Plain Talk to Teachers
I
THE ‘learned professions’ were once an inner circle of distinction. Every family cherished the ambition to have representation in this court of honor. Divinity, Law, and Medicine, these three, and the greatest was probably Divinity. Greatness was not yet measured in cash-value, nor did the proletariat regard these distinctions as invidious. Not yet. Now we have new aspirants for place in the inner circle. Engineering professes a body of special knowledge and expert experience; special schools alone can give this knowledge; and the trained engineer renders a specialized service to society. And nursing. Who shall deny that nursing demands special knowledge, and that it renders important service to society? Then there are the social workers, business engineers of various kinds, philanthropists — and teachers. Some will have it that not all philanthropists are teachers, but that all teachers are philanthropists.
Shall all these be recognized as professions? The exclusiveness of the inner circle is in danger. The term ‘learned’ may have to be abandoned. Or, possibly, terms of initiation can be defined in such a way that some may qualify and others not. What is a profession, then? Samuel Johnson defines it merely as a ‘vocation, known employment, a calling.’ This, of course, includes shoe-shining. Surely teaching is not behind shoe-shining in its claims, although it is certainly behind shoeshining in cash-value. ‘An occupation that involves a liberal education, and mental rather than manual labor.’ This is the definition of a recent maker of dictionaries, and has a tendency to restore the sacred inner circle of the ’learned profession.’ But what will the first proletarian glossary offer as a modification? Will it blot out finally, and perhaps ruthlessly, the early and late distinctions between occupations and professions? or is there no distinction between surgeons and barbers, between lawyers and lathers, between teachers and tinkers?
A profession may be distinguished from a trade, vocation, occupation, or business by the following well-marked characteristics: —
1. A profession presupposes a body of scientific and technical knowledge and corresponding skill in practice.
2. This knowledge and skill can be acquired only by extended study and careful practice by persons who have the necessary native endowment.
3. The welfare of community, state, and nation depends on services which can be rendered only by those who have this knowledge and skill; and
4.The practitioners, or members of the profession, by virtue of their special qualifications and by virtue of the public service rendered by them, incur definite moral obligations to each other and to the community. These obligations are the basis of professional ethics.
These characteristics cannot be disregarded. The character of the service rendered will be the touchstone. Communities may differ in their estimate of the value of a particular public service. The same service will have a varied rating in different periods. What was a trade in one period may become a profession in another. But the basis of judgment will be the four here named— a special body of knowledge, an extended period of study and practice, a service deemed essential to public welfare, and a body of professional ethics.
II
We are passing through a period of self-examination in education. Like the seeker after grace, we are almost morbid in our self-reproach; and like him, we are entreating fervently the gift of professional salvation. We covet the things that will make teaching an undoubted, unchallenged profession. The college professor is pleading for a salary on which he can live decently, and rear a family, without doing the family washing and working as a ‘scab’ carpenter at eight dollars a day during-the long vacation. This same college professor also asks for a larger share of selfdetermination in the academic organization. To him professional salvation means financial recognition and a better social and professional status.
The common-school teacher organizes and makes a show of numerical and political strength, in order to secure a minimum living salary. She identifies herself with the ranks of labor, skilled and unskilled, or less skilled. As yet she has not succeeded in raising this minimum up to the wage of the municipal street-sweeper. Self-examination brings home to her that she is not received into the habitations of the social pace-maker, that she is not a social entity at all. She is treated very much like the trainer of horses, like the chauffeur, like the caretaker — except that she receives a smaller wage. Salvation is conceived by her in terms of social recognition and an equivalent salary; and she seeks this salvation, to the prejudice even of her professional status, largely because she has as yet only a trade and not a professional consciousness.
The educational leader and administrator, too, has become introspective and has discovered the ‘national emergency in education.’ The emergency consists in poorly paid teachers, untrained teachers, ‘ deplorably low professional standards, and the immaturity of teachers.’ He seeks professional salvation in federal financial aid, and a seat among the powerful in the President’s Cabinet.
