4

THE

Golfing

HE spring and autumn tournaments at the Country Club bring together the best players from the MidIdle Atlantic States. The Amateur Championship and the Annual Championship of the Woman's Eastern Golf Association have been played on this course. The eighteen holes have a playing length of 6,016 yards. The Sea View Golf Club links and clubhouse cost nearly half a million dollars. Its eighteen holes have been approved by many leading golfers. Golf is played

all the year.

Aviation

VIATION Week, 1910, set stand

Aards in the air. Brookins made a

world's altitude record. The same year, Wellman and Vaniman left Atlantic City in the airship America for their

covery rapid and pleasant. Doctors of all schools, many of them specialists, are resident. The Atlantic City Hospital is well equipped.

The marvelous sand forts of the children defy the hopes of the advocates of universal peace, and their pennies have as yet failed to appease the insatiable appetites of the sand lions of the beach sculptors. Riding the ponies, wading in the ocean, paddling in the shallow pools, searching for rare shells and the coy and reluctant clam-all these entertain the

children when not engaged in a wild scamper before the pursuing line of foam. Atlantic City is at all times of the year the place for children.

The Convention City

was

January, 1921

The teacher

a daily fire drill. regularly asked the students: "Children, what would you do if fire were to break out in this building?" The children all repeated in chorus: "We would rise in our places, step into the aisle, and march quietly out of the building." On the morning when Mr. Mabie visited the school, the teacher stepped before the pupils and said: "Children, what would you say if I were to tell you that Mr. Mabie is to speak to you this morning?" The children promptly replied in chorus: "We would rise in our places, step into the aisle, and march quietly out of the building."-The Outlook. Train Pupils for Citizenship CHOOLS are the price we pay for

EAR New York, Philadelphia, S being rent, propperous, and free

NE

Baltimore and Washington, Atlantic City has good train connections. with all parts of the country. Its meet

of 1,008 miles over the ocean. This was the first serious attempt to cross the Atlantic in the air.

The Atlantic City Air Port-the first in the world-was dedicated May, 1919. It supplies a splendid flying field for the Aero Club of America, the Aerial League of America and the Atlantic City Aero Club. It also provides an aerial mail station, an air port for transAtlantic liners, either seaplane, land plane or balloon type, and a good landing field for all aircraft. At the Second Pan-American Aeronautic Convention, many interesting demonstrations were made. In the future the popular route to the Playground of the World will be through the air.

Pure Water Supply

HE water for the city comes from

THE

tricity, gas and water. It has everything that goes with a large city except great manufacturing and commercial interests. It is a neutral point of which no city feels jealous. Atlantic City is the leading convention city.

Good Roads and Automobiling

a great,

nation. Without schools we would be a Mexico or a Russia. Health, knowlproducts of your teaching in the school. edge, power, skill-all should be direct

But the by-products should be regular habits, honesty, respect for law, love of justice, loyalty to our flag and all that it represents, and an abiding faith in our republican institutions. May we all as teachers highly resolve that God helping us we will this year bear high the torch of knowledge, justice, freedom, and truth that has been committed to our hands.-C. P. Colegrove, in Midland Schools.

High School Libraries

The Absecon Boulevard will eliminate STANDARD Library Organization

grade crossings and save five miles between New York or Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Garage accommodations are ample.

Unique and Unrivalled

and Equipment for Secondary Schools of Different Sizes, popularly known as the Certain Report, has been reprinted by the American Library Association, 78 East Washington Street, Chicago, Illinois. It was first published by

HE National Education Associa

Ttion

tion is a professional organization.

