It
takes a great deal more than enthusiasm to make a competent teacher;
and it is easy to prepare pupils successfully for almost any written
examination without any enthusiasm for anything except success. But,
cramming apart, a bored teacher is inevitably a boring one: and while
unfortunately the converse is not universally true and an enthusiastic
teacher may fail to communicate his enthusiasm, yet it is quite
certain that you cannot communicate enthusiasm if you are not
possessed of it.
But this enthusiasm, indispensable for the best teaching of anything,
is, so to speak, doubly indispensable for even competent teaching of
literature. On the one hand the ulterior objects of the study, of
which I have tried to indicate the importance, are of an impalpable
kind. I doubt if there is any subject of the curriculum which it would
be so difficult to commend to an uninterested pupil by an appeal to
simple utilitarian motives. On the other hand there clings to
literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of
literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility
and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the
student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared
with football or hockey. If the attitude of the teacher reflects the old
question of the Latin Grammar "Why should I teach you letters?" he would
better turn to some other subject which his pupils will more easily
recognise as appropriate to school hours.
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