He would not have the people educated to depend upon the Federal Government for benefits. He feared that the Sheppard-Towner Bill would tend to "make the public expect to be nursed from the cradle to the grave" and be a detriment to the public life rather than a benefit.
New York State made a good appropriation for its own aid to mothers and babies, but did not apply for the Federal aid in addition. By the middle of the second month of 1922, however, nearly thirty states had accepted the Act as a welcome help in their welfare work, and few will be left outside of its provisions by the end of the year. The fear that such an Act would make the general government the active controller and director of the lives of parents and their children in most intimate ways seems not justified by the facts. The Bill, when pa.s.sed, simply provided money to be given to the states on the fifty-fifty basis "for the purpose of cooperating with them in promoting the welfare and hygiene of maternity and infancy." The specific plans for each state are to be made by the state agency in charge of the work and the only Federal supervision is that of standardization, by which the Chief of the Children"s Bureau, the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, and the Commissioner of Education must approve those plans as "reasonably appropriate and adequate to carry out the purposes of the Act" before the money of the Federal Government is pa.s.sed over to any state.
It is rather as a help to states desiring aid in this particular than as a compulsory requirement that the Act is intended to operate. There are those, however, who fear any extension of power of the National Government even through influence acquired by subsidies for necessary aids to the common life. It is a matter for thought and unprejudiced study what form of public aid is, on the whole, the best for our country. It cannot be denied, however, that different states have differing burdens to carry for the immigrant, the ignorant, the dest.i.tute, and the defective. It is at least desirable to press the point that no state lives to itself and no one dies to itself. Disease knows no boundary lines of political government and the death-toll of mothers and babies does not halt at geographical limitations. We are all one country insofar as bad social conditions are concerned. We are all helped when any smallest country town most remote from the centres of population is raised in its social standards and conditions. Hence, perhaps, we may not fear national aid to each locality in need or feel concerned as to what agency accomplishes a required social advance.
Ellen Key declared that every mother should be maintained by the state during the first year of every child"s life and that afterward each child should have one-half its support from the state and one-half from the father. That may not be the ideal. We may believe that to thus reduce the father"s responsibility would mean a dangerous lessening of his energy and devotion to the family well-being. It is true, however, that while there are so many in every community without essentials for care in childbirth or for the early nurture of infants, we must find some way of providing these essentials, or the state is endangered at its vital centre.
=Every Child Should Have a Competent Father.=--The third demand of childhood is for a competent father. That takes us at once into the area of wages and economic conditions. When the Children"s Bureau, itself a testimony to the awakened social conscience in respect to childhood, shows from careful investigation that in families where the father earns only ten dollars or less a week more than twice as many babies die before the age of two years than in families where the fathers earn twenty-five dollars a week or more, we can see with clearer vision than ever before that to give babies a fair chance in life the father must be fairly paid for his work.
The following table shows this fact in graphic form:
[Ill.u.s.tration: INFANT MORTALITY RATES. ACCORDING TO FATHERS"
EARNINGS COMBINED FIGURES FROM SEVEN CITIES STUDIED BY US CHILDREN"S BUREAU.
The baby death rate rises as the fathers" earnings fall.]
=Economic Aspects of the Father"s Competency.=--The death-rate of babies in families in which the mother has to earn outside the home under factory conditions of labor in order to secure absolute necessities is so high that it is seen to be not socially thrifty to thus place a double burden upon mothers. The death-rate and sickness-rate of families in which the children do not have sufficient nourishing food, in which the mother is half starved and wholly deprived of rest and pleasure, and the father is under terror night and day lest the rent money will not be ready when the landlord"s agent comes, cannot give us ease of mind. The families in which unemployment is frequent or overwork keeps the father as well as the mother under the pressure of nervous exhaustion, are the families in which the right of the child to two competent parents is grossly denied. The aid given the mother, by even the best of "Maternity Bills," insofar as it transcends the wider dissemination of knowledge and gives actual financial aid in economic distress, seems only a makeshift. The sick have a social claim for social care and the ignorant of all ages have a special claim upon the community for instruction, whether from separate Commonwealth or from the Federal Government, it matters little. The financial aid given, however, the "material relief" that must be rendered in family emergencies, should not be needed by the healthy, law-abiding, thrifty, honest, skilled, or even half-skilled workman. He should be able to earn a necessary minimum for himself and for his family by his own labors. We cannot here enter into the economic problems involved, but must register a conviction that real social progress must include not only a competent father for every child but also a fairer chance for every man to become that competent father through fairer sharing in the profits of industry. Widespread and careful inquiry as to reasons for dropping below the self-supporting line list as one cause of "necessity for material relief, having in the family more than three children under the age of fourteen." This fact must give us thought. At fourteen in many states the child may begin to earn something toward his own support. The question may well be debated whether or not an average man in ordinary economic general conditions should be unable to care for more than three children below the earning period if his wife is a competent housemother and thus earns her part. If such a condition of restriction upon family increase is accepted as inevitable and permanent in our industrial order, then surely the cost of rearing children must be far more widely distributed. In such a condition there would be needed social help for fathers and mothers far more definite and inclusive than merely the aid to expectant mothers. If it is true that it takes from three and one-half to four children from each married pair to keep up the population considered necessary for national well-being, and if there is an increasing number of men and women deterred from furnishing even two of that quota by the expense involved, then it is high time that we consider at least how the family burden may be more equally distributed.
