The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples.
Interpretation
A true teacher empowers students to trust themselves rather than relying on the teacher's influence.
In this quote, Alcott emphasizes that a genuine teacher should not foster dependency but rather inspire self-confidence in their students. The teacher's role is to guide learners towards their own understanding and inner spirit, ultimately fostering independence and self-trust rather than a following or discipleship.
In practice
During a teacher training seminar to emphasize the importance of guiding students rather than dominating them.
Nature is the armory of genius. Cities serve it poorly, books and colleges at second hand; the eye craves the spectacle of the horizon; of mountain, ocean, river and plain, the clouds and stars; actual contact with the elements, sympathy with the seasons as they rise and roll.
Yet the deepest truths are best read between the lines, and, for the most part, refuse to be written.
Observation more than books and experience more than persons, are the prime educators.
We climb to heaven most often on the ruins of our cherished plans, finding our failures were successes.
Children are not yet fools, but we shall turn them into imbeciles like ourselves, with high I.Q.'s if possible.
We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.
A book may be very amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.
Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child's control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to a failure.
What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
Children do live in fantasy and reality; they move back and forth very easily in a way we no longer remember how to do.
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