Volume 14 , Issue 50

Pity the School Teacher

Back in 1912 the modern school teacher must have been inwardly a wonderful and awesome creation. She was the vortex around which swirled all the perplexing currents of our confused society. She must have the versatility, plasticity and adaptability of genius to answer the demands made upon her brain and heart. Upon her shoulders, as upon Atlas's, rests the whole world. Is it the same as it was one hundred years ago?

Consider what she was supposed to do. She must supplant the State in educating youth in patriotism, law, history and all the latest civic virtues. She must train him to vote right and to serve his country. Richmond teachers one hundred years ago listened to an able appeal for more fundamental instruction in the principles of government for the future citizen. This was an admirable end, but was government so simple and modern affairs so easily grasped that for the princely stipend of $50 or %60 a month could they secure an expert to interpret constitutions and direct commonwealths?

Teachers back then must make her room an annex tot he home. What parents connote instill, guided by love and made wise by acquaintance wight he very hearts of their children, the teacher must impart to them out of the dull pages of a book. Beginning with manners and running all the way to morals, she must somehow by her precept and example mold fifty or more young pagans into models of virtue and propriety.

Whatever was too difficult for home teaching was lumped vaguely together as the sphere of the school. Sewing and cooking and manual training, we believe, could be taught admirably in schools. But we do not think character could be built in the mass. it was laziness in the parent that would delegate these supreme functions of education to an underpaid and harassed young woman, who often enough was scarcely able to keep honest herself on the wage she got back then and maybe even today, one hundred years later.

These are but a few of the things the teacher back then was supposed to do. All of them were good. many of them were truly vital parts of public education. Not for a moment would we have the influence of the school in real life sacrificed for an outworn tradition of mere book-learning. But it was time society took a common-sense view of such things and provided special teachers and broader instruction to fit these paramount guides for the multifarious calls upon their energies. it was folly to abase progress on education and not furnish the best educators.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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