An Editorial

I

The platform properly begins with the most vital element in a system of education-the teacher. It recognizes the serious obstacle that immature, transient, and untrained teachers place across the path of educational progress. It is the conviction of the Association that this problem cannot be met by half-way methods. The teaching profession itself

carried through to a successful issue, will constitute the greatest single achievement in the history of American education. It will involve among other things an almost complete reversal of the attitude that the public has hitherto taken toward the work of teaching. From an occupation now almost universally regarded as temporary and casual, the actual work of teaching boys and girls must in the future offer the recognitions and rewards that mark an occupation as constitu

Its fundamental purpose as set forth in its Charter is to elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching and to promote the cause of education in the United States. This is more than a mere sentiment; it is a pledge and a promise to the people of the United States from whose Representatives in Congress the Association accepted its Charter. As a professional organization the Association will do most for its own members when it does most for the cause in which their services are enlisted. It will do most for its members and most for the cause of education when it directs its energies toward raising the standards that determine who shall be permitted to teach; when it recognizes meritorious work wherever found and demands that such work be fittingly rewarded; when it condemns those within its own ranks who betray their high trust; when it demonstrates to the public that the men and women engaged in the public-school service would make that service clean, efficient, and dependable.

Consistent with these ideals, the platform that appears in outline form on this page has been officially adopted as expressing briefly but faithfully the collective judgment and the collective will of the Association as embodied in its resolutions. It is the purpose of the present article to consider the more important implications of this program as a whole. Succeeding articles will treat in turn each of the detailed proposals.

will be satisfied with nothing short of a competent and well-trained teacher for every classroom in the land.

How far we must travel to attain this goal and the successive steps that should be taken will be the theme of subsequent discussions in these columns. It is sufficient here to acknowledge that the goal will be hard to reach. For this reason, if for no other, the task which the profession has set for itself, when

ting a real career. For those who wish

to make classroom service an 'ultimate

job,' giving to its problems the same absorbed and life

long study that the physician, the lawyer, the engineer, and the business man are proud to give to their daily work, there must be sanctions and compensations that are comparable with those that accrue to patient, devoted, and successful effort in other callings.

It is with no selfish or insincere motives that the Association has set up this goal. It is not for individual profit that the members of this group pledge themselves to advance the status of the teacher. It is rather because the prevailing low status has prevented and still prevents thousands of capable men and women from entering the service. The work that should be done by the very ablest talent that the country produces is, in consequence, turned over in large part to persons who are far too immature to grasp its significance. The work that calls for the highest type of preliminary preparation if it is to be done well is all too frequently delegated

to teachers who have themselves but the barest minimum of substantial education. The work that can be done best by those who have mastered a difficult art through years of studious effort is intrusted to successive levies of raw recruits.

That all this is unjust to the small proportion of teachers who spend their lives in the service is not the point at issue in the earnest desire of the Association to correct these grave defects. The emphasis is clearly and unequivocally upon the injustice that the Nation's children suffer from this shortsighted policy and upon the reduction of the Nation's strength by the failure to realize through competent instruction, training, and inspiration the possibilities that these children represent.

Society cannot insure to every child a good home, a devoted and intelligent mother, and a wise and provident father; but society can insure to every child a good school and a competent teacher. This is by all odds the most direct and effective channel through which the forces of social control can operate. To provide these advantages is by all odds the most serious of social obligations. Furthermore, by making such provisions now, the proportion of good homes and wise and provident parents will be vastly increased in succeeding generations. Investment at this point will not only return large dividends in the immediate future; the interest will be compounded at a rate unparalleled by any conceivable form of material in

vestment.

II

Basic to any effective plan for placing a competent teacher in every publicschool position is a far-reaching policy for the preparation of teachers. The Association recognizes this need in the second plank of its platform. Increased facilities for the training of teachers will mean not only more normal schools and teachers' colleges, but the extension and improvement of existing institutions. The instructional staffs must be enlarged; the program of studies enriched and expanded; and the requirements for admission and for graduation decidedly advanced. The Association maintains with justice that the professional schools of teaching should be placed on at least an equivalent footing with the institutions that train recruits for the professions that have so far developed the highest standards of preparation. To require from prospective

teachers a standard of preliminary training inferior to that demanded of prospective lawyers, physicians, and engineers is to belittle the public-school service and to leave its responsible posts open to men and women of inferior ability. Young people of the caliber needed in the work of teaching are intelligent enough to measure the worth of a service by the price that one must pay in terms of preliminary training for the privilege of admission.

