Certainly a plan to retain the undoubted
benefit of required study for teachers in such wise as to lessen
its burden, and various schemes devised to shift the emphasis
from scholarship to professional work, were mostly impatiently
repudiated by the Teachers' Federation, and when one badly
mutilated plan finally passed the Board, it was most reluctantly
administered by the superintendent.
I at least became convinced that partisans would never tolerate
the use of stepping-stones. They are much too impatient to look
on while their beloved scheme is unstably balanced, and they
would rather see it tumble into the stream at once than to have
it brought to dry land in any such half-hearted fashion. Before
my School Board experience, I thought that life had taught me at
least one hard-earned lesson, that existing arrangements and the
hoped for improvements must be mediated and reconciled to each
other, that the new must be dovetailed into the old as it were,
if it were to endure; but on the School Board I discerned that
all such efforts were looked upon as compromising and unworthy,
by both partisans. In the general disorder and public excitement
resulting from the illegal dismissal of a majority of the "Dunne"
board and their reinstatement by a court decision, I found myself
belonging to neither party.
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