These individual plaints are made acute at this time by the universal expectation of a new world after the Great War. They come to expression as part of the great longing for better things. But not one element is new. Teachers’ salaries have long been below reasonable expectations. College instructors are to-day working for salaries which good chauffeurs decline; and grade teachers receive less than journeymen barbers, less than garbage-collectors, less than street-sweepers. This has been true almost ab initio. The social status of public-school teachers has never been determined by the importance of their service to community life. The preparation of teachers for their work has been disgracefully inadequate, because we have had, and now have, the absurd belief that ‘anybody can teach reading, writing and arithmetic,’ and therefore boys and girls fresh from the grammar schools, sixteen years of age, are employed as teachers. Sixteen per cent of the publicschool teachers in the United States are between sixteen and twenty-one years of age. This is an old story. As for professional standards, is not that a preposterous term to use of childworkers? Can we regard children under twenty-one as constituting a profession, especially when most of them remain in the work of teaching less than five years?
III
A frank statement of conditions seems advisable. There are forces that hinder the development of a teaching profession. There are elements in the work of teachers that are common to the crafts. And human nature is triumphant in teachers as in other folk, expressing itself in conduct that is sometimes less than professional. Since these conditions prevail from the kindergarten through the university, — or so far as they do prevail, — they are symptomatic, and must be clearly defined and commonly recognized and classified before they can be corrected.
Divinity has maintained itself as a learned profession in spite of low salaries. Country physicians, likewise, constitute an important and honored element of the medical profession, in spite of low earnings. On the contrary, the better salaried groups of teachers, supervisors, principals, high-school teachers, do not usually display clearer professional characteristics than the lower salaried groups. May it not, then, be true that low salaries are due in part at least to lack of professional qualities? Group solidarity and length of service, professional fitness, high professional ethics, and professional alertness will, to some extent at least, tend toward better salaries. Social recognition almost certainly waits on evidence of professional qualities in the teacher. No social group can afford to deny itself the benefit of social intercourse with men and women of refinement, broad learning, and of expert knowledge in any field of usefulness, least of all in the teachers of its children.
Low salaries and lack of social recognition are two conditions that exist by common consent. There is no room for argument here. Our economic and social behavior toward teachers has been and is disgraceful. The remedy awaits the assertion by the teachers themselves, in word and act, but especially in professional conduct, that they are worthy of larger salaries and of social equality. These disabilities may be effect as well as cause. At any rate we should frankly raise the question. For example: group-consciousness or solidarity is notably lacking among teachers. Women teachers frequently avoid classification and identification as teachers. In public places, at public resorts, they try to give the impression that they are not teachers. Schoolteacher is accepted as a term of reproach. Even during educational conventions, when the streets of the convention city are inevitably overrun by teachers, when hotel lobbies and dining-rooms are monopolized by women teachers, there is this same desire to escape identification as of the genus teacher. It is a token of the fact that there is no group pride. A strange phenomenon. Its explanation probably lies in the fact that the basis of unity among teachers is still the external and comparatively unimportant coincidence of name or place or occupation. The cohesive power of high scholarly purpose, of common civic service, is apparently absent.
The American public-school teacher is young and immature. Fully forty per cent of her is under twenty-five years of age. That is a significant fact. The woman teacher begins before she is twenty years of age, teaches three or four years, marries, and drops all interest in teaching as a life-work. That young women should marry before twenty-five is reasonable and natural; but it is wholly impossible to build up a professional esprit de corps in a force that has to be recruited so frequently from such immature material. For it should be remembered that few women — it might be questioned if any do — look upon teaching as a life-work before they have passed thirty, which is equivalent to saying that women teachers under thirty are not likely to have a professional attitude toward their work. Since this group constitutes so large a percentage of the entire body, the result is inevitable. Teaching is a temporary employment to them. It fills the marriageable interim between normal school or college and matrimony. In that interim the attention is naturally fixed on the main chance. Time devoted to professional reading is reduced to a minimum; time spent in attendance on educational conferences is not given with professional enthusiasm. Teaching is not a career, but a vestibule to a career.
