teachers, a most conservative estimate places the proportion that have met this standard at one in five. In England the proportion meeting a comparable standard is four in six, and in many of the countries of continental Europe the proportion is still higher. In so far as our policies of teacher-preparation are concerned, we are surpassed by some of our South American neighbors. A bulletin of the Federal Bureau of Education 1 authoritatively asserts that the United States gives less attention to the preparation of public-school teachers than does any other civilized nation. 1 Why do we hold this low station in respect to a public business which, theoretically, overtops all others in its significance to the welfare and progress of democratic institutions? Surely the cause is not to be found in our poverty, nor is it to be found in a failure to recognize abstractly the importance of public education. It lies primarily in the tradition that the actual work of classroom teaching is not a serious and permanent occupation. That teaching is at best only a transitory calling for either men or women has become, indeed, a fixed tradition. Social and economic forces have been favorable to its cumulative growth. The supply of these temporary teachers until recently has overtopped the demand; hence wages could be kept low. The girls usually lived with their parents, and their earnings were often more in the nature of pin money than of a living and saving 1 Bulletin No. 12, 1916. wage. Public education, indeed, has been far from burdensome to the taxpayer. The entire schooling of the average adult native-born citizen has cost the public less than one hundred and fifty dollars an amount FIGURE 3.1 Chart showing comparison of teachers' salaries in five Middle Western states with the union scale of wages for certain occupations in the same section as indicated by the average of the wages paid in Chicago and Cleveland. From E. S. Evenden's Teachers' Salaries and Salary Schedules. comparable perhaps with that which the village grocer invests in his daughter's piano lessons. Nor is a low wage scale the only sorry result of the tradition that teaching is not a serious business. Stand ards of preparation have been kept low. In general, the requirements for a teacher's license in any community have been those that the average girl graduating from the local school could easily meet. To advance requirements beyond this point would mean that the local girls must go elsewhere for preparation, and this would automatically place appointments in the local schools beyond the reach of the larger part of the otherwise available "home talent." The typical publicschool teacher comes from a family of four or five children, and from a family that "enjoys" a very moderate income. A study made in 1911 estimated the earnings of the average family from which elementary teachers are drawn at $800 a year. Any attempt to raise standards for the teacher's license to the point where adequate preparation would be required is met at once by "pressure" from the numerous groups of families that have come to look upon teaching appointments in the local schools as the vested right of their daughters. Under these conditions, too, it is not surprising that the material rewards of public-school service, meager as they are, have acquired the earmarks of a public gratuity doled out to the deserving poor, a point of view that finds a tragic expression in the rulings of most boards of education that a woman teacher's tenure ends automatically with her marriage, unless, as 1 L. D. Coffman's Social Composition of the Teaching Population. some boards have charitably decreed, her husband is unable to support her!! It is small wonder, then, that public-school service has become progressively less and less attractive to the type of young manhood and young womanhood that the Nation needs for this important work. Recent developments have intensified the situation, and have created throughout the country a real crisis. In the early days, conditions were at least tolerable. Teaching was a stop-gap occupation, it is true, but many of the strongest and most promising young men were drawn into the schools for a brief period, and some of these, finding the work to their liking, remained even in the face of meager rewards and inadequate recognitions. The girls, too, who entered the schools temporarily were usually of a fine type, coming from homes that represented the best ideals and traditions of American life. To-day all this is changed. Almost no men become classroom teachers in the urban elementary schools; they are rapidly deserting the rural schools; and those seeking even temporary appointments in the high schools are diminishing in number and apparently deteriorating in quality. Industrial and commercial enterprise has been quick to see that it pays to catch ability 1 During the war the Boston School Committee permitted certain former teachers, who had married and whose husbands were then in the Army or the Navy, to return to the classrooms. But it explicitly provided that officers' wives should not have this privilege on the ground that an officer's pay was ample for the support of his wife. while it is young and to pay generously for its training. Indeed, it is intelligent enough to recognize ability in those no longer young. A man who had served for thirteen years as a teacher, advancing in that time from the district schools to a high-school principalship, recently enrolled at a university to prepare for additional responsibilities in public-school work. Needing funds to meet the increased cost of living, he applied for parttime work in a metropolitan bank. A week later he withdrew from the university, giving as a reason the fact that his work at the bank would be full-time. He was asked by one of his instructors what he knew about banking. "Absolutely nothing," he replied. "I am learning. The bank will pay me while it is training me more than I have ever received as a teacher. The future possibilities are vastly more attractive than anything that public education can promise. To advance in the educational field I must prepare further at my own expense. And," he added, "I have a family." This competition for ability, at first limited to young men, is now rapidly extending to young women. the cities, the gap between graduation and marriage may now be bridged much more rapidly, much more easily, and much more pleasantly through any one of a score of other occupations than through teaching. Even the girls in the towns and villages who, a few years ago, would have sought appointments in the neighboring rural schools now find more lucrative and attractive In |