=The French Plan of Family Extra-wage.=--One plan of meeting this unequal social burden of parenthood and the social danger involved in too few children born, France has devised by the family extra-wage.[8]
This is simply a provision by which married workers with children are preferred before married workers without children, and much preferred before bachelors, in the matter of wages. French work-people with families, irrespective of their station, rate of pay, premium or bonus, receive:
1. An indemnity of 200 francs at the birth of a child.
2. A suckling indemnity, which is given to the wife, of 100 francs a month during the first year.
3. An indemnity of 3 francs a day for each child under fourteen years of age, which becomes a part of the family income. The Paris district alone for the first four months of 1920 shows 39,266 families in receipt of these allowances, with 62,176 children benefited, at an expense of 4,115,014 francs. The money comes largely from a pooling of funds by combines of manufacturers in many industries, so that although business pays the extra charge it is distributed equally among all engaged in the same industry. The trade unions have not been wholly pleased with this discrimination in favor of fathers and mothers. They work for the strict equalization of wages. The national need for more children of strength and health, however, and the effect of low wages upon mothers and upon infant life have led to this social measure.
Surely, this is a way not wholly unreasonable by which a society can help pay for the children it demands.
=The Endowment of Mothers.=--In England, a different plan has been developed, although not yet applied. _A Proposal for the National Endowment of Motherhood_, advocated by K.D. Courtney, H.N. Brailsford, Eleanor F. Rathbone, A. Maude Royden, Mary Stocks, Elinor Burns, and Emilie Burns, has been published. In this plan the ideal is "that within each cla.s.s of income the man with a family should not be in a worse position economically because he has a family than the single man in that cla.s.s." They demand that "the standard of living be not lowered by children." The authors of this plan declare that in the present system "The mother is still the uncharted servant of the future who receives from her husband at his discretion a share in his wages." They want the mother to receive from society, through the Government, "a weekly allowance sufficient in amount to cover the primary cost of physical subsistence, paid to the mother for herself and for each of her children, throughout the period when the care of the children necessarily occupies her whole attention." They claim that such a plan would, in the first place, make "equal pay for equal work" for men and women really possible, since the argument that "men should be paid more because they have families to keep" would be outgrown. They claim also that such a plan would remove economic restrictions on parenthood which now often work social harm. They also claim that the health of children requires this public allowance for their care.
The authors of this plan, although frankly stating objections to this point, claim that the payment of this allowance should be directly to mothers "as the first step toward raising the status of women and blotting out, in what has been called the n.o.blest of professions, those conditions which compare only with the worst of sweated employments." The whole discussion of this plan is worthy most serious attention of all interested in preserving the family from injury through economic inequalities.
=Does This Plan Make Too Little of Fathers?[9]=--There is one question, however, among others, to be asked of the authors of this plan, and that is, Can not some means be devised to make the father"s share in the care of the children more definite and better rewarded, less often shirked or incompetent, in any scheme for state subsidy for the care of young children? The difficulties that inhere in all subsidies for children are chiefly those that make people of small intelligence and little conscience trade with the state for larger subsidies for larger families, begotten by the less fit for parentage and with an eye on the public purse. This catastrophe, not unknown in the past history of England, must be avoided. If there shall develop any scheme for equal sharing by all the community in the expense of raising the coming generation then there must surely be no special honor paid to those that have very large families. Better, for social purposes, that no children above a reasonable number should in any family receive a special allowance, even if older brothers and sisters did do so. It may be that in France large families are desperately needed. Not so in the United States. The number of five or six should certainly be the limit for which any just scheme of family subsidy should mulct the taxpayer.
