Teachers' Guide to School Turnarounds

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1864 edition. Excerpt: ...the most of your active power, you are obliged to learn by book, or by some trick of indirection. You think that you can only appear to be wise by assuming to be wise; and it is possible that you are right. It is possible that you impose upon a few who would otherwise hold you for a very common sort of person; but all the reputation for wisdom you may secure, can never compensate for what you lose by cutting off these voluntary supplies. Water flows naturally into the humble, open spaces; it never seeks the mountains., except to run around them. Self-love, self-conceit, pride of opinion--all these are barriers to knowledge and barriers to success. During your brief life, you have suffered from many grave mistakes, which, had you been a teachable man, might easily have been avoided. Your position repelled all information voluntarily offered, and your pride forbade you to seek for it at the only available sources. You have blundered through experiments whose results could have been given you by a dozen of your neighbors, who took a secret satisfaction in witnessing your expensive failures. He is the wise man only who, holding himself unselfishly tributary to the lives of others, lays hold of, and appropriates, the wisdom won by the life around him. It should be in life as it is in science. If I read the record of a series of experiments by which a certain scientific result is arrived at, I do not feel myself humbled by the discovery, nor humbled by using the discovery for my own advantage. I contribute freely to my own work--I appropriate freely the results of the work of others, as a member of the great commonwealth of life. It is a noble thing to teach; it is a blessed thing to learn. I have told you that there are probably one or two...