The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools

by Upton Sinclair

In their efforts to keep the teacher an individual, the employing class has not relied upon terrorism alone; they use all their propaganda resources to take possession of the teacher’s psychology, to shut up her mind in class greed and snobbery. The teacher is a “lady” in ninety-five per cent of cases—and in the other five per cent the teacher is a “gentleman.” The teacher belongs to the white-collared class, and receives a monