 
to do what they can’t do. Education can’t be conducted by uneducated persons.

The superintendent in many city, village and consolidated districts announces that the college bred professional 
teacher will be paid the full professional teacher’s salary, whether teaching in high school or elementary school. 
Gradually the nation wide movement of sentiment fills the consolidated school with faculty of college bred 
professional teachers from schools of education, standard colleges, and teachers colleges.

The farmer has for his calves and his yearlings as skillful attendants as he has for the cattle that are nearing 
the market. In the consolidated schools he begins to put up the money for what his children need.

Can the standard college and the university and the teachers college all cooperating meet the demand? I think 
they can. Ten years ago the Missouri Teachers Colleges had less than 5000 college students. Today they have more 
than 10,000 college students. The universities and standard colleges move forward abreast of the teachers colleges.

We are at the beginning of cooperation among higher institutions. The home state of your speaker has voluntary 
organization and cooperation. It was seven years ago, State Superintendent of Schools, Honorable Howard A. Gass, 
invited the state educational institutions to have conference in his office. There was an agreement effected, 
whereby the state teachers colleges and the university of Missouri have uniform requirements in quality and 
quantity for entrance to the Freshman year and for the bachelor’s degree. These agreements have been in operation 
seven years. They are enforced by a state committee that can not be dominated by any one institution. The state 
educational institutions

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in all their departments exchange credits at par. Students cross over from one institution to another. They 
carry their credits with them. They go where their interests may best be served. There is no appreciable 
competition. A similar adjustment is operative among the state institutions, the college union colleges and the 
junior colleges.

The University of Missouri encourages intending teachers to enter the teachers colleges, if they so desire, and 
at graduation from the teachers colleges to enter the graduate colleges of the University. The teachers colleges 
encourage their graduates to mass themselves in larger numbers at the doors of the graduate colleges of the 
University, and help to build for Missouri graduate colleges running parallel with the best in America.

The teachers college faculties are encouraged to continue research studies. They attain increasing productive 
scholarship. There is much fruitful research brought into notice through departmental bulletins published by the 
teachers colleges, representing constructive thinking and looking into the new and higher ground of the future. 
Some of the teachers colleges undertake to publish the graduate theses of their faculty members. Many of these 
documents are known to be outstanding products for public use.

The teachers college faculties have marked increase of absence on leave with tendency towards allowance of part 
or all of their annual compensation while absent. The ascending curve is shown in yet another way. There is one 
teachers college whose faculty makes more excursions and visits to other institutions and to public schools than 
any university faculty is known to do. That is a function of the teachers college. I speak of one which I know 
best. Within three years it had representation at the national conference of health doctors in Spokane, 
Washington; conference of political science teachers in Salt Lake City; geographical excursions through 
California; language, history and other conferences in Nashville, Tennessee; Bismarck, North Dakota; Denver, 
Colo.; Oklahoma City; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Madison, Wisconsin; Cleveland, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Cornell 
University; Providence, Rhode Island; New York City; Washington, D. C.; Richmond, Virginia; and many other 
national conferences outside the N. E. A. And the costs of these excursions were paid in whole or in part by the 
institution.

There is a teachers college faculty of fifty members, with average of 900 college students in residence eleven 
months in the year. There is demonstration school, 500 children, housed in a forty room building with library, 
auditorium, play grounds, gymnasium, science appliances. There are the kindergarten, the six elementary school 
grades, and junior high school. Each group of children has a college bred professional class room teacher all day 
long. College students as intending teachers sit in with the children, make observations, report findings, and 
receive instructions for further studies, with opportunity for project teaching when qualified. College students 
become partners with class room teachers. They help through their own initiative to direct children into the 
comprehension of studies.

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The demonstration school is an ally and, in some of its phases, part of the city system. It is on the college 
campus, in college property, directed by college faculty. The city superintendent is member of the college 
faculty. The city contributes to support of the demonstration school. Senior college students have privilege of 
study in the nearby city senior high school.

One big, red faced college of liberal arts professor with Ph. D. degree teaches a ninth grade Social Science class 
in the demonstration school. He is followed by some senior college student observers who watch and study him and 
the children daily and try to catch the step. He has pride in what he does. Several colleagues of equal 
capabilities, both men and women, from liberal arts departments, have delight in paralleling what this man does.

