A "Scoop."—Sometimes there is considerable rivalry among the newspapers of a city. The editors or local reporters watch for what they call a "scoop." This is a piece of news that will be very much sought by the public and which remains unknown to the people or, in fact, to the other papers until it appears in the one that has discovered it. This is analogous to what I should try to do in securing a teacher: I should try to get a veritable educational "scoop" on all the other districts of the surrounding country. The only way to secure such persons is for some individual or for the school board to make this a specific business. In the country districts this might be done by one of the leading directors; in a consolidated school, by the principal or superintendent. If it is true that "as the teacher so is the school," it is likewise true that as is the principal or superintendent so are the teachers.
What Makes the Difference.—It will be found that a small difference in salary will frequently make all the difference between a worthless and an excellent teacher. It is often the ten or fifteen dollars a month additional which secures the prize teacher; and so I should make the difference in salary a secondary consideration; for, after all, the difference amounts to very little in the taxation on the whole community.
A Question of Teachers.—The question of teachers is the real problem in education, from the primary school to the great universities. It is the poor teaching of poor teachers everywhere that sets at naught the processes of education; and when the American people, and especially the rural people, realize that this is the heart and center of their problem, and when they realize also that the difference, financially, between a poor teacher and a good one is so small, they will rise to the occasion and proceed to a correct solution of their problem.
CHAPTER VIII
THE THREE INSEPARABLES
In the preceding chapter we discussed the type of person that should be in evidence everywhere in the teaching profession. Such a type is absolutely necessary to the attainment of genuine success. In rural schools this type is by no means too common, and in the whole field of elementary and higher education it is much more rare than it should be. Because of the frequent appearance of the opposite type in colleges and in other schools, the teacher and the professor have been often caricatured to their discredit. There is usually some truth underlying a caricature; a cartoon would lack point if it did not possess a substratum of fact.
The "Mode."—Now, there is often in the public mind this poorer type of teacher; and when an idea or an ideal, however low, becomes once established, it is changed only with difficulty. The commonplace individual, the mediocre type of man or of woman, is by many regarded as a fairly typical representative of what the teacher usually is; or, as the statistician would express it, he is the "mode" rather than the average. The "mode" in any class of objects or of individuals is the one that occurs oftenest, the one most frequently met with. And so this inactive, nondescript sort of person is often thought of as the typical teacher. He has no very high standing either financially or socially, and so has no great influence on the individuals around him or on the community in general. This conception has become so well established in the public mind, and is so frequently met with, that all teachers are regarded as being of the same type. The better teachers, the strong personalities, are brought into this same class and must suffer the consequences.