no such opportunities. Here unusual success brings no unusual recognitions or rewards except as it may actually lead one away from the work of teaching into administrative and supervisory activities.

Our conception of what constitutes promotion in educational work is in itself a sad commentary upon the unprofessional status of our calling. In general the line of promotion is from rural school to graded elementary school, from lower grades to higher grades, from elementary school to high school, from high school to administration or perhaps to college teaching. And even in college and university work the effective sanctions and recognitions attach, not to teaching as such, but either to the kind of productive scholarship that finds expression in printer's ink, or again to administration. It is not too much to say that the current policy of promotion in educational work is actually backward-from the most exacting tasks to those which, while still difficult enough, really make smaller demands upon the individual.

THE "FACTORY" PLAN OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION

In common with many of you in this audience I have tried to think out plans by means of which the status of the classroom teacher in the scheme of public education might be effectively recognized-plans thru which effective rewards and sanctions might come to attach to the actual work of teaching. I think that, upon the whole, you and I have been animated in these plans and hopes by purely unselfish motives. We find certain satisfactions in our work-satisfactions that often overtop any material rewards of which we can conceive-but this, after all, does not solve the problem. The great majority of our public-school teachers are transient, immature, and untrained. They do not look upon teaching as a permanent career. They do not prepare themselves adequately for it. They do not remain in the service long enough to acquire anything more than an amateur's conception of its problems, its methods, its technique, and its responsibilities. Those who enter it as a permanent calling are continually tempted to seek promotion that takes them away from the actual, vital contact with pupils and students. The great, and just now the very momentous, problem of getting the next generation ready for its serious responsibilities is being accomplisht more and more upon the factory plan. I mean by this very frankly that the status of the classroom teacher is becoming more and more akin to that of the "hands" in a factory, working under foremen and superintendents who assume the real responsibility. More and more frequently too these foremen and superintendents in our schools are being recruited from a group which has never served an apprenticeship in the actual work of teaching boys and girls.

Schools, however, cannot be operated on the factory plan except at the peril of the vital and fundamental function that they must discharge. We are wont to think of teaching as an applied science. It is the fashion to believe that general principles analogous to those that govern the processes

of agriculture and engineering can be workt out and reduced to simple rules that anyone can apply under competent direction, and the plain corollary of this thesis is that the teacher may be considered as an artisan, analogous in every essential way to the carpenter and the bricklayer and the plumber who take the plans and specifications workt out by the architect and the construction engineer and realize them in actual material production.

I have all sympathy with the scientific study of educational problems up to this point, but here I balk. Teaching is only in part an applied science. The analogy with agriculture and engineering is mischievously misleading, once it has been carried beyond a relatively narrow range of application. The alliance of teaching is rather with the fine arts than with the applied sciences, The effective teacher must be an artist rather than an artisan.

ADMINISTRATION V. EDUCATIONAL POLICY

A final suggestion, thoroly practicable, is designed primarily to offset the insidious tendency that I have noted-the tendency to operate the modern public school on the factory plan. There is a very great difficulty to overcome here. In so far as administrative matters are concerned, there must be in every large educational institution, or system of institutions, a . hierarchy of authority and responsibility. Administratively we must have our foremen and our superintendents; but this is not at all inconsistent with delegating to the teachers as such a large measure of collective responsibility for what may be called the educational policies of the school or the school system. This distinction between purely administrative matters on the one hand and educational policies on the other has been workt out most admirably in certain of the colleges and universities that are supported at public expense. The lay boards of trustees are responsible to the people for the proper expenditure of the people's money, but these boards, if they are intelligent, depend almost entirely upon professional judgment for educational policies. In the colleges that I refer to these educational policies are always initiated by the faculties, which comprise usually only the mature and permanent teachers. The president of the institution, while administratively the agent of the board, is educationally not the autocratic boss but rather the cooperating leader of the faculty.

I believe that a similar plan is thoroly practicable in a high school or in a complete school system, assuming in each case that the teaching staff is mature, permanent, and well trained. Educational policies concerning the course of study, the adoption of textbooks, the adjustment of the program, the provisions for exceptional pupils of all types, and similar matters may well be determined either by the teaching staff acting as a unit, or by a representative "senate" of teachers elected by the teachers themselves. That the administrative and supervisory officers will exercise a leadership is both inevitable and proper, but leadership in these educational matters should be entirely without the authority of coercion or even

the suggestion of such authority. The recommendations of the teachers must, of course, be subject to the approval of the board representing the the people, but they should not be subject to an individual administrative

veto.

ADEQUATE PREPARATION OF TEACHERS

It should go without saying that the permanent betterment of the classroom teacher's status is absolutely dependent upon far better facilities for the professional preparation of teachers. It is, after all, the dead weight of the transient, immature, and untrained majority of our teaching population that forms the heaviest handicap to educational efficiency and progress. With more than half of the nation's children under teachers who have had absolutely no adequate preparation for their serious responsibilities, teachers who themselves are scarcely more than boys and girls at work, there can be little hope of an essentially modified conception of the teacher's service. As a nation we give less attention to the preparation of teachers than does any other country of equal standing. Until this condition is corrected fundamentally we are hopelessly handicapt.

