larship, and (3) lack of professional preparation.

Although morally the status of the teacher is high, socially it is found to be lower than the status of the average lawyer, the physician, or the theologian. Teachers do not give proper time and thought to the social side of life. To begin with, they are thought to be like the old-fashioned scholar in matters of personal appearance. Fortunately, there is no special style of dress by which they are known, but there is a carelessness that characterizes the rank and file of them. They do not feel the desirability of meeting people in a social way. The fault, however, is not in the occupation, but in the persons who take it up. Whenever teachers meet other men and women on equal terms, they get all the esteem their character and personality deserve. Undoubtedly, as many complain, they are overworked, and have not strength left for society; often the drudgery of the school robs them of time for social duties, and tends to quench any social desire. Moreover, many are not paid enough to dress properly. In school we teachers are associated with less mature minds, and it is easy to become selfsatisfied. Unless we come in contact with men and women of equal or higher intellectual attainments, we fail to realize our littleness.

The general testimony of the replies is that in the larger villages and smaller cities the social position is higher than in the larger cities and smaller villages. From Maine the statement comes that there has been no advance for the last twenty years in the respect with which the public regards the teacher. Of the older States, Pennsylvania also is represented in an unfavorable light: "A teacher is apparently of little account." "He is regarded as an inferior of humanity." "He has no influence in the community outside of the schoolroom." It is evident that in all parts of the country where the educational sentiment is

strong, because of the presence of colleges, normal schools, or large private schools, more consideration is shown to teachers as a class. One man in the West gives his opinion that the teacher is a "great big cipher." One from the South writes: "The teachers are expected to help the church, subscribe to the political fund, take all the papers, be helpers for everybody and everything, and carry the burden of humanity generally, and never assert their own views, but patiently serve." From all over the Union comes the testimony from teachers that, if they wish to keep their positions, they must not express their opinions on local and national questions. This subserviency of itself would tend to make the calling an inferior one. A few of the New England States furnish evidence of a respectful recognition of the teacher in society; Georgia, Colorado, Minnesota, and Illinois leave with me the impression that they are the hopeful States. The reports from some of the States, especially from New York, are very conflicting. There is hardly a State from which there is not the opinion expressed that the chief lack among our teachers is "general culture, and the refinement of manner that comes with it."

Intellectually, the teacher, whether in city or in country, has not attained a high status. Overcrowded as the profession is, because it is the best stepping-stone to other callings, the average teacher has not deliberately qualified himself either in scholarship or in professional knowledge. This testimony goes to corroborate the statements on this point made annually by the National Commissioner of Education. As the public school teacher is not scholarly, it follows that his interests are not broad, and that intellectually he is not a power in the community. In the schoolroom itself, it often happens that the teacher has no greater knowledge of his subjects than an acquaintance with the facts required for the recitation. A superintendent in Illi

nois writes: "The criticism I have to offer upon teachers as a class is their limited literary qualifications. They do not know their subjects sufficiently to make instruction definite and logical." A teacher in a neighboring State notes chiefly the teachers' lack of "an accurate and broad knowledge. Our elementary schools are taught by young persons who are not always graduates of grammar schools, and hardly ever of high schools. Further, our high school faculties are not, as a rule, made up of college graduates."

The standard of professional equipment of the American teacher is, as would be expected, even lower than his social status. Throughout the Union the idea prevails that any one who knows schoolroom subjects can teach, and that any one with sufficient muscle can discipline. The public is satisfied with a low standard of scholarship, and makes little demand for professional skill. Until quite recently the normal schools have furnished what professional preparation there has been. Nothing struck me more forcibly, in studying these opinions, which came straight out of the experience of those who wrote them, than the note of dissatisfaction with the normal schools. Several teachers ask, Why require a normal school training when our normal school graduates are not successful teachers? The majority of the students of the normal schools enter with little more than an elementary education. For this reason the normal schools tend to lose their peculiar function of preparing young men and women to teach the elementary branches. As a superintendent in Illinois well expressed it, "Most of our normal schools try to give an average of academic with an equal amount of professional training, all at once." The result is an apology for both. The normal schools tend also to "deify method, and to lose sight of the supreme importance of the teacher's individuality and personal force." The kindliness of the American

heart rather than professional responsibility characterizes those in charge of these schools, and those candidates not fitted by qualities of temper and manner for teaching are not weeded out. One educator from a small State observes, "A teacher is born, not made," and then continues, "We need a few more teachers born."

A person can become a successful member of none of the professions who is not naturally fitted for it. It is not sufficiently understood, however, that a good teacher cannot be made out of a person who lacks all the qualities of a teacher. A second or third rate man cannot begin to do the harm in one of the so-called "learned" professions that he can do in a school where he has the sole charge of forty or fifty boys and girls for five or six hours a day, five days in the week, seven or eight months in the year. The school age is the impressionable age.

