3. THE SERVICE OF ALUMNI AS TEACHERS
Face to face with a mighty host we find ourselves when we attempt to
number the teachers of Virginia who, at one time or another, for long or
shorter periods, have been students at the University. In the years immediately
preceding 1870 and in all the long Olympiads of ante-bellum days,
schools were being kept alive here and there in Old Virginia by those whose
torches had been kindled at Jefferson's altar and whose vision had been at
least in part uplifted with his own. Those men labored provincially, it may
be, and often under painful handicaps, but who will deny to them a meed of
honor in the better times that have come after them? They labored and
we have entered into their labors. We are building better, let us hope, than
did they; but they often builded better than they knew.
Since 1870, when our present system of public schools was inaugurated,
alumni of the University have been enabled to assume more numerous and
more definite relationships in the teaching forces of the State. This fact
appears with growing distinctness as we proceed with our investigations.
Consider, for example, the influence that has been radiated through the
thousands of teachers that have attended the University summer schools
during the past thirty-odd years. A conservative estimate would place the
total number of persons, men and women, who have attended these summer
schools within this period at 15,000. Not all of this mighty host, it may be,
have been teachers; but many of them have been teachers by profession and
by practice; and thousands of them have carried the ideas and the inspiration
here imbibed into the public schools of the State.
In recent years, as we all know, the deliberate and consistent aim in
these summer schools has been to make them the most helpful possible to
Virginia teachers. And it would be hard to find any community in the
State, however small or however secluded, in which there is not working today
at least one school teacher who is proud to speak of the days—the
summer days so full of work, so full of play, so full of joy—spent here. The
services of University leaders, like Bruce R. Payne, Charles G. Maphis,
and others, through the University summer schools, have been of incalculable
value to public education throughout the State.
