to the rear board while any regular recitation is going on. Their work can be corrected any time the teacher gives the class any sort of composition work or study. In many schools where they have supervised study during a third of every period, the teacher always has this opportunity. In case a teacher is busy during the whole period with regular class duties, a sort of Lancastrain system can be used. I have used the last system in French composition, and while I do not think it would work as well in English, the main results should be secured,-more attention, more care, more thought, more work from the poorer pupils; and if they did not improve noticeably with these, I would consider that there was something at fault with my teaching. To a Daffodil Hail to your kindling glances, Armed with the joy of the earth! Straight little slim little fellow, -ISABEL R. HUNTER. Equal Salaries for Men and Women Teachers T ELIZABETH HODGSON, WICHITA, KANSAS HE National Educational Association not long ago voted to endorse the doctrine that men and women teachers should receive equal salaries for the same grade of work. These educators are making a mistake, an amiable, chivalrous, and very modern one, but a mistake just the same. Sentimental justice is one thing; physical and economic laws are quite another. The humanitarian spirit of the age is bringing about considerable unwise legislation which does more credit to the hearts of the legislators and promoters than to their heads,―minimum wage and eugenic laws, for instance. Some cities are already trying the equal salary plan, to their future regret. While public sentiment can modify many economic conditions, it can not keep wages long at an unnatural level, cannot force employers to choose the less desirable workers, nor make efficient, ambitious men willing to work beside women for the same wage. What is more fundamental still, no reform movement can overcome the physical differences which make it impossible for a woman and a man to contribute exactly the same services to society. The basic reason why a man's salary is higher than that of the woman doing similar work is this: for the woman of the middle classes marriage constitutes a profession, even the profession; while for the man it does nothing of the sort. It multiplies his responsibilities, steadies his conduct, arouses his ambition, and sends him back to his old work with a double determination to succeed. Employers of the most varied type join in declaring that the married man is in general more valuable to industry. His share in the community life becomes larger and more vital, and his value as a citizen is greatly increased. He is now a householder, a militant citizen, a supporter and defender of the family and the state. He makes direct contributions to society, and it is just that he should receive a direct social wage, a reward for his increased effort and reliability. If wage conditions in a single industry interfere with normal marriage, the most desirable men will desert that industry. If many occupations cease to pay a living family wage, there will be a great increase of immorality and general social abnormalities. That tremendous force of natural growth which enables a sapling to split a sidewalk is illustrated likewise in the violent disruptions caused by conditions that interfere with normal marriage. When a woman of the middle class marries, she gives up her work outside the home, in all but exceptional cases. Her contributions to society now become indirect, and she naturally receives an indirect social wage. In economic terms she becomes a buyer, a consumer, a conserver of values, not a producer. Her social contribution may be larger than ever, for she sends forth her husband a happier, cleaner, healthier, more ambitious man than he would otherwise have been, and she gives to the state well born citizens. And she collects her social wage through a happy home, through the higher salary paid her husband, through the public schooling and community protection that are given her children. Now, what has this to do with the question of equal salaries for men and women teachers? Just this: the thoroughly educated and experienced man teacher is usually married; the thoroughly educated and experienced woman teacher is usually a spinster, for to marry is to leave the profession. The married man and the spinster may do the technical part of a teacher's work equally well. But which is the completer human being? Which really contributes most to society? The man, undeniably. Leaving their extraschool value to society out of the question, are the married man and the spinster equally fitted to prepare their students for practical success? They may know an equal amount about teaching first-year latin, but which knows most about the duties of citizenship, the needs of the business world, the qualities that fit a young person for a given vocation, the hundred practical, daily operations of life outside the home? No one can deny that the average man has a broader experience and touches life at more points than the average woman. Academic narrowness and impracticality are among the worst weaknesses charged against the schools. Men can contribute certain elements of an education that women do not possess; but unless society pays them a premium for doing so, there will be few men in the schoolroom. A very few able men who love the work too well to leave it; some ambitious young men who are teaching for a year or two in order to get started at something else; and a few older men of small calibre or weak initiative will constitute most of the male teachers, if the profession is made more unpopular than it already is. In the lower grades the predominance of women is desirable. Few men can handle children with the skill and affection natural to women. In the colleges and universities there are comparatively few women professors. The great fields where men are needed are the grammar grades and the high schools. It is a great pity that adolescents, especially boys, should lack association with virile, broadly trained men teachers. To be sure, they need feminine influences too, but there is no danger that women will desert the high school. The feminine contribution is the less essential, since children see much more of their mothers than their fathers. Besides, the remarkably efficient schools of Germany prove that men teach passably well even when left to themselves. Educators advocate at least fifty per cent. of men teachers in the grammar and high school grades; the present number falls far below this mark, even counting all the school executives, many of whom do no teaching. There is a fundamental reason why men teachers are more needed than ever before. Our city population is growing with abnormal rapidity, and the city boy sees less and less of his father, has less and less home opportunity to gain the practical, knock-about physical training he needs, is more and more removed from a normal masculine atmosphere. The purity and unselfish devotion of mothers and women teachers can not be overpraised; yet their standards, their abilities and ideas are not adequate for giving a boy a full, normal development. If all sons could work beside their fathers as the farmer's son may, if all boys could have plenty of out-door "chores" and country sports, they might gain a man's education even if their school teachers were all women. But in the city a father has little time for his son, there are few useful tasks for him around the home, and the moment he seeks activity and comradeship he is exposed to many dangers. Our cities are awakening to this situation, and through the Y. M. C. A., through church societies and public playgrounds, and especially through the sports and the manual courses of the schools they are trying to give the boys physical training and normal society. Now, what would be the effect on this problem, if men teachers' salaries should be lowered and women's raised, so as to make them equal? Many of the ablest and most desirable men would leave the schools, thus greatly devitalizing them, and increasing the difficulty of keeping boys in them. New York City has just been trying the equal salary plan with this identical result. Experienced men have deserted the profession, and the number of young men entering the teachers' training colleges has dropped in a startling manner. Everyone admits that adolescent boys need some men teachers. Mothers and schoolma'ams are too apt to over-emphasize the feminine virtues, the merely negative and passive virtues. Without obedience, self-restraint, patience, and courtesy, a man would, of course, be a brute; but with them alone he would be an amiable failure. He needs the fighting virtues too,-independence, initiative, aggressive courage. Do our over-womaned schools develop these to a high degree? The world thinks not. Too much petticoat government moulds the docile boy into a waxen model of conformity, while it disgusts the dynamic, aggressive lad so that he escapes unprepared into the field of industry; or, worse yet, turns his subverted energy into a dangerous channel. There is another reason why boys need a few men teachers. This country is forming the conviction that our political and social evils are largely the fault of the inert citizen,-the honest worker and kind husband and father who refuses to devote any time and brains to the problems of good government. Why have the flames of patriotism burned low? Why should thousands of voters let party leaders huddle and drive them like sheep, or merchandize them like bars of soap? One answer is, that the men of today were almost wholly educated by the women of yesterday. Their mothers and their teachers drilled into them the private virtues and the family virtues, but could not give them what they themselves did not possess-civic pride, keen knowledge of public affairs, devotion to the public weal-in a word, aggressive citizenship. Why not teach history, civics, economics, even literature, in such a way as to make wide-awake patriots of the boys and girls in our schools? The women of tomorrow may do it, but few of the present generation are doing it. The high school boy of today who depends on his mother and his women teachers alone is not apt |