But the need of increased facilities and advanced standards for the preparation of teachers strikes far more deeply than this. Low standards of prepara

SOCIETY cannot insure to

every child a good home, a devoted and intelligent mother, and a wise and provident father; but society can insure to every child a good school and a competent teacher. This is by all odds the most direct and effective channel through which the forces of social control can operate. To provide these advantages is by all odds the most serious of social obligations. Furthermore, by making such provisions now, the proportion of good homes and wise and provident parents will be vastly increased in succeeding generations. ment at this point will not only return large dividends in the immediate future; the interest will be compounded at a rate unparalleled by any conceivable form of material investment.

Invest

tion not only cheapen the service; they oppose the most stubborn of all obstacles to educational progress. It is probably true that in no other profession does inefficiency have the opportunity to live and to spread its baneful influence that it has in teaching. The muddled lawyer soon loses his clients. The bungling surgeon will not kill many patients before the logic of hard facts forces him to conclude that he has missed his calling. Even the blundering engineer cannot build many bridges that "buckle and break" until his last chance of getting another contract has been buried with the ruins.

In the efficiency of lawyers, physicians, and engineers the public, of course, has a vital interest; but its interest in the efficiency of its public-school teachers is even more fundamental, for here not only does inefficiency affect a wide circle of relatively helpless human

ity, but it may remain undetected for months or for years. To the preliminary preparation of teachers the public must look for protection against this danger.

III

If our professional schools of teaching are to attract students in sufficient numbers and if they are to keep them sufficiently long to insure a proper preparation, it is clear that the service itself must have a higher-a more honored-place in public esteem. Good pay for competent teachers is the first need, but it is not the only need. Methods must be devised for discovering exceptional merit and for recognizing highly efficient service wherever in the school system that merit may be found or that service rendered.

Men and women of the type that the schools urgently need are the men and women who look beyond material rewards. They crave-and they crave justly the recognition that successful effort brings in other callings. The names of the most successful practitioners in law and in medicine are widely known. Unusual achievement in the commercial and industrial fields brings a measure of renown that overtops in its attractiveness even the high financial rewards that go with it. The great artists, writers, actors, and musicians have their appropriate recognitions. Even the preacher who suffers with the teacher the misfortunes of a beggarly wage has possibilities of abundant compensation in wide fame and acknowledged prestige. But of the seven hundred thousand classroom teachers in American schools, not the seven hundred, not the seventynot even the seven-who are doing the best work are known to their own profession, let alone the public at large. 'Fame' in the educational world attaches not to superior teaching, but to successful administration, writing, and research and even the most successful teaching is more likely than not to draw the teacher away from his real work and, under the guise of 'promotion,' assign him to tasks that, important though they may be, require qualities less fine and less rare than those that highly expert teaching involves.

To change the false system of values by which teaching is now measured will be far from an easy task. It means above all an 'awakening of the people' not only or primarily to the essential injustice of this system of values as it affects the teaching profession, but to

a realization of the fact that their children are the chief sufferers.

IV

An effective plan for placing in every classroom a competent teacher must also go hand in hand with an extended and continuing program of educational investigation. Every art depends for its advancement upon scientific study that aims to lay bare the principles lying back of its practice. The scientific study of educational problems has passed the period of its infancy; it has amply justified the efforts of its pioneers in the contributions that have already been made to the understanding and improvement of educational processes. But what has been accomplished hitherto is at best only an augury of the benefits that will come when this field of investigation has become as well organized as are the fields of research in medicine, engineering, and agriculture. At the present time nothing is being attempted in educational investigation that is at all analagous in scope or efficiency with what a single endowed institution-the Rockefeller Institute-has accomplished in medicine; and any comparison of educational research with the work of the tax-supported agricultural and engineering experiment stations would be ridiculous.