In the formation of habits,

lines of thought, and rules of action, unconsciously the pupils adopt their teachers as models. A South Dakota teacher makes an utterance from that new State which has a genuine ring in it when he says: "The lack of professional training prevents the teacher from holding that standing in the community which other professionally trained persons have. The low status of the profession has not made the teacher the adviser of the Board of Education and of the parent to the same extent to which the physician and lawyer are advisers in their professions." It is to be acknowledged that the lack of confidence in teachers is well grounded.

If it has been a question in the past whether teaching should be considered a profession, the data hereby furnished leave no further doubt that it is yet a makeshift, a "procession" rather than a profession. Only a very few choose the work deliberately as a permanent vocation because they think it best for them. A few take it up because they cannot get anything else to do, and remain in it

for life. Teaching has the reputation of being a "berry-picking roadside, where spare change is to be picked up before jumping into the field and going to work," and of being a "hospital for the blind, hospital for the blind, the halt, and the lame of every other craft." From a New England State a teacher reports: "Many in the community think teachers must have failed in some other business before being willing to take up teaching." Among the teachers employed in the country schools are many young girls. Often an American girl, after she leaves school, "keeps school" until she has the opportunity to keep house, and this fact alone shows that teaching is not a life-work with the majority who take it up. Men, also, frequently regard teaching as an incident in their career; it is a step to their professions, or else a temporary means of support to the doctor while waiting for patients, to the lawyer while waiting for clients, and to the preacher while waiting for a pulpit. Successful professional men are apt to look upon men who remain in teaching with a sort of compassion. If a teacher's purpose in taking up the calling is of a temporary or trivial kind, it will be to the detriment of the pupils; for the teacher's purpose is reflected in the schoolroom. Instability of the teacher's purpose accounts directly for much of the inefficiency of our schools. If a person is in the work because of a lack of brains or force to succeed in something else, his presence will tend to keep out better persons. Among other reasons, the status of the teacher is low because the ablest men and women are not attracted to it in very great numbers, and because such persons of ability as are drawn into it are not retained; and thus the system tends to the survival of the unfittest.

This instability of purpose leads to a great deal of moving about within the calling. Teachers who lack any great amount of professional zeal leave lowpriced positions for more lucrative ones

before they have had time to impress themselves fully upon their pupils. In a new country like ours new ideas are taken up and quickly put into practice; but our teachers, like the rest of their countrymen, are too eager for immediate results; they will not remain patiently to watch over their ideas and wisely to aid their development. Frequent changes, for whatever cause, mar the influence that teachers might exert upon the pupils. It is not uncommon for every teacher in a town to be new at the beginning of the year. School boards, especially in the West, have a belief that places can be filled easily. Usually the teachers who come are no worse than those who go. One superintendent says that his best teachers marry, and leave the poorer ones whom he could better spare. While incompetency is the rule and competency the exception, frequent changes are not so much to be regretted. It is the country schools, undoubtedly, that are most affected. After being called to the cities teachers are contented, and tend to become unambitious and nonprogressive. A considerable number of teachers say that changes are too infrequent in the cities. From one city in the West a teacher writes: "If a cyclone were to strike this city, it would be justified in carrying off seventy-five per cent of the teachers; and yet our schools are progressive and well spoken of because we have a progressive superintendent." The natural reflection is, what a load that superintendent must carry, and what could he not accomplish if things were turned about and he had a number of competent teachers! When there is any degree of permanency in the more remote communities, it is because local candidates are elected. They can live more cheaply at home, and cannot casily be called away. A school taught by

"home talent" is often dead educationally. The old faults are fixed, and routine rather than naturalness and progressiveness characterizes the work done.

One weakness of the occupation as compared with the legal and medical professions is that persons outside of the calling determine who shall enter it. As letter after letter shows, school committees do not know how to estimate the qualifications of a teacher. They elect, in many cases, those who will bid the lowest, or else those of a particular religious sect or political party. Further, that there is a lack of stability because of improper outside influences the massing of the testimony by President Hall shows conclusively. That insecurity from this source is harmful in keeping out or removing good teachers, and appointing poor teachers, no one can deny. In some States legislation attempts to reach this evil. Tenure of office is extended to the teacher during good behavior. It results in electing for life teachers who will do better work because of the great er security, but it makes stable also those teachers who, although not decidedly incompetent, are willing to drift along in the old currents. One Massachusetts superintendent writes: "We have permanent tenure, a good deal more permanent than it ought to be, for the good of the pupils." Again, also from Massachusetts: "Good teachers are secure, poor teachers altogether too secure." It may be said in passing that the weight of testimony from Massachusetts is in favor of the establishment of a life ten

ure.

One principal feels that "annual election for teachers of proved ability is an annual humiliation." I, who am also a Massachusetts man, dissent from his opinion. Tenure of office in Chicago is reported by one person as the "curse of the system. Merit has very little advantage over incompetency." Another from the same city says: "Teachers are too secure. Tenure of office keeps teachers in that should be out." In all reports that touch upon this point, written from places where there is no law freeing teachers from annual elections, there is unanimity of opinion in favor of such a

law.

Far too much, however, has been expected from that source.

Admitting the testimony to the general fact that young teachers have not had the proper intellectual and professional equipment, it may then be asked: Are the members of the teaching corps aware of their shortcomings? Do they feel the need of making up for what was impossible or not thought of before they began to teach? Here again the facts reported by the teachers themselves do not bring out the bright side of the teachers' status. Scarcely any mention is made of the means offered to those engaged in the work, for making up deficiencies or supplementing imperfect training. The large attendance, however, upon teachers' institutes, summer schools, and summer courses at the colleges is a hopeful sign. In the West greater efforts are made in the way of supplementary study than in the East. It may be that in the newer States the proportion of untrained teachers is larger. Conditions are more elastic beyond the Mississippi, while on this side there is a tendency to be too well satisfied with existing arrangements. The high degree of permanency in the teacher's position in Boston, for example, if we are to trust the reports from that city, leads in many cases to a feeling that further efforts in the direction of professional equipment are unnecessary. One reply will be sufficient to show what is the general feeling expressed: "The trouble is, teachers are not ambitious, do not prepare themselves for promotion. They, especially the women, do not read and improve themselves as they should. They do not grow, they are apt to be satisfied." That the average teacher does not keep in touch with the advances in his line of work, that he is often so overworked as to make this impossible, that he tends to fall into routine, and that, in a word, he is not professionally progressive seems to be the consensus of opinion as indicated by the reports.

The remuneration of teachers as compared with that of the "learned" professions is low, whether unduly low for the mass of them, who are hardly more than unskilled laborers, is doubtful. As a Kansas man puts it, "There are about as many overpaid as there are underpaid teachers." Throughout many States, and in some cities in other States, the salaries of women who teach compare very favorably with women's salaries in other walks of life. The minimum salary reported is four dollars a week. Teachers living at home can work for less pay than others. This results in the depression of salaries. Any system of schools, and especially any in which there is co-education, that ignores the need of both men and women does not attain its greatest efficiency. Men are usually passed by because women can be had for lower salaries. Men must bear family burdens, and thus cannot compete on the same footing with women. One teacher writes: "Men of a given degree of ability and application can earn more in other occupations than in teaching." The same teacher adds further: "Low salaries necessitate poor teachers, but it does not follow that high salaries alone will bring good teachers. Inefficiency is often rewarded. Every schedule of salaries rewards inefficiency just as much as it does efficiency." One person on the Pacific coast reports that "the best teachers are poorly paid; the inefficient, exorbitantly paid." A letter from Illinois runs as follows: "It has been my observation that teachers are appreciated for what they are worth."

Tutoring in the larger towns, vacation work everywhere, and other forms of outside work are done by teachers to add to their meagre salaries. This practice is harmful in diminishing the efficiency of the school work. It does not allow proper preparation for daily recitations, nor furnish the proper rest for the teacher. It is a practice not confined to lowsalaried teachers. In the more favor

ably situated communities extensive outside money - earning is carried on, and the public naturally asks whether it is necessary to pay as much for teachers as it does pay.

If one remains in school work, one is obliged to save for old age. Germany regards her teachers as "defenders of the public safety," and pensions them. The hindrance to the granting of pen sions in the United States is the incomplete organization of our school systems, together with the general lack of the permanency of the teaching force. There is not sufficient stability to give an impetus to the establishment of anything like a general coöperative pension bureau. No one who is temporarily in the profession wishes to contribute to a general fund for this purpose. No one who is competent desires to pay part of his earnings into a retirement fund, which, as one teacher puts it, means that "the competents support the incompetents." Brooklyn proposes to have a retirement fund. Deductions are to be made from the salaries of the regular teaching corps, and applied for the support of those who retire or are discharged. If I am not mistaken, the initiative in this was taken by the city authorities, and the scheme is regarded with disfavor by the majority of the teachers. In Chicago, "it is proposed to honor teachers " by giving them. pensions. One teacher writes: "From the nature of the work teaching compels a man to retire early." If this is true, it is a fact not to be observed in the German schools. A New England teacher wishes that "salaries were such that it would not be inhumane to retire one when too old to teach." Male teachers, particularly, feel that by the time they are forty they ought to be in something else. If it is once admitted that a teacher past forty is useless, then away with the idea that teaching will ever be "held in as high honor as it ought to be."

Teachers' agencies stimulate competition and assist teachers to find their