[13] Frederic Burk, The Training of Teachers, October, 1897.
“PUT YOURSELF IN HIS PLACE”
To seek wisdom through a questionnaire is a time-honored expedient, while to give wisdom through questions has classic authority. It is therefore immaterial whether it is Experience or Inexperience that may be either seeking wisdom or that may have wisdom to bestow in this interlocution concerning a domestic problem that has already been involved to the nth power.
What are the causes of our household troubles?
The causes are in part economic—a household system governed by the same economic laws that govern other industries, but resisting the action of these laws; in part social—the attempt to form a chemical compound of public and political democracy with private and social aristocracy; in part educational—the tradition that marriage acts as a solvent to change every ignorant, inexperienced young woman into an accomplished housekeeper, and that, therefore, mental training is for her a work of supererogation; in part religious—the persistent maintenance of the belief that from the primeval chaos every woman has been foreordained to be a housekeeper, united with the rejection of the parallel belief that every man has been foreordained to be a tiller of the soil.
But the situation in regard to household help has never been so critical as it is at the present time.
This statement has been found in one form or another in all literature, sacred and profane, from the times of Abraham and Achilles to the story of the last college graduate who has entered domestic service in disguise.