The few men who continue to drift into teaching are subject to similar temptations. Most men begin teaching because it is the most ready means of turning their education into cash-value. Between twenty and twenty-five teaching offers these young men as large financial rewards as business. But the break comes between twenty-five and thirty. Business offers larger rewards then, or they leave teaching, to complete courses in law or medicine. In either case they are lost to teaching, and their places are filled by inexperienced recruits.
This is doubly hard on the smaller school, since these tender youths occupy places of administrative importance before they have maturity of judgment and thought. They hold places of professional importance, in spite of the fact that they are not seeking careers in teaching.
This apparently leads to the conclusion that the body of teachers consists of forty per cent of immature women and men, sixty per cent of unmarriageable women and unsaleable men. This is, of course, only partly true. But it is a fact that men teachers are too frequently effeminate. Someone has said, ‘There are three genders, the masculine, the feminine, and the “male teacher."'
Teachers are constantly changing, then, partly because they like to migrate, partly because they leave the profession and their places to young recruits. In rural districts it is not unusual to have ninety per cent of the force new each year. In cities, twenty to thirty per cent of the force is annually changed. The migratory habit is due partly to a desire for better salaries, partly to instability in the employing agencies, and partly to a love of change for its own sake.
The teaching force of these communities is extremely variable because it is mobile and temporary. Methods are necessarily unstable, and under such conditions the school product cannot be standardized. Mobility and professional spirit are clearly inconsistent, mutually exclusive.
One damning heresy continues to plague teachers and teaching — a heresy held, it is true, by the laity rather than by the teachers, but not entirely renounced even by the latter. ‘Anyone can teach.’ This is a negation of all professional aspirations. The taxpayer and the school trustee assume the truth of this and act upon it. In the country school, therefore, boys and girls of sixteen or seventeen, without any training in method, with no schooling beyond the grammar grades, are employed as teachers; while in the high schools, college graduates are asked to teach subjects for which they have no special preparation. This is particularly true of English and of history. By accepting employment on these terms teachers of course subscribe to the heresy; and by holding to it, teacher, trustee, and taxpayer together put the stamp of approval on inadequate teacher-training standards. In this, as in other fields, democracy shows its impatience of expert service.
The expert school administrator is free from this heresy. He may be guilty of others — not of this one. He demands adequate scholarship plus professional training, even for the lowest-salaried teacher. But democracy is not yet willing to accept the school expert. The definition of standards of preparation — even the selection of teachers — is still prevailingly in the hands of school trustees who have no correct basis of judgment. Consequently, too often they choose teachers for their good looks or because they know persons of importance. To expect a professional esprit de corps in a body of teachers so selected is the height of folly.
Out of these several conditions arises an inevitable tendency on the part of teachers to stagnate. Teachers must grow in knowledge and in the graces of their art if they wish to remain professionally alive. Stagnation in teaching is certain professional death. But the normal-school graduate is proverbially stagnant. She reads no books, she investigates nothing for herself; she expects the impetus provided by the normal-school training to last through her teaching life, and the community she serves receives rapidly diminishing returns. And college graduates are not notably more progressive. While it is true that they start with a wider horizon and with more extensive scholarship, their enthusiasm for learning is not notably contagious.
Even the late crop of ‘teachers’ colleges’ and ‘schools of education’ does not contribute vigorously to a spirit of progress and the advancement of learning. These institutions love pedagogy and pursue it, sometimes to the exclusion of other good things. They are magnifying the teaching process to the detriment of the learning process. Teaching skill is refined to the point where the child is taught everything so skillfully that he learns nothing. That is to say, he makes no effort to learn because effort is unnecessary. Under this ‘soft pedagogy’ the learner is chronically passive, even if he is receptive. The ‘School of Pedagogy’ is concerned with method, rather than with the matter of knowledge, and the product is therefore somewhat pedantic, as might be expected. It mistakes the shadow for the real substance, and accepts for its standard the mere conceit of learning.