You see, my friends, the teachers college with its demonstration school develops college professors of a new type. 
Scholarly men and women from liberal arts college are pleased to cross over into the demonstration school and 
teach an hour a day in the eleventh grade, the ninth grade, the fifth grade, or other grades.

It was a venerable college professor who grieved because his college students did not comprehend their studies 
till they had attended his classes two years. Only as Juniors and Seniors were they receptive and satisfactory 
students.

But it had not occurred to him to find at any time the apperceiving background in their consciousness or the 
avenues to their consciousness, and it took them two years unaided to discover the avenues to his conventionalized 
mind. He knew only the ways of the lecture, the quiz and the "exam." For one, I fear there is much fiction in the 
idea of a great gulf between the ways of reaching the consciousness of children and the modes of procedure in 
educating grownups.

The effective teachers college works its field far out among the public schools. One such college has a committee 
of helping teachers, expert in elementary schools and high schools. The committee visits and helps all kinds of 
public schools, not as inspectors but co-operating, helping teachers. One or more times each year several members 
of the faculty spend a few days each seeing, studying and helping the public schools within a radius of 100 miles. 
These varied forms of intermixing with public school education are good for the public schools. They are even 
better in their effect upon the spontaneity, resiliency and constructive ideality of the college teachers.

Some people are alarmed lest the teachers college become more like standard college and less like the old time 
normal school. They need not worry. The name "normal school" has no magic force. It is not self-defining. 
"Teachers college" is. "Teachers college" as a self-defining term parallels college of medicine, college of law, 
college of divinity, all of them self-defining. Many intending lawyers and doctors in earlier times attended the 
normal schools. The term "teachers college" is notice to them to go elsewhere. The teachers college is for 
intending teachers. The standard college is primarily for all the others.

The teachers college is cooperative. It directs many students to enter the standard college. It deals fairly with 
the student and the standard college.

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The installation of departments of education in the standard colleges is a reversal of earlier attitudes; but it 
is good for education and for the colleges.

The teachers colleges begin effective health promotion through curricula for that purpose. The one that I know 
best declares that:

(1) Physical education is instruction and exercise for all;

(2) Physical education is not the mere training of a few of the big and strong ones to win games;

(3) Physical education affects both mind and body.

The college at Kirksville studies physical education through its Department of Child Hygiene and Public Health as 
a fundamental feature, and partly as basis for corrective gymnastics and other plays and games in gymnasiums and 
out of doors. The special health faculty includes a college bred medical doctor on duty all the time, a university 
bred nurse, a bacteriologist with Ph. D. degree soon to be received. These people have a suite of nine rooms with 
abundant laboratory appliances, in a building devoted to physical health and recreational education.

All students have examinations as to eyes, ears, nose, throat, teeth, lungs, sputum, blood, skeletal conditions, 
etc. Each day the medical doctor and the nurse have many calls. There is definite purpose in view. It is to have 
a college community of buoyant healthy men and women.

The health faculty gives courses in general Hygiene; in Home Nursing; in Rural, Personal and Social Hygiene; in 
Preventive Medicine; in Applied Anatomy; in School, Home and Hospital Nursing; in Bacteriology and other vital 
subjects.

It is the purpose of this college to step into the breach for health education, not merely to have healthy students 
but to habituate a generation of intending teachers to the most practical health procedures in school and community.

I venture to ask the elements hostile to the teachers college whether they favor doing all that ought to be done 
for the better education of all teachers. If they say yes, then I ask them whether they favor higher education for 
high school teachers and lower education for elementary school teachers. I ask them whether they favor premature 
differentiation and the consequent gathering of intending teachers into two different groups with full knowledge 
of accelerating the life development of the one group and arresting or retarding the development of the other.

I ask them whether they do not desire to centralize control of education among themselves. As it seems to me they 
are autocratically defining their own sphere and in like manner seeking to prescribe the sphere of others.

I therefore ask them whether their fundamental creed isn’t autocracy with settled determination of making operative 
democracy impossible, or whether they stand for American democracy. If they are for democracy they are for the 
American formula of justice in education. If they are for democracy and for the formula of justice then the 
transformation of all the two year teacher producing institutions into senior colleges for teachers will soon be 
brought about in all the states of our country.

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