=Just Limits to Number of Children in Subsidized Families.=--The difference between the three under fourteen years which in so many cases can be cared for una.s.sisted by the average workman, and the four and more that bring the family down to the danger-point of financial dependence, might be a subject for consideration in any scheme of family subsidy, and some clear idea of social need in family fertility should be a part of any proposition to make allowance from the public funds for each child under the earning age. In any case, the father"s share in the self-sacrifice and burden of parenthood should have some clear recognition in any law dealing with such state aid. In the last a.n.a.lysis, unless some extreme form of socialism is better than the present industrial order and to be sought, the best way to help the family is to make fathers and mothers competent to take care of their own children without too great effort for themselves and without injurious consequences to the children. Those Trade Union leaders may be right in principle when they hesitate to accept any public family aid scheme lest it make wages less rather than more and bring on a condition in which heroic struggle for one"s own, the very pith and marrow of manhood in its relation to the family, be less esteemed and less practiced.
We are confronted, however, both in the movements for aid to maternity in care before and after childbirth, and in all the many provisions for child-saving that publicly supported Boards of Health are everywhere inaugurating, with a tendency of the greatest strength and social appeal, tendencies toward a sharing by all of the burdens heretofore borne only by the heads of families. Some way must be devised by which such sharing will not cheat society of any gains to character and to sense of family responsibility which old systems of economic support of children have given the race. Some way must be devised to recognize as economic a.s.sets of society the special sacrifice and service of the housemother in her function of life-giver for the coming generations and yet not ignore the father but rather bring him nearer to competent fatherhood as social conditions make it easier for him to bear his part of the family load. The place for full discussion of these important considerations is not here, but the need for the child to have a father who can be the efficient partner of the competent mother in the task of rearing him must be always insisted upon, else reform measures that help the mother will only take us backward instead of forward.
=The Right of a Child to be Officially Counted.=--The next right of the child we must consider is the right to be listed as a member of the population. A registry of facts concerning himself and his condition that will enable the community to see where he is, what he is doing, and how he, in general, fares, is essential. The fact that only about one-half of the Commonwealths in our Union have full registration of births, deaths, health conditions, school attendance, and other vital matters concerning each individual, and of immense importance to society as a whole, is a confession of social incompetency too shameful for a nation that calls itself civilized.
Where there is no adequate registration babies may be easily lost sight of altogether. Children may escape the call to school and child labor be unchecked. When an investigation of conditions in almshouses and remote country districts of a certain southern state was made the numbers of defective and blind and crippled children brought to light was appalling. Yet one political leader of that state, at least, declared when the investigation began that "it was not only unnecessary but an insult to an enlightened state." The enlightened state simply did not know how many children were born dead, how many died the first month or year of life, how many went to school later on, how many were not able to profit by instruction because of congenital defectiveness, how many needed special care and training by reason of some special handicap, and how many ran away from such public inst.i.tutions as gave poor harbor to those without family protection. One of the fundamental rights, surely, of every child is to be counted, to have the community of which he is a part know something about him, and have his record kept where those interested in his protection and care, in his health, his schooling, his vocational training, may find out what they need to know in order to aid his progress or check his wrongdoing.
=Every Child Should Have Social Protection.=--In the next place, the demand of every child must surely be for community protection against those who for greed or evil purpose would exploit his life. The first law pa.s.sed for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, which aimed even at parents who did not act a parent"s part, was the Magna Charta of child rights. After that the door was opened for all manner of protective legislation for the benefit of the young. Yet we still have many men and some women whose business it is, and a very profitable one, to debauch youth or despoil children.
Surely the time has come when all decent people should unite to abolish such evils.
=Child-labor.=--In the field of child-labor we have model laws, not always well enforced, laws that aim to keep inviolate for childhood at least a few years of schooling.[10] We have health laws which aim more and more at reducing the diseases of children and making it possible for all to share in the power and joy of normal existence.
