The family and its members

by Anna Garlin Spencer

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 asset.

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 quantity 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 passing. 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 asset 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 institute 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.

In all the things that experts should direct, and in all the things that mean health and comfort and happiness to individual children, parents, even if not very learned, should have a voice and seek to make their convictions work to actual progress.