What Hope for Women Teachers?

by ISABEL STEPHENS

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WITHIN the last two or three years this country has become aware of its underpaid teachers. Nowadays no one is allowed to miss the fact that teachers arc poorly paid and scarce. The assumption seems to be general that if teachers were paid more, more young people would choose the profession and stick to it, and then we parents could cease worrying about the school life of our children. It would be good to think that it was all as simple as that.

Unfortunately there seems to be little evidence that young women in American universities and colleges have a desire to teach and would gladly enter the teaching profession if they could afford to do so. I do not think that the small pay check is the main deterrent which holds back able, wellprepared young women from teaching. If we raise salaries enough, we shall of course find people to do the work; but the question is, What people? Will conscientious parents who want good schooling under good conditions for their children be able to stop worrying when salary scales are up 50 per cent? I am inclined to doubt it.

Let us by all means hasten the present tendency of school boards to raise teachers’ pay — it is only reasonable and just. But let us not be deceived into thinking that that will solve a very grave national problem. The horrid truth is that we have invented a huge new machine — the American School System. We have devised elaborate schemes for training and qualifying young people for membership in the staffs of our thousands of schools, and now we must face the fact that far too few of our ablest and finest students wish to follow the profession of their teachers. Unless we can discover why this is so and do something about it, America’s pride in its schools will become what it already threatens to be: pride in our school buildings and our organization. It is not just numbers of teachers that we need; it is more fine teachers, teachers of the caliber of the rare ones in every community.

It is imperative that we assess here and now the thinking of young people about the teaching profession. If we can find out why they are reluctant to embark upon it, perhaps we can in some cases change their ideas to conform more nearly to the facts. Perhaps we can change things in our own communities to meet some of their just criticisms. Since women far outnumber men on most of our school staffs, what young women think is especially pertinent. Students in the liberal arts colleges represent a large group from which we should draw our future teachers. But at present very few students in the women’s colleges are headed for teaching. From my own experience in talking with undergraduates, I have repeatedly encountered four typical forms of resistance. These ideas permeate the entire college, but are not fostered by it. They come fully developed from the home community. Sometimes the girl sheds them, more often not. Somewhat simplified these notions are as follows:

1. “ Teachers are born, not made. You either are good at teaching or you are not. It is a talent that cannot be trained or learned.”

Here is an escape for any young scientist or historian or linguist who shrinks from the thought of teaching.

2. “Teaching is the safe and stodgy thing to do. Grandmother felt emancipated when she broke away from the farm and got a job teaching. Nowadays one must have an apartment in New York and see life while working at Altman’s or Macy’s. There is no chance of teaching anywhere except in stuffy little towns or suburbs or in girls’ boarding schools, where I would be ‘the young element’ among the dried herring.”

Here is a mixture of truth and fiction which has great power to dissuade any who may leap the first hurdle or feel they have “talent.”It shows no understanding of the possibilities in teaching as an interesting occupation regardless of grandmother’s desire to get away from great-grandfather.

3. “Teachers are old maids. I want to get married and that means I ought to meet men in the next few years. Teaching is a dead end.”

Here again is much truth. Here is where the higher-salary argument begins to be important, because if teachers were paid more, more young men who now hesitate would enter the profession. There would be more eligible bachelors on school staffs, and in time fewer teachers would remain single. This argument overlooks the fact that a young woman need not marry into her own profession. The real difficulty lies in the fact that a woman schoolteacher living in a strange community is isolated from males — not only male teachers, but all males. The suburb or city community makes no place for her as a social being outside of school hours. The small town eyes her suspiciously and keeps her in a state of self-conscious solitude except for church socials and ladies’ bridge parties. (The square-dance vogue is helping here.)

4. “Teaching is dull and monotonous. You do the same thing over and over.”

This total misconception is a very hard one to defeat. Teaching is the only adult occupation which most girls know by direct daily experience. Even housekeeping they know only in fits and starts and as assistant sweeper-upper. Teaching they have seen at close range for years. Little do they stop to realize that monotony enters every job, that “journalism” may mean drudgery, “publishing” often means proofreading till your neck aches and then more proofreading, that “secretarial work” means typing, typing, typing, typing. To repeat once a year seems insignificant when one has tried being a telephone operator. But to such a remark the college student will say, “Oh, but I want to be in personnel work with the telephone company.” She has never tried five-minute interviews all day long — cards, card files, and numbered faces.