Yet, although something has been done for the child who would otherwise be at work in factory, shop, or sweated trade at home, there are, it is said, still "Two Million Overworked Farm Children." In the South, in some sections, the little black children still pick cotton for the little white children to weave in mills. In the North undersized and mentally undeveloped youth still testify to industrial exploitation even where laws against child-labor are on the statute books. The agricultural workers, numbering more than any other cla.s.s and spread all over the United States, count too many little children in their lists. It is estimated that in our country there are 38,000,000 living on farms, and of this number only 8,000,000 adult men are listed as laborers; we hence can well believe that children and youth are a disproportionate element in the working of those farms. This makes the slogan proposed by Owen E. Lovejoy, the Secretary of the National Child-labor Committee, "Keep the Farmer Through His Children," a highly compelling one. In the tobacco fields of Connecticut, boys and girls ten years of age and over; in the truck gardens of Ohio among the onion beds; in the Michigan sugar-beet fields; in the California asparagus beds; in the Southern cotton fields, where children as young as three years of age have been found--in all these and on lonely farmsteads doing general work we find these children. Cut off from regular schooling, herded often in the poorest subst.i.tutes for homes, moving about from place to place with fathers and mothers unskilled or handicapped by weak character, these children are defrauded of every right of a child at every turn.
It is not true, as some complacently a.s.sert, that all is done that should be to prevent the sacrifice of young life to the industrial demands for large returns for investment. It is not true that such organizations as the Child-labor Committee can rest content with accomplished tasks and disband.
The exemption of agricultural labor from the legal protection of children given in many states in the field of manufacture, and the total lack of realization by the general public of the newer conditions which specialized and scientific farming make for the tenant hands, make this particular form of child-protection in farming a question of supreme importance.
As this book goes to press the Supreme Court decision which declares the Federal Child-labor Law unconst.i.tutional places upon those working through state channels a still heavier burden of effort at child-protection. This decision of the Supreme Court may well be understood as indicating no indifference to child-welfare but rather as a call to clear the method of child-labor reform from any entanglements of taxation or doubtful alliance with Federal officialism. The principle of child-protection, whether by national or state laws, holds the moral devotion of our citizenship more firmly than ever before.
=Children Must be Protected in Recreation.=--The need for the protection of children from commercialized recreation with its centres set near all manner of vicious influences has aroused the conscience of the nation. The investigations of social conditions near the Camps of Training for our army in the Great War and many forms of social service carried on by men and women in connection with the Red Cross have given impetus to the general movement to "clean up the cities" to make the rural communities and village centres more helpful to moral living, and to make the streets safer for "the spirit of youth."
Yet the rural schoolhouses are so many of them lacking in provisions of decency and of playground supervision, and the village lounging-places are so often the scenes of vicious a.s.sociation, and the absence everywhere of sufficient provision for healthful and safeguarded recreation is so obvious, that we know we have still a long and heavy task before us to accord children their admitted right to social protection from moral evils against which even the best of parents can not adequately stand alone.
=Standards of and Aids to Health.=--Health standards in the community, fixed by experts and maintained, at least in minimum essentials, by public provision, is the seventh right of children which society should insure to each one.
The difficulties and dangers which inhere in any form of financial payment to parents, either fathers or mothers, in aid of their parental tasks, are not so clearly present, if present at all, in special aids given to all the population in matters of public sanitation, personal hygiene and the care of the sick. If we make our public aid topical rather than by cla.s.ses, and to all citizens alike in definite aid, we avoid much of the taint of charity. Few, if any, propose, for example, to give maternity aid to the rich. Fewer still advocate old-age pensions for those of independent incomes of moderate size. Many see, however, that health aids should be so distributed and so universally offered and used that the standard of health may be equally raised thereby for all. The idea that there are no people between the rich, who can pay anything asked, and those poor who can pay nothing for hospital care, diagnosis, or general medical and nursing service, is becoming an exploded one. There is general agreement among those most intelligent in such matters that what is needed more than anything else in the field of physical culture and physical care is provision for the people of small incomes who desire to be self-supporting. It is a common saying that no one but a millionaire or a pauper can afford a surgical operation or a trained nurse. We are moving, too slowly, but still moving, toward some form of provision of doctors, nurses, hospital and convalescent care, to which people of refinement, of independent feeling but of limited purse, can resort when they need such aid without a sense of humiliation or incurring the danger of wholly unsuitable companionship. Whatever difficulties there may be in securing adequate aid of this sort to adults, there can be none in the case of children.
