We advocate a sane and sound training for children and cannot fail to deplore the current makeshift in the form of drives and campaigns and petty pedagogical pastimes.
The schools are overrun with charlatanism and quackery of the very cheapest form.
The school board of Buffalo had as its president the local head of the Standard Oil Company, and as its other members a lawyer to the rich, a son of a banker, a son of a great lumber merchant, and a wife of a rich man. The action of these five was to summon the teachers and question them as to their responsibility for the pamphlet—but refusing to let them produce any evidence of the truth of their statements. After which the board met in secret session, and dismissed the president and the recording secretary of the Teachers’ Educational League. Also they found four other officers of the League guilty of “disrespect, defiance and insubordination,” and sentenced them to be removed, but with the privilege of being restored to their positions if they would sign an apology and promise to be good in future. Three accepted these terms; the other, together with the two who were unconditionally dismissed, appealed to the state commissioner of education, and it is pleasant to be able to record that this official reversed the action of the school board. So it appears that a teacher can be a citizen in Buffalo—provided she is willing to face a scandal and an expensive law-suit.
All this is a part of the “open-shop” movement, whose purpose is to keep the wage-slaves from organizing and acquiring power. From coast to coast both school boards and superintendents are solid on this question. In my home city of Pasadena the board of education unanimously adopted a resolution condemning the affiliation of teachers with the American Federation of Labor. At a convention of superintendents in Riverside, California, Superintendent Wilson of Berkeley declared that “the ends for which teachers’ unions strive are unsound.” In New York the state commissioner of education, John H. Finley, made the same statement, his ground being that a teacher is in the same category as a soldier, “an officer in the army of future defense.” Commissioners and superintendents who want to know how to enforce military discipline among teachers may receive instruction from Mr. J. W. Crabtree, secretary of the National Education Association, and formerly president of a state normal school in Wisconsin; at an N. E. A. convention he said to a friend of mine: “My teachers will never form a union—I keep their noses to the grindstone!”
Consider the experience of Miss Leida H. Mills, for twenty-nine years a teacher in the schools of Wichita, Kansas. The teachers there had no tenure, and were getting the munificent salary of forty dollars per month; they proceeded to organize, and Miss Mills, who was head of the Latin department in a high school, committed the crime of becoming president of their organization. The president of the board of education was a bank cashier, and he first fought her, and then fired her. She addressed a protest to the board, which the board ignored. She found a job on the Pacific Coast, leaving her mother and father back in Kansas; she has returned twenty times to see them—quite an inconvenience for a poor teacher! The Wichita board had to invite eight other teachers before they found someone to take Miss Mills’ place; but of course they always find someone in the end.
In San Antonio, Texas, there were no funds to increase the teachers’ salaries, and it was proposed to raise the money by private subscription—a method of putting the teachers under bonds to the bankers. That this was the plan became evident when the teachers began to form a union, and one banker withdrew a contribution of fifty thousands dollars which he had promised! The teachers went on with their union, however, and got some three hundred and fifty members; also a separate union of colored teachers with a hundred members. In the following spring the two active organizers of the union were “let out”—one of them a school principal who had been teaching the Mexicans for twelve years, and had spent a good part of his own salary in providing equipment for them; the other a high school teacher, a university graduate with four years’ excellent record. Both were well recommended by the superintendent, but the board fired them, and twelve more teachers resigned—with the result that both the white and colored teachers’ unions have disappeared from San Antonio.
In Houston, Texas, the teachers joined the American Federation of Labor, and the unions threatened the mayor with a recall, and the school board almost doubled the minimum teachers’ salaries. But then came Mrs. Josephine C. Preston, past president of the National Education Association—you remember the lady who presided at the Salt Lake convention, with Professor Strayer of Columbia seated at her right hand. Now we discover what the makers of educational “greatness” are up to; the “great” Superintendent Preston told the teachers of Houston that it would be far better for them to belong to her organization—it didn’t cost so much, and it was so much more genteel! So the teachers deserted the labor unions en masse. The president of the American Federation of Teachers remarked to me sorrowfully: “The price of a teacher in the United States is fifty dollars”—meaning that a teachers’ union would agree to disband if the board of education would give them fifty dollars a year increase of wages as the price of their civil rights.
CHAPTER LXXXII
THE TEACHERS’ UNION
The effect of official tyranny such as we have been observing is to reinforce and intensify the occupational diseases of the teaching profession, which are timidity and aloofness from real life. The teacher lives in a little world of her own; she spends many hours every day with her children, and other hours in reading their themes, and marking their examination papers, and making out complicated reports. For the rest, she knows only her colleagues, whose life is as narrow as her own. And this is the way her superiors want it. Said the superintendent in Agra, Kansas, to a young lady graduate of Wellesley College: “You ought to have gone to a normal school instead of to college. There they teach the teachers just what they ought to know, and not anything else.”
It hardly needs saying that a world which is five per cent male and ninety-five per cent female is an abnormal world, with many jealousies and suppressions. The teacher is, as a rule, either a very young woman, looking forward to escape through matrimony, or else a woman grown prematurely old, and watching with suspicious eye the curvettings of youth. The tendency of women thus placed to curry favor with their superiors, and to be spiteful toward their rivals, is very strong; and the only way to keep the school-room from becoming a place of fussing and fretfulness is to open the windows to the airs which blow in the outside world. The teacher must have a vital interest in the great causes which are stirring the minds of men; she must have some hope outside her own very slender chances of personal success. The teacher, in other words, must cease to be an individual, she must become part of a group; she must share the consciousness of an organized and disciplined body of workers, with a duty towards the future, and a means of carrying it out.