The Schools I Want and How to Get Them

by CATHERINE TUTTLE SQUIRES

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TEACHERS strike!" “Pupils strike!" “Overcrowding a serious fire hazard!” “American education a failure!” Depressing headlines flash by with almost daily regularity. Gone are the days when articles on the schools wore largely those interred in professional journals. When school may not even open tomorrow because there are no teachers to teach, it is news and everybody’s business. Parents, taxpayers, educators — we are all deeply concerned because we have to be.

My own point of view is that of a former teacher, mother of two children in the grades, school board member, and property owner. I am considering primarily tax-supported schools.

I believe, first of all, that the need for new and improved schools must be met. The lack of satisfactory physical space, well equipped, is not confined to any one part of the country or to any single type of community. The children in the crowded buildings of small towns have their metropolitan counterparts in New York City, where, we are told: “In one [school] last fall, children had to squat on tin pails and fruit baskets for lack of chairs.” In between these two extremes are the rapidly growing “middle-sized” places in which population increased so rapidly during the war that the schools are desperately taxed for room. Typical of these is one expanded community of 20,000 in the Middle West where an aroused school board is already planning a bond issue of $650,000 to provide new and improved facilities. Worst of all, perhaps, is the plight of the country child. Rural areas are the “educational slums” of this nation, according to Dr. John K. Norton, Professor of Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, in a recent eloquent plea for increased state and Federal aid for our 190,000 rural school buildings.

Secondly, the schools I want will have better teachers with better pay. While deploring strikes as a means to an end, one can hardly blame teachers for doing something drastic in the light of the fact that $1786 was the national average of pay in 1945 for all teachers, supervisors, and principals. People frequently criticize teachers for being so ineffective in the classroom, and so negative in the general community life. The chances are that a teacher is worked to death in the overlarge classes that reduced faculties have produced; or that in off hours, if he has any energy left, he is doing anything and everything to supplement his meager salary. It is no wonder that thousands now in the profession are leaving it, and sufficient prospective teachers to replace them are simply nonexistent. A survey of twenty states indicates 55 per cent fewer teachers in training than five years ago.

Whether school boards, harassed by weary taxpayers, like it or not, they will have to make substantial salary increases if they are to keep the teachers they now have, or attract the small number that will bo available during the next few months and years. In 1945 the American public spent $3,000,000,000 on tobacco products and $8,000,000,000 for alcoholic beverages. If we can afford those vast sums, surely we can give our educators a decent recompense.

Assuming better pay, we will have more and better teachers, both men and women. Under present conditions the profession is highly feminized. In Chicago, with a current enrollment of about a third of a million pupils, there are close to 13,000 women teachers and only 2000 men. The proportion is doubtless the same in most communities. Granted that elementary teaching has long been considered a woman’s job, we must have more men teachers throughout the schools to secure well-balanced faculties. Given financial security, the high type of man we traditionally associate with teaching will have added incentive to enter the profession.

However, salary increases do not provide the whole answer to the problem of improving the quality of instruction. Even in New York State, where the minimum pay is now $2000, and in California, where it is $2400, there are probably some poor teachers. Man does not live by bread alone, and young people must be made to see that teaching has rewards which cannot be measured solely in terms of money. For reasons not entirely connected with the salary situation, teaching no longer appeals to many of our best college students as a profession with prestige and honor. In a recent college graduating class of 175, only three wished to become teachers. The majority of these graduates came from families of comfortable circumstances.

To correct this state of mind, we must, it seems to me, restore the position of the teacher to one of general respect and admiration. The usual stale, and often cruel, jokes about teachers all too frequently bring a laugh, indicative of the low popular regard in which they are sometimes held. As citizens we must assume more responsibility for making enjoyable the life of the teachers in our own communities. Too often the only social and recreational experiences they have are among themselves and of their own creation. They live in the town, but they are rarely a part of it.

We have a serious obligation here if we are to keep and attract the really able individuals with winning personalities that we want in our schools. A certain type may be compensated by sheer love of the work, but we must make more evident our appreciation of the great numbers now “unhonored and unsung.” With the rewards more apparent, we can deliberately and without apology encourage our best young people to enter the teaching profession, an appeal to which they can respectfully and thoughtfully listen.

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THIRDLY, the schools I want will have rethought their whole philosophy of education. Most schools ought to re-examine their objectives. Aside from some markedly progressive — or conservative — private schools, and public vocational schools, who knows what many tax-supported institutions wish to accomplish? For what are they trying to educate? Even in the vocational groups there might be a questioning of the course to see if the student is given, to quote Robert M. Hutchins, Chancellor of the University of Chicago, “a sense of purpose which will illuminate not merely the 40 hours he works but the 72 he does not.”