When we started Boards of Health we definitely outlined a path from the doctor"s office and the nurse"s service to the public school and from the public school to the home. We saw more clearly as the years went on that that path must be worn by many feet if we would have adults strong and well and ready for the work of the world. We have in many Boards of Health (as so efficiently working in New York City under Dr. Josephine S. Baker) Children"s Departments, officered by those specially engaged in baby-saving, in child hygiene, in the health of school attendants, and in the general instruction of mothers in the care of children. This is an achievement which needs only to be more widely understood, applied and supported to be of the greatest social value. We have now the Federal backing in these matters in many provisions outside that of the special Maternity Aid Bill with its fifty-fifty financial plan to make the general government partner with the states and with the various local communities in health aid to all the people. What we need now is to make the care of the minor child seem to all, as it now does to so many, a duty that can be isolated in the mind from any doctrinaire socialistic plans, a duty to include all the population in wholly free health-service from the state. There are differences which may well be stressed between schemes for placing medical service of every sort under state regulation and wholly supporting it by public tax, and any plan for radically abolishing the capitalistic regime.
We are fast coming to a united conception of social duty as requiring help to all parents that they may bring up their children in health and give those children the physical training which they need. Let us all, then, push hardest first for the standardization of health in the case of children and youth and the best possible arrangements of tax-supported aids to the realization of that standard. That is surely one of the ways in which the parental burden of child-care can be socially shared without starting embarra.s.sing questions of radical or conservative theories of logical next steps.
=Health Boards Should Help All Alike.=--We can, however, thus divorce health activities from economic disputes only by making the investigation of children, the provisions for free examination and treatment, and the establishment of hospital and clinic facilities exactly the same for the children of the rich and of the poor. A recent investigation of the diet of children deduced from reports of undernourishment furnished by doctors specializing in children"s diseases, showed that in some cities, at least, the children of the well-to-do were as often underfed or wrongly fed as were the children of the poor. Sometimes the fact that a family is financially able to employ a nurse, but not intelligent or conscientious enough to employ a competent nurse, results in worse conditions, as to food and other particulars, than are found where poor mothers do the best they can with limited means.
=Items of Work in Child Hygiene.=--The standards of health and the public provisions for their realization, which even now in the crowded city of New York are so ably enforced by "The Division of Child Hygiene," show that "the hazardous business of being a baby" is much reduced in risks. The list of details of work undertaken by that Division of Child Hygiene as so fully reported in the doc.u.ment of 1914 and in later publications may be of use if here repeated. They are as follows:
I. Control and Supervision of Midwives.
II. Reduction of Infant Mortality.
III. Supervision of Foundlings Boarded in Private Homes.
IV. Inspection and Supervision of Day Nurseries.
V. Inspection of Inst.i.tutions for Dependent Children.
VI. Medical Inspection and Examination of School Children.
VII. Vaccination of School Children.
VIII. Enforcing of Child-labor Law in Issuing Work Certificates.
For this many-sided work physicians, trained nurses, and various other helpers are required. Could the public purse be drawn upon for a more vital public necessity than this list indicates?
When it is remembered that from forty to fifty per cent, of births are in charge of midwives in the foreign-born population and that the condition of housing and of water, air and food supply are deplorably inadequate in manufacturing centres, and that in rural communities there are few doctors and nurses and little hospital service, it will be seen that the idea of having Federal aid for this large health requirement was not one of concentration of power in the Government (as some have thought), but rather of a diffusion of standards and better sharing in all parts of our country. The health crusade is not bounded by state lines, diseases may cross those lines without consciousness of any check. The help toward the abolition of all preventable illness, the protection of child-life from all manner of preventable weakness, abnormality and suffering, seems to be the business of society in general, if anything can be so called. The children must be saved if the nation is to prosper. It used to be thought that a high birth-rate was a sufficient indication of national well-being. It is now seen that a low death-rate and a high level of strength and vitality, of health and mental power, are still more the required national a.s.set.
As Dr. Helen D. Putnam well says, "Democracy must finally depend on its department of education for establishing the right: for mothers, intelligence, health, economic opportunity to care for their babies; for babies, either rich or poor, intelligent, physically competent caretakers," If this be true, then the work of Health Boards and kindred agencies is a part of general education as it has long been a part of accepted charitable duty. The children stand first in line for receipt of that health education because they are the promise of the future.
We must take humane care of all the misfits, all the crippled, all the weak, all the defective, all the abnormal and the insane. This is now admitted. We must prevent, so far as we are able, such weight and burden falling upon our children and our children"s children, as charity now presses upon us. In this matter, at least, "we must begin with the grandfathers if we would reform the world."
