The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 41
[introduction]
The best trained and most efficient of our young teachers, in
general, are those who have first been pupil-teachers and who have afterwards passed a year at the Training College. The pupil-teacher is a boy or girl who, as the name implies, is at once learning and teaching; getting private lessons from the master and taking a class during the day. The pupil-teacher in theory passes an examination at entrance and an examination every year, and receives a small stipend, that is gradually augmented as the services paid for become more and more valuable. In some cases the pupil-teacher, on conclusion of a five years' course, becomes a trainee at a so-called Training College. This is a school in a large town, the head master of which receives a salary of £50 a year as training master, and a bonus on all the pupils he sends up who pass a successful examination. Besides this, he gains indirectly by securing the services of the best pupil-teachers in his school. From the school or district training college the pupil-teacher passes to the Training College in Melbourne, presided over by Mr. Gladman, and spends a year under the direction of teachers paid by the State in preparing for a final examination. If this is successfully passed, the trainee receives a certificate, and passes with credit into the State service.
What pupil, teachers are.
The advantages of this plan are very great. In the first place,
it supplies the State with a body of efficient teachers, who could not be procured as cheaply, or perhaps at all, in any other way. In the next place, as the pupil-teacher has very commonly been a scholar in whom the head teacher took particular interest, the
relation of these assistants to their head is often very cordial and pleasant; and many head teachers have told me how much they preferred the young people trained by themselves to the assistants sent them by the department. Lastly, though the beginning of educational work so early is necessarily accompanied with some short-comings in the pupil-teacher's literary accomplishments, it undoubtedly gives a command of teaching power which it is more difficult to acquire later in life. The pupil-teacher learns a little less than the teacher who has not graduated in class-work, but generally can communicate knowledge and enforce order very much better.
Advantages of the pupil-teacher system.
Defects of the present pupil-teacher system.
Mr. Gladman has kindly drawn up a scheme for the requirements of pupil-teachers, which slightly increases the present demands on them, but not more than will be amply compensated by the increased time allowed them in their fourth year.
* This is now partly remedied.