III. The Teacher
SHALL the Teacher be abolished?...
What’s that you say?—Oh, but surely not before she has had a hearing!—the worst criminal deserves that much consideration. I beg of you to let me speak one moment in her behalf.—Ah, thank you, my friends.
(Sister, you had a tight squeak just then! If it hadn’t been for my presence of mind and my habitual coolness in the presence of infuriated mobs, I hate to think what would have happened.—And now let me see: what can I say in your behalf? H’m.... H’m....)
My friends, this unhappy woman (for we shall centre our attention on the female of the species) is more sinned against than sinning. Reflect! The status of women in the United States has changed in the last fifty years. Modern industry has almost utterly destroyed the old pioneer home with its partnership-marriage; ambitious young men no longer have an economic need for capable women-partners; women have lost their wonted economic value as potential helpers, and their capacity for motherhood appears to the largest section of young manhood in the aspect of a danger rather than a blessing. Women have, to be sure, acquired a new value, in the eyes of a smaller class of economically “arrived” men, as a sign of their “arrival”—that is, they are desired as advertisements of their husbands’ economic status. In one sense, the task of demonstrating the extent of a husband’s income is easier than the pioneer task of helping take care of a farm and raising a houseful of babies; but, after all, such a career does require either natural talent or a high degree of training in the graceful habits of conspicuous idleness and honorific extravagance. And, whether it is that the vast majority of women spurned such a career as an essentially immoral one, or whether they were not really up to its requirements, or whether the demand was found to be more than met by the hordes of candidates turned out yearly by the boarding-schools—whatever the reason, the fact remains that a large number of women began to see the necessity and to conceive the desirability of some career other than marriage. But industrial evolution, which had destroyed their former opportunities, had failed to make any considerable or at least any decent room for them in the industrial scheme. Most particularly was this true for the young women of the middle class. They were unable to go into the professions or the respectable trades, and unwilling (for excellent reasons) to enter the factories; they were given no opportunity to learn how to do anything—they were (quite against their will, but inevitably) condemned to profound ignorance of the most important things in the world—work and love; and so, naturally, they became Teachers.
The world did not want them, and so they stayed out of the world, in that drab, quasi-religious edifice, the School Building, and prepared others to go into the world....
Good Heavens! do you suppose for a minute, if this unfortunate woman had known enough about Anything in Particular to get a respectable job outside, that she would have stayed in there to teach Everything in General?[1] Do you suppose she wants to be a Teacher? Do you suppose she likes pretending to be adept in a dozen difficult subjects at once, inflicting an impossible ideal of “order” upon the forty restless children whom her weary, amateur, underpaid efforts at instruction have failed to interest, spending her days in the confronting of an impossible task and her nights in the “correcting” of an endless series of written proofs of her failure—and, on top of that, being denied most of her human rights? The munition-factory girls at least had their fling when the day’s work was over; but she is expected to be a Vestal. In some places she can’t get married without losing her job; in New York, if she is married, she can’t have a baby! No—it is her misfortune, not her fault, that she is what she is.
In fact, I think that if we could have managed to keep the war going a little longer, she would have pretty much abolished herself. Abdication is becoming popular, and she among all the monarchs is not the least uncomfortable and restricted and hedged in by useless divinity. Her abdication will be as disturbing an event as the Russian Revolution. The Russians were accustomed to their Czar; but they just had to learn to get along without him. And perhaps a similar lesson is in store for us....
You find it a little difficult to imagine what School would be like without Teachers? Well, for one thing, it would be more like the rest of the world than it is now—and that, we agreed, was what we wanted. Where else, indeed, except in School, do you find Teachers? The rest of the world manages to get along without them very well. Perhaps it is merely a superstition that they are needed in School! Let us inquire into the matter.