=The Educational Rights of All Children.=--The right of every child to a minimum of education, which was our eighth point, is also conceded, and the duty of making public provision in tax-supported schools for these essentials of reading, writing, fair knowledge of arithmetic and the rest, is acknowledged. The idea, however, that some people have that all the children in the United States have an elementary schooling is erroneous. This is not a treatise on education, and elsewhere the statistics of length of schooling per year for the different parts of the country and of dearth of school seats in cities and famine of teachers everywhere must be considered. From the side of the family, however, the claim must be made that equal rights in some accepted minimum of school training, and that determined in quant.i.ty and quality of teaching by those who know what education means, should be the demand of all fathers and mothers. In the older time young men going through college on the way to one of the three learned professions then listed, law, theology, and medicine, taught often in the country school to earn an honest penny. Such teaching on the way to some form of vocation deemed far more honorable was not of a sort to make teaching a profession in itself. Later, some measure of higher education was given young women in Normal Schools to fit them for teaching little children, and the teacher of the elementary school became, thereby, a professional. To-day few young men teach to help themselves through college and only a few choose teaching as a profession. To-day, also, the profession of teaching, which once was almost the sole opening for higher vocational work for women, now competes with a large number of professions or types of business or applied art, and fewer women proportionally are headed for the schoolroom when they leave college or normal school.
This tendency to take other lines of work increased to unprecedented extent during the Great War, which opened new worlds of paid work to women. This gives us the present teacher shortage, which all who know conditions feel to be the most serious menace to universal education.
There are not only not enough teachers to go around, there are still fewer teachers fit to teach. If it is the right of every child to have a good education in essentials, to be well taught as far as he goes in schooling, how shall that right be realized if the teacher famine continues?
=The Use of Married Women as Teachers.=--The interest of the family is specially concerned in one way to ease that shortage of teachers. That way is the use of married women in the public schools. All women who have "verified their credentials" as good teachers should be held on to when they marry with all possible strength of appeal to fulfil a social duty as a part of the teaching force of the locality where they live. The old absurdity of making women resign from the teaching force when they issued wedding cards, or conceal the fact of their marriage if they were not scrupulous, so as to keep their positions, is fast pa.s.sing. Few communities hold on to this penalizing of the woman teacher when she marries, but many school boards retain a sentiment against urging the continuance of any married woman on the staff. This must give way to an intelligent understanding of two things: one, that experience in teaching is an immeasurable a.s.set to the schools and must not be lost in so great proportion of women as it has been; and, in the second place, that teaching lends itself in unique manner to half-time work, to vacations for maternity duties, to combining of two or three married women in positions that might be filled by one spinster, and to other social expedients favorable to married life; and that all that is needed is good sense and some skill of administrative adjustment to keep the larger majority of good teachers in the field after they are wives and mothers.
Moreover, from the point of view of the family, it is injurious for social practice to keep women who have the qualities of good teachers from marrying lest they lose their beloved profession. It is one of the best, although one of the least tried, ways of bringing the school and the home together by giving a good many teachers a clearer idea from personal experience of what the home needs from the school, and giving mothers a clearer idea of the reasons for school rules by having them serve in both capacities. The normal school education of women was obtained by appeals based on the fact of the first half of the nineteenth century that unless women teachers were secured and trained for the task the elementary school could never be enabled to fill the need of the public school system. The fact of the early part of the twentieth century should be as deeply pressed, the fact that there are not enough women teachers of education and character for elementary school service unless we mix teaching and marriage for many of them. This fact should make a social appeal to-day equal to that of Horace Mann"s great mission.
If we are to have enough elementary school teachers and continue to increase the number from the most fit women for the task, we must also inst.i.tute a new social backing for the profession. In this connection one is obliged to deal with the disrespect shown the average teacher of little children and even of the high school and college instructor as compared with leaders in other professions. The teacher of little children is most often a woman, and if a woman away from home and especially in some rural communities is very nearly a social outcast.
The "teacherage" is just beginning to be called for as the suitable home for the teachers of a school; a "teacherage" which can become a social centre if near the school building, and thus be uniquely useful. The jointure of all the best homes in a community with all the wisest teachers in that community, not alone for the occasional discussion of "School Problems" or "Home Problems," but for some common public work which will link both teachers and parents to the larger life of the community--this is a necessity if we would have enough teachers of the right sort.
The attention to the physical details of school housing, school gardens, school playgrounds, school lighting and seating, all these the family life which furnishes the children must be keen about in the interest of each child. The curriculum must not be left to a school board chiefly interested in other matters than text-books, except it may be for a business interest in the latter. The supply and testing of teachers must not be left to a body more concerned in getting places for relatives and friends than for securing the best available teaching staff.