It is noticeable that none of these notions about teaching makes any reference to salary. Neither do they make any reference to teaching as a “calling” in any literal sense of the word, as one might speak of the ministry. It seems that most college women do not think of teaching as something important to do for the good of the world, as they think of work for the United Nations or the diplomatic service or even government jobs in Washington. In recent years, since about 1932 to be more exact, young people fired with any sort of missionary zeal have been much more likely to direct it toward government civil service than toward teaching. This fact has probably spared the nation some overearnest teachers who wear out their pupils with good intentions, but it has also deprived us of a great many enthusiastic people in a profession that can use them as well as most Washington bureaus, if not better.

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THERE is a fifth deterrent which undermines the supply of teacher candidates still further. This fifth consideration does not usually come to college with the freshmen. It comes upon students unawares after they have overcome the objections of their friends, and often of their families, and have decided that teaching is what they want to do. Enthusiastic disciples of teaching, they suddenly discover that they must qualify for public school jobs in a way that seems to them absurd. Many refuse to do it. They say, “There is too much hocus-pocus to qualifying for a teaching certificate in most states. What with six semester hours of this and eight of that, too much of my time would go to courses in education and psychology which I do not want.” Furthermore, the requirements for experience leave them baffled. Apparently they must, take a fifth year and then be short some essential “practical hours.”

Very few of even the most earnest and eager students in a liberal arts college are willing to take the eighteen hours of education plus the practice teaching they seem forced to do, usually in a fifth year. If they must finance a fifth year of study, they prefer to go on into some professional school, or even, as a last resort, into graduate work leading to college teaching. At this point their instructors in college often add the final push by discouraging the ablest ones from teaching in secondary schools. College teachers like to maintain that the best students are most needed in college teaching and will waste their time in the secondary schools. It is hard to say how much influence this attitude has, but certainly it is no help to be told by your professor that he considers high school teaching something for the second-raters — the earnest C students — to do.

I almost never talk with a college woman who is considering the advisability of going into public school teaching without feeling strong sympathy with her hesitation at the same time that I want, to urge her into the work. She is right in thinking that she will be bored with some of the courses she will have to take to fulfill state requirements. She will often wonder whether anybody cares what she thinks about history or mathematics or whatever it is she wants to teach, and whether she is ever going to have a chance to know the children she hears so much about, but does not seem to be allowed to teach.

She is right in thinking that it will be difficult to find a job in a community of the kind she knows best. She will probably have to start in a wholly strange small town where she will be conspicuous as a newcomer whose faults, real and imaginary, will be topics of general conversation. If she does achieve a suburban school, she will find it hard to have a good time and to make congenial friends. The young married couples, absorbed in their own social life, leave her isolated. Aware of much of this, she will find it hard to stick to her determination to teach in public schools when good private schools are glad to have her for what she is, provided she can give evidence of good standing in her academic work, and of serious intention to become a teacher. Just as many of the most promising young men who go into teaching turn to the private schools and academies, so the young women who rightly feel that they have had a good education are tempted to turn away from the public schools.

There can be little doubt that in the worthy attempt to legislate prepared teachers into our schools, and to legislate out political patronage, we have set up absurd barriers for literate, intelligent young people. One or two courses in education can be a help to them, but surely most of their theoretical work in education should be done not before they have ever taught school, but after four or five years. Then it comes as a desired inspiration and help. Studied in vacuum as far as their own teaching life is concerned, educational theory must of necessity be almost meaningless. Some actual experience with children should of course be provided for advanced students in every undergraduate college, and they should undergo some sort of apprenticeship before launching into their own classrooms. But the present requirements for experience make it almost impossible for young teachers to start anywhere except in the most difficult situations.

The oneor two-room school is no place for the beginner, nor is the small-town school. Big city schools should make places for many more novices than are now admitted. As novices they could learn as they teach under the guidance of experienced people. If they could be reasonably sure of sympathetic direction on the job, many young women who now shrink from the work, and many more who once tried and were discouraged, would enlist in the important service of bringing up the next school generation.