Now this new pedagogy is harmful in what it fails to do rather than in what it does. That is, its method is harmless, nay, helpful, if it is founded on adequate knowledge of subject-matter. But the pedagogue wants ever more and more method. The summer sessions of our colleges find the ‘Methods’ courses vastly more popular than the informational and cultural courses. The teacher makes her annual pilgrimage to the ‘seat of learning,’ not to get learning, but to refine the mechanics of method, thus becoming, not more cultivated, but more mechanical in her teaching.
IV
Teaching is nevertheless entitled to be rated among the learned professions. Its claim rests squarely on the importance of the service rendered, on the breadth and depth of the body of prerequisite knowledge, on the special technique by which alone success can be attained, and on a common ethical obligation which rests on those persons who have acquired this knowledge and the technique of teaching.
The service rendered by teachers has very great value, rising distinctly above the vocations and trades in this respect, and comparing favorably with the learned professions. Take the blacksmith’s trade, for example. When his work is well done, he has a well-shod horse and a satisfied customer; when it is poorly done, he causes a small financial loss and has a displeased customer. The transaction involves a single customer, and has small significance to the community. The same is true of the trades generally.
Contrast with this the work of the physician or the lawyer. The failure of the former means physical death; his success, physical fitness. The public health is in his keeping. His work has direct social significance. He subtracts from or adds to the common welfare, according as he fails or succeeds. In a similar manner, the lawyer who errs secures less than justice for his client; while the lawyer who succeeds gets justice for his client and promotes the cause of justice generally. The tranquillity and the security of the community are in his keeping.
But the teacher surpasses each of these in value to the community, for the teacher who errs injures the cause of truth. By teaching vicious doctrines, he may undermine government, misdirect the mental energies of youth, and retard the development of society. The forward movements in human welfare become possible only from correct teaching. Civilization advances in accordance with the quality of teaching service. The influence of the great teacher extends through many generations, doing high service beyond the limits of his natural life. It transcends geographical and national boundaries. Witness Socrates and Jesus. Judged by the character of the service rendered, teachers clearly form a distinctive and homogeneous group, which by its peculiar knowledge and special skill controls the general community welfare.
The teacher necessarily professes knowledge on the subject he essays to teach. Generally speaking, then, he should have a liberal education in the best sense. That he should ‘know something about everything and everything about something,’ is a hard saying but a true one. And then there is a body of scientific and technical knowledge relating solely to the art of teaching, which must be mastered. With this special knowledge goes a related skill. Persons who have this prerequisite liberal education and the special knowledge and skill are experts, differentiated from tradesmen and purveyors of commodities, forming a group which may be called a profession under the most rigorous definition of that term.
Because this distinctive group, which we are pleased to call the teaching profession, possesses a knowledge and a skill which are vital to the welfare of community and national life, on which depends the continuity of civilization, there rest upon the group definite obligations toward the community and toward each other. These obligations are moral, and form a body of professional ethics. That teachers are becoming aware of their obligations is shown by the fact that codes of professional ethics for teachers have been formulated in several teachers’ organizations, notably by the State Associations of New York and Massachusetts. Briefly stated, these codes seek to fix standards of professional qualifications, to outline the principles of professional conduct, and to provide for the advancement of the profession as a whole. In so far as the teaching body generally accepts its ethical obligations, it has acquired a professional consciousness.
The fundamental question for all of us who give thought to education and the advancement of teaching is the creation and the increase of the professional solidarity which comes from a common consciousness of work well performed. The charlatan with his conceit of learning must give place to the genuine scholar with sound learning. The pedagogue with his pedantry must yield to the simple teacher with rich personal power. The vocationist must not be admitted with his cash-value doctrine until the groundwork of an education has been laid. ‘Soft pedagogy’ must be displaced by a vigorous, self-directed learning process. The temporary time-serving teacher must go. The feminizing process, by which even male teachers lose their virility, should cease. Our watchword should be, professional conduct. The new world demands more of teachers than any previous period has demanded of them. Education is the means of social salvation for modern peoples. The teachers must, therefore, have scholarship and technical skill, and also high moral purpose. They must recognize their ethical obligations to the point where they become a cohesive body, a profession. For such a body of teachers the rightful place in the sacred circle of the learned professions is prepared.