I sincerely trust that the classroom teachers as a group will aid and abet in every possible way the movement that is already on foot to raise the status of our normal schools and city training schools. This is part and parcel of your cause. Personally I am strongly in favor of federal cooperation in the support of these schools. I believe that the national government should do for these schools the same effective and stimulating service that it has done for the state agricultural colleges. I think indeed that the measure of cooperation should be even closer with the normal schools. At the present time the teachers of our public schools as a group are recruited from an economic level of the population that cannot afford to send its children to distant schools for an extended term of preparation for the work of teaching. This, I take it, is at basis the fundamental cause of our low professional standards. There is but one way out of this dilemma, and that is to place the preparation of public-school teachers upon the same basis that we have placed the training of officers for the army and navy; namely, to select candidates for the service upon a rigorous basis of merit and then to pay them a living wage so that they can afford to prepare for teaching in a way and to an extent consistent with the responsibilities that they are to assume. For the government to cooperate with the states in doing this would be to recognize in a most effective way the much-talkt-of dependence of the nation's welfare upon the public school and the significance of the teacher's service to the nation's life.

The present time is peculiarly opportune to project an extended national, perhaps even an international, movement looking toward an appropriate status of the classroom teacher. Such a movement planned and projected now and launcht full tilt immediately after the war would be thoroly in harmony with the great democratic movement which has already gained

momentum in industry and politics both here and abroad. And this larger movement itself is thoroly in harmony with the spirit and purpose of the great cause for which we are fighting.

CAUSES OF THE PRESENT SHORTAGE OF TEACHERS

ISABEL A. ENNIS, BROOKLYN, N.Y.

As a result of the world-war perhaps no greater menace faces the people of this country than the present shortage of teachers. A glance at the daily papers and at school reports, city, state, and national, reveals everywhere a shortage of present teachers and of teachers for the future. Fewer pupils are entering the high schools, and there is a decided falling off in the number of high-school pupils entering the training schools for teachers. Hundreds of experienst teachers, men and women thruout the country are resigning their positions for places in banks, in the government service, and in the various mercantile and industrial pursuits, where the responsibility is not so great and the remuneration is far greater. And why?

A pamphlet on Teacher Shortage Reasons by D. William Allen, Institute for Public Service of New York City, reads:

1. Salaries are too low compared with salaries in other fields, and too low compared with the high cost of living.

2. The attractions of other fields, apart from salary differences, are greater and are better advertised.

3. The training value of successful teaching as preparation for other fields is underadvertised.

4. Working conditions of schools and supervision are many times uninspiring and unagreeable, even when not disagreeable and discouraging. 5. Public and social recognition is too low [I would add, too slow].

Salaries are too low. There are nearly 800,000 teachers in the United States. There are perhaps 22,000,000 pupils. The average salary of the teachers in the United States is considerable less than $600. It is said that in Richmond, Va., there are teachers receiving less than $200 a year. Salaries should be increast. War bonuses should be given, and given immediately, to meet the increast cost of living and the competition of these various industrial, commercial, governmental, and clerical positions which are attracting some of the very good teachers from the public schools.

The public owes the teacher a duty and a recognition which it is all too slow to acknowledge and to render. When one considers the conditions of eligibility for a teacher in this ever-changing, complex civilization, classroom work is only incidental to her great work. She must fill every gap and want in the child's life except perhaps his keep, and many times she attends to that too,

Twenty-five years ago a woman could sew, do housework for herself or someone else, and she could teach; but the avenues of employment open to women today are so many and so varied that the profession of teaching is not being sought as it was in former years. Grammar-school graduates who may easily secure employment at $8, $10, or even $12 a week, with little or no responsibility, will not be drawn toward $16 or $17 a week after six years of severe training. On the walls of the Hall of the Board of Education of New York City are numerous United States government advertisements for stenographers, typewriters, clerks, etc., with salaries ranging from $900 to $1200 per year.

Much is made of the fact that the inflated salaries of these positions will not continue after the war, and that many places now filled by civilians will be given to returning soldiers. Be that as it may, the fact remains that many teachers have left the profession because they could not make ends meet on the very small pay given them in the cities in which they teach, and the United States Commissioner of Education warns us that "conditions that will follow the war will demand a higher standard of general intelligence, industrial efficiency, and civic equipment than we have yet attained." If these standards are demanded, the salary paid to the competents will not go down. In my judgment salary increases given to the teaching corps will not be withdrawn after the war.

Education is a state function; it ought to be recognized as a national duty. The United States is spending enormous sums for the education and rehabilitation of those who are fighting "to make the world safe for democracy," but it is not making certain whether these millions of dollars are actually providing for the efficient instruction of the future citizens of this country in what may be termed the "new education"-"to make democracy safe for the world." A precedent has been set by the passage of the Smith-Hughes Act, which provides for an appropriation, in conjunction with the state, to pay the increast cost of instruction thruout the United States. Instead of the United States paying half and the state paying half, should not the federal government pay the whole of it?

Some of the remedies suggested for the shortage of teachers are:

1. While this is not the time to lower standards of efficiency, circumstances warrant the same treatment being accorded to students in our high schools as to those in our military and naval academies: (a) rearrange the selection of the subjects; (b) reduce the time for the courses; (c) intensify the work so that the students may cover in two or three years what is now required of them in four years.

2. Reduce the time for training teachers about one half. Make the training period an intensive one and provide professional courses for teachers to pursue during the period of probation.

3. First provide, then advertise, the rewards, opportunities, and attraction of successful teaching.