In the meantime, the public is making demands upon the schools for results that are in many cases unattainable simply because the problems involved have not been subjected to a rigorous scientific analysis. Teachers are criticized for their failure to work what, under the present conditions of our knowledge, would be nothing less than miracles. That the prestige of the profession suffers from this situation is again not the basic evil; that the money invested in schools fails to make the return that it might make is not the most serious consequence of this neglect. The

basic evil lies once more in the injustice that the people's children suffer because the people themselves are unwilling to provide for the welfare of their offspring the type of scientific service that they provide for their crops, their cattle, and their hogs.

The establishment of the agricultural experiment stations through federal subsidy thirty-five years ago was in many ways a 'leap in the dark'; but results have justified in a thousand ways the chances that the Nation took. To promote the scientific study of important problems is no longer a leap in the dark. Science is often slow in its processes, but it has a way of getting results in the end. The processes of education are vastly more complicated than those of agriculture, more complicated even than those of medicine. It is the difficult tasks that are always left to the last.

But the time has clearly come for a measure of advancement in educational research that will rival the brilliant record that agriculture and medicine have made in the past thirty years. The most difficult pioneer work has been done. difficult pioneer work has been done. The methods have been refined and the field fairly well explored. It would be most unfortunate if, with this start, the movement should not go forward as rapidly as the resources of this rich country will permit. The Association stands pledged to do all in its power to promote this advancement.

V

The program that has been discussed in the preceding paragraphs is essentially a national program. It is true that it might be carried out bit by bit through the successive efforts of the States and the local communities. It is true, also, that a forward step even in the smallest or the most isolated school may be a step forward for the Nation. But such fractional advances leave the full solution of the problem not only years and decades but generations in the future. It should be remembered, too, that, while certain progressive communities are moving forward, others are likely to stand still or even to move back; hence the net result for the Nation may not be progress but retrogression. The Association is convinced that the Nation is neglecting at its own peril the serious problems presented by the public schools. It maintains that the Nation is itself an educational unit-that the States are as interdependent educationally as they are commercially and indus

IN

IN the meantime, the public is making demands upon the schools for results that are in many cases unattainable simply because the problems involved have not been subjected to a rigorous scientific analysis. Teachers are criticized for their failure to work what, under the present conditions of our knowledge, would be nothing less than miracles. That the prestige of the profession suffers from this situation is again not the basic evil; that the money invested in schools fails to make the return that it might make is not the most serious consequence of this neglect. The basic evil lies once more in the injustice that the people's children suffer because the people themselves are unwilling to provide for the welfare of their offspring the type of scientific service that they provide for their crops, their cattle, and their hogs.

trially-that educational backwardness in any single section, in any single State, in any single community is a matter of national concern-that every child is a child of the Nation as well as a child of the State and of the local community in which he may reside, and that the Nation as a nation has an interest and a stake in his proper education.

The Smith-Towner bill has been framed to meet the national need for better schools and better teachers. Its provisions and its present status are fully discussed elsewhere in this Journal. It is mentioned here as the most important step that has yet been undertaken to make effective on a nation-wide scale the comprehensive program that the Association has projected.

When the bill has been written into law, a beginning will have been made toward the solution of the great problem-a competent teacher for every public-school position in the United States. But this will be only a beginning. The program of the Association is larger than the bill-larger than any form of legislation could possibly be. Its full realization will depend upon something more fundamental than law; it will depend upon the deep-lying motives that sway the hearts and minds of our people-their innate sense of justice and fair play, their appreciation of real values once these have been clearly demonstrated, their substantial idealism that

has a way of rising on occasion to splendid heights of sacrifice and service.

Only as these fundamental forces are appealed to and directed toward the ends that the program seeks to attain can the promise of a new day in education be fulfilled.

VI

A profession can never be developed from without; wholesome growth and permanent gains come only through the operation of forces that work from within. The professions that today represent the highest standards of service very largely control the conditions governing that service. Their practices are governed by public laws, but these laws have usually been framed by the professions themselves and passed by the representatives of the people because the professions have taken the initiative and made the demand. Not only have the professions safeguarded the public interest by securing public legislation; they have safeguarded the public interest by voluntarily imposing upon themselves restrictions that may even impress the lay mind as needlessly oppressive.