If we want to keep in our schools the young teachers who have been ambitious enough to fulfill the paper requirements and at the same time retain their vigor and originality of mind, we must give careful thought to the things which some of them find discouraging after they get into the schools, as well as to the deterrents which keep their peers out. More than once I have received a letter saying something of this sort: “I am not going to stick another year. I feel cramped and caught in this narrow little female world where we talk, or rather gossip, about the children and our own little affairs. Teaching makes people petty and pulls them down to a trivial way of talking and thinking. We never feel as if we were part of anything big — not even ‘American Education.’ Most of our job is busywork, filling out records and attendance sheets and ratings. The principal is more interested in how efficient we are than in our ideas. Socially and intellectually I’m in a hole. I’d better climb out now.”

The next time that I hear from the writer of such a letter, she is trying her hand at selling or publicity or stenography. She had fine possibilities as a teacher, I know. She failed to find encouragement and companionship of the kind she had known in college. She is to blame for weakening so readily; but also to blame are the school and the community in which she taught. Young teachers are not considered as young people who want to live fully and gayly in the adult community. Parents tend to invite them to supper with the children; conversation seldom rises above a discussion of reading disability and usually stays on Johnny and Mary. If there were more married women among the teachers, it would be much easier for the new young women to enter the life of the community with the help of established citizens. The opposition to married women teachers in many places rules out of the schools the very people who could do most to build a happy, easy social life between teachers and the community.

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THERE are a few things that private citizens, just plain parents and other taxpayers, can do about all these discouraging facts and discouraging fictions that keep exceptional young people away from teaching. To begin with, why not abandon the notion that teaching is an inborn talent and recognize it as a difficult art that can be learned by anyone who cares enough about children and about studying to be willing to live in a world of books and children without finding the two incompatible? Once recognized for what it is (or should be), the profession seems a good one for many able young women. They should be encouraged to consider it. This can best be done by a direct attack. I mean: by helping to create an interesting social life for the teachers in the local community, citizens can disprove the notion that teaching is dull and also the notion that it leads to isolation and a single life. (Why the single state seems so overwhelmingly undesirable to American girls is difficult to say. Grandmother’s sister never did get married, and now at sixty-five she is a lively and charming spinster with no apparent regrets over her freedom. She found a profession interesting and independence preferable to many of the marriages of her friends. But that particular sort of emancipation seems to have been on the wane since the early part of this century, particularly in the decades since psuedo-Freudian doctrine has become popular.) The sincere “career woman” is almost nonexistent on most college campuses today.

It is important that we dispel the pall of oldmaidism which hangs over teaching. This can be done by encouraging more men to teach and also by including women teachers in the normal social life of the community, by making plans for them at the dinner table and the country club dance. Furthermore they should be admitted to the staffs of city schools when they are young and inexperienced. Low pay would be no deterrent to them if they could have the compensations of urban life when their hearts are young and gay, and of teaching experience under the direction of experts. Though all such arrangements are technically in the hands of school officials, citizens can voice their opinions. School boards have ears and power.

Parents can even find out when, as is sometimes the case, new teachers are baffled by the kind of mechanistic system they are caught up in. They can find out, for example, when state requirements for certification are keeping able prospects from coming into the best schools except as “internes” or student teachers for a single year of study. They can ask whether there is any way for these young people to stay on as beginners in the city schools instead of having to strike out alone in small communities. Wouldn’t those small communities often be better served by married women residents?

Is the prejudice against married women teachers working to draw young unmarried women into the profession or to keep them out? Investigation will often show that local regulations not only keep out of the schools friendly and experienced advisers of the sort young women teachers want, but also add another “dead end” as far as professional interest is concerned, for if a teacher marries, her profession is permanently closed to her in many parts of the United States. This fact discourages many young women from undertaking long and expensive preparation.

With all these matters the local citizens should be intimately concerned. Nothing but lethargy or ignorance on the part of parents makes it possible for “efficient” principals and superintendents to make bored classroom managers out of potential teachers. If we parents more often praised a teacher for ideas and enthusiasm and scholarly emphases, and less often for her power to keep order, the policing would be kept where it belongs, as a minor necessity but not the end-all of teaching. A thoughtful, scholarly person can find teaching a very delightful job, but she can do so only if she is encouraged to be thoughtful and scholarly. While the main responsibility for making life interesting for young teachers falls upon themselves, the principal, and the older members of the school staff, parents can help both by positive action and by inquiry and criticism.

Above all, these young teachers must be treated as young women. When that happens college girls will look with favor on the profession, and many of our finest will put teaching as their first choice for the future. Then indeed parents can begin to relax.