In the so-called liberal arts schools, there are often lacking even the fairly well defined goals of the trade types. The tendency seems to be to add course after course, each valiantly championed by its own defenders, in the hope that somehow the hapless student will emerge “educated.” The result is a confusing welter of assorted facts on every subject remotely connected with the complexities of modern life. My own feeling is that it is time we did some subtracting, or at least some reorganizing, with a shifting of emphases. As Angelo Patri, wise teacher of many years, has said: “It is not necessary to teach a child every detail of human experience. If he is taught the fundamentals of learning, he can go a long, long way himself. ... It is wonderful how much a child can skip of human knowledge and still arrive at wisdom.”

That is not to say that only the three Rs are to be left after the pruning has boon done. But anyone familiar with the handwriting of the average college student and the need for work in remedial reading and spelling knows that there is still plenty to do in the fundamentals. Granted that all these specialized courses — the latest is a demand for classes in labor relations in all public and private schools — are desirable per se, there is still too much. How can there be any real digestion of experience, any real appraisal of what is presented, when the net effect is the miscellany found in the typical “Question and Answer” column of the daily newspaper?

In my opinion, we shall do better to attempt less and stress more the basic subjects and the techniques of study and the acquiring of information. An Englishwoman now teaching in this country has observed: “The American child does not know how to study. ... I have 129 pupils and only 20 can study seriously.” If we will showr our students the way to get knowledge and stimulate them to want to do so, we shall accomplish more than we do by the mental stuffing process now so prevalent.

The schools I want will also make provision in their curriculum planning for released time for religious education. Such a policy in no way conflicts with the traditional separation of church and state in this country, yet it does make possible a kind of training our children need as never before. With the whole world confused in its sense of moral values, the school cannot be indifferent to the power of religion. That released time is a workable arrangement is indicated by the fact that forty-six of the forty-eight states already have the plan in operation; and one has only to study its conspicuous success in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in the state of Vermont to realize what great good is being accomplished. The remaining two states should quickly fall in line.

Within the present province of the schools is the stressing of what might be called world-mindedness. The atomic bomb brought a new division of time into human history, and any thought of the future must consider it in all its dreadful import. As the U.S. Commissioner of Education, J. W. Studcbaker, puts it: “The schools must provide the firm basis for international cooperation by an increased emphasis for world understanding.” This new emphasis does not mean the addition of new courses; it means rather a shifting of accent from national to international in courses already in existence. The possibilities for teachers with energy and imagination are almost limitless. Geography, history, language, music, art — every one of them can be made vitally significant from the world perspective.

Such an orientation is already being carried out in New York City, where every teacher from the first grade through the high school is provided with an excellent syllabus on the United Nations. This introduces no new courses, but shows how the world point of view can be correlated with material currently taught. Such a syllabus should be used everywhere. In addition, professional journals are now full of suggestions for alert teachers, and they have only to follow the progress of that most hopeful of organizations, UNESCO, for further help and inspiration.

These, then, arc the schools I want: more and better-equipped physical structures; schools with better teachers, better paid; revised curricula with released time for religious instruction; and an allpervading emphasis on world-mindedness.

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How to achieve such schools? There is no magic formula, but I should start at home. Be it large or small, every community carries its own weight, and I should try to make the citizens of my immediate locality conscious of these needs and eager to work for their realization. A striking example of the effectiveness of this approach was demonstrated six years ago in my own community. We were greatly in need of a new school building, but there were the customary objections from those reluctant to see an increase in taxes. A systematic program of educating the public was carried out by the committee empowered to investigate the situation. Small groups of private citizens were talked to; practically every local organization received a careful and patient explanation of the case; and the most, recalcitrant individuals were accorded special handling. When the issue came to a vote, the result was a wide margin in the affirmative.

A similar local demonstration on another matter occurred two years ago. To test popular support of the United Nations, an article on that subject had been placed in the warrant for every town in my state, to be voted upon at t he annual Town Meeting. For several weeks prior to that occasion, a college professor in the community, himself an expert on international relations, addressed groups of all kinds, informing them on the nature and importance of the United Nations. When the votes were counted, there were 137 for and only 2 against. A neighboring town which had not been “educated” expressed itself almost solidly in the negative.

This same technique can be employed in any locality on any question of public interest. When the schools are concerned, the process should be made positive by electing to boards of education only forward-looking persons who have vigor and enthusiasm.

To supplement local monetary support, I should work for increased state and Federal aid to schools. It has become almost a cliché to regard national assistance as running “the risks of Federal domination of teaching.” This is, I believe, a groundless fear. We have had very satisfactory subsidy plans on both state and national levels involving the building of highways, care of the blind, school hotlunch programs, and, newest of all, the proposed government appropriations to encourage hospital construction. If the present comparatively small grants to education can be augmented and handled as successfully as in these other fields, we should accept them with gratitude.

Helpful as are these extra-local aids, however, I should never let my own community forget its primary responsibility in the education of its children. There is where the spark of initiative must ignite, and be fanned to working heat. If we can but arouse enough people everywhere, in the country, in the towns, and in the great cities, we shall have schools worthy of the best in the American tradition, and productive of citizens who will unite in the great cause of peace and security for all.