It means much to the dignity and worth of a calling that its standards and ideals are self-determined. It implies a measure of public confidence that gives to the professional group a powerful prestige in its efforts to improve its service. To raise their profession to this plane of public confidence should be the aim of all teachers who have at heart the welfare and progress of education. Only united action can bring this about, and united action means, first of all, effective organization.

For the first time in the history of American education, the framework of such an organization has been set up. The National Education Association is now a federation of State and local teachers' organizations. Its deliberations and proceedings hereafter will be organized and conducted on the delegate basis. Its pronouncements will voice the opinions and record the judgments of the teaching public with a measure of fidelity that has hitherto been out of the question.

At the present time more than sixty thousand teachers speak through the National Education Association. By the close of the year, the number will be more than one hundred thousand. The voice of one hundred thousand teachers will be listened to by the public. Within a year this first condition needed to elevate teaching to the status of a real profession will be met. From

that time forth the all-important question will be this "How may this great organization which now has the ear of the public use the opportunity to promote public trust in its proposals?"

We speak frequently in these days about 'selling ideas.' The first step in selling an idea is to obtain a hearing. That point the Association will soon reach. The next step is to convince the prospective purchaser that the goods offered meet a real need, and that the price is consistent with the value. But in building up a permanent business the first sale is at best no more than a fair beginning. Only as the goods continue to satisfy will the market continue, and in proportion as the goods do satisfy, the confidence of the market in the merchant grows apace. It is that confidence that must be the goal toward which our efforts are directed. The items in the Association's program are the goods that are offered; the public is the market; the Association is the merchant. The public's confidence-its 'good will'— once it is assured, will be the Association's most important asset.

VII

The essential strength of the Association under its new organization lies in the vigor of its component units. The influence of each of these units adds to the power and prestige of the central body; and through the central body each unit partakes of the strength of all the others. To contribute to the

W

HEN the bill has been written into law, a beginning will have been made toward the solution of the great problem— a competent teacher for every public-school position in the United States. But this will be only a beginning. The program of the Association is larger than the bill -larger than any form of legislation could possibly be. Its full realization will depend upon something more fundamental than law; it will depend upon the deep-lying motives that sway the hearts and minds of our people-their innate sense of justice and fair play, their appreciation of real values these have been clearly demonstrated, their substantial idealism that has a way of rising on occasion to splendid heights of sacrifice and service.

once

development of each and every affiliated organization is to increase the effective power of the Association as a whole.

are.

The Association, then, has an important service to discharge in promoting, in every way consistent with its Charter, the progress of teachers' organizations throughout the country. This service cannot be limited to an encouragement of new movements, important as these It must involve as well the safeguarding of the gains already made and especially the defense and protection of professional interests, standards, and ideals. The Association has properly placed its first emphasis upon the responsibilities of the profession to the public; but it recognizes that there must always be a fundamental balance between responsibilities and rights. Vigorously to combat in every legitimate way the injustices to which teachers may be subjected because of their occupation must be part and parcel of its efforts to advance the interests of the profession and to promote the cause of education. It is true that there should be no empty threats or idle boastings here; it is equally true that there should be no mincing of words. The National Education Association is in a position to serve a plain warning to those who would defame the teaching profession, belittle the public-school service, or embarrass teachers in the performance of their duties. A clear implication of the commission given to the Association in its Charter is the duty of protecting the profession and its members from unwarranted and unjust attacks. The Association will not seek trouble-but neither will it seek at the price of selfrespect to avoid trouble. It has the most pacific of aims; but in the defense of the profession and in the professional protection of its members it has both the power and the determination to be as aggressively militant as the occasion may demand.

VIII

There are two principles which, in the judgment of the Association, should be firmly established as public policies because they are fundamentally essential to the realization of the ideals that have been set forth in the preceding paragraphs.

The first of these is the principle of equal salaries for equal service to all teachers of equivalent training, experience, and success. This means, negatively, that the financial rewards of (Continued on page 13)