=The child’s viewpoint.=—­This is no flight of fancy.  Rather it is a reality in countless schoolrooms of the land if only the teachers were alive to the fact.  But we have been so busy measuring, estimating, scoring, and surveying the child for our purposes that we have given but scant consideration to the child’s point of view as regards the teacher.  We have not been quick to note the significant fact that the child is estimating, measuring, scoring, and surveying the teacher for purposes of its own and in the strictest obedience to the laws of its nature.

=The child’s need of ideals.=—­Every child needs and has a right to ideals, and finds the teacher convenient both in space and in the nature of her work to act in this capacity.  Because of the character of her work and her peculiar relation to the child, the teacher assumes a place of leadership, and the child naturally appropriates her as the lodestar for which his nature is seeking.  And so, whether the teacher leads into the morass or into the jungle, the child will follow; but if she elects to take her way up to the heights, there will be the child as faithful as her shadow.  If the teacher plucks flowers by the way, then, in time, gathering flowers will become habitual to the child, nor will there be any need to admonish the child to gather flowers.  The teacher plucks flowers, and that becomes the child’s command.  Education by absorption needs neither admonition nor homilies.

=The ideal a perpetual influence.=—­And all this is life—­actual life, fundamental life, and inevitable life.  Moreover, the inevitableness of this phase of life serves to accentuate its importance.  The idealized teacher gives to the child his ideals of conduct, literature, art, music, home, school, and service.  Take this teacher out of his life and these ideals vanish.  Better by far eliminate the formal instruction, important as that may be made to be, than to rob the child of his ideals.  They are the influences that are ever active even when formal instruction is quiescent.  They are potent throughout the day and throughout the year.  They induce reactions and motor activities that groove into habits, and they are the external stimuli to which the spirit responds.

=The teacher’s attitude.=—­The vitalized school takes full cognizance of this phase and means of education and gives large scope and freedom for its exercise and development.  The teacher is more concerned with who and what her pupils are to be twenty years hence than she is in getting them promoted to the next grade.  She knows full well that vision clarifies sight, and she is eager to enlarge their vision in order to make their sight more keen and clear.  She, therefore, adopts as her own standards of life and conduct what she wishes for her pupils when they have come to maturity.  She may not proclaim herself an ideal teacher or a model teacher, but she is cognizant of the fact that she is the model and the ideal of one or more pupils in her school and bases her rule of life upon this fact.