The call of the time is for cooperation of all interested in the schools of colleges, school boards, superintendents, principals, teachers, editors of educational journals, and public that the schools and their teachers may come into the fuller confidence and regard of the community. The time calls also for constructive action and for less talking of the pathology of the situation-for talking up schools and teachers instead of down; for energy in remedying defects after we have had the courage and persistence to find them; and for concerted effort to elevate the compensation, standards, and character of the teaching profession. When this is done, there will be no lack of young men and women of high ideals to enter it. The Vermont Plan-Inspiring and Forward Looking STENOGRAPHIC REPORT OF THE ADDRESS BY •¤‡N all the difficulties that confront the public school system, three interrelated but distinct causes are evident. In the first place, the teachers have not been receiving a living wage. I think our people throughout the country have become pretty generally aware of some features of this question, but I am impressed more and more with the fact. that few people, even school people, have recognized the true seriousness of the situation. We read of deficits that have accumulated by government control of this enterprise or that enterprise. Has it ever occurred to you that the financial loss to our country on account of the teachers who left the service last year cannot be less than two hundred and fifty million dollars? It cost this government-these states-that much to procure the teachers who left the profession last year. We can put it in a somewhat different way, perhaps more within our power of grasping, when we say that according to present statistics every time a normally trained teacher left the service the state lost seven hundred and fifty dollars, and that figure is based on costs in 1914, 1915 and 1916. The financial loss today cannot be less than from one thousand dollars to fifteen hundred dollars whenever a trained teacher leaves the service. But more important still, by one means or another we have tried to fill our schoolrooms with teachers, and to a certain extent we have succeeded; but were we to put a certified trained teacher in each schoolroom in the United States, it would require that we fill four out of every five teaching positions in the United States-a problem of such magnitude that I think very, very few people have ever comprehended what the real difficulties are. In the second place, our teachers have been hampered by prescriptions, by forms and by commands that have removed from them most of the opportunity for self-expression. There is no other profession, or no other calling, in which individuals have been beset by so many restrictions as regards their getting into and continuing in the profession. Now, I will grant at once that there is no logical reason why anybody should dislike examinations, but we do; and that is true of every solitary person with whom I have ever come in touch who ought to be in the schoolroom. I have seen some who were not afraid of examinations, but they were people who should never have been in the schoolroom. Think of the situation-examinations, examinations, examinations; until by actually wearing out the system in some of our states the teacher secures a life certificate which, so long as she remains in that state, allows her to teach. Inside the schoolroom there are prescriptions and restrictions such as never obtained anywhere else. I want to say that, in my belief, had any industry ever approached the teaching profession in respect to the red tape and the prescriptions that obtained, there would have been a country-wide strike. We would never submitted to it anywhere else. Within the school the teachers have been compelled to use methods and systems and patent devices because they happened to appeal to somebody who had been at the head of the system. I do not want to find fault with the superintendent, for I do not know how he could have managed it otherwise. He has been dealing with people who, in a large measure, have no initiative or ability to strike out for themselves or to accomplish results, and in the rapid growth of our school system it has been necessary to have certain prescriptions; but that does not alter the case as to the undesirability of this feature from the teacher's point of view. I might enlarge upon this, but the previous speaker has mentioned some of the important features of this matter. There has been prescription after pre scription. I would like to tell you what I told a group of our teachers a few days ago (as a confession). I was in New York City a few weeks ago, and a friend was telling me the experience of one of the heads of a subsidiary of the United States Steel Corporation. This man conceived the idea that the corporations were not getting at the root of the difficulties between themselves and their employees. He left his office and went into the factories and mines, remaining there for more than six months. He spent four months in the factories at Homestead, and for six weeks he was in the mines working as an ordinary miner. He came back with a story for the rest of his fellow presidents which differed somewhat from that which is ordinarily given. He said that in the main, the difficulty between their workmen and themselves was that of the immediate superior. Just the moment a man was raised to the position of foreman he forgot all about what he thought and the impressions that he had as a workman, and began to crowd and crowd and crowd; and again, when the foreman became a superintendent, he forgot how he felt as a foreman, and began to crowd and crowd and crowd; and finally, the whole thing was left to a board of directors who met in a room very remote from the industry and there voted large sums of money for the establishment of rest rooms, for the introduction of lunch counters, and consoled themselves that they were taking such splendid care of their men. And those men reported that only two per cent of the people employed at Homestead were on an eight-hour day, and they did not visit the rest rooms provided or take advantage of many of the other provisions made for their comfort and welfare. There was a lack of touch between the heads and their workmen. I came home from New York wondering whether that could be said of the school system, so far as my own state was concerned; whether there was difficulty between the teacher and the principal, the principal and the superintendent, and perhaps between the superintendent and the state department. Then within two weeks I had the pleasure of spending part of an evening in company with Miss Mabel Carney, who had just returned from the West. For more than a week she had been in one of the large cities, where she had met a considerable number of her former students and associates. In that city more than five hundred high school teachers had joined the Federation of Labor. When she talked with them they said they had no particular complaint to make about salaries, for they were reasonably adequate, but the interminable amount of red tape, reports and standards put upon these people, they said, made life such a burden that they saw no way of reaching a condition that would be desirable unless they could get the influence of a much larger association. In Chicago she found much the same situation. We find that there has come to be in our teaching profession, just as in all other occupations, that difficulty between the teacher and her immediate superior, and so on with the immediate superiors right up through those in higher positions of authority. A third difficulty that is pretty clearly evident is that we are not bringing into the teacher-training institutions in the country as a whole either a sufficient number of young people or, again taking the country as a whole, a group of young people of sufficiently high ability. We have dropped off, they tell us, fifty per cent in numbers since 1916, and in many cases there is a twenty per cent shortage over last year. All this time we have been looking to the industries and saying that the industries are competing with our schools, that the industries are taking our teachers. I do not know anything about that in Massachusetts or in most of the other states, but I will tell you something about my own state. In 1890 Vermont had forty-four young women in institutions of higher learning throughout the country. There were only forty-four women from Vermont who were having the privileges of colleges and universities. Today, in our own state, there are five hundred young women in Vermont institutions, and I do not know how many are attending the higher institutions outside the state. Do you not see that our problem here is a very peculiar one? Twenty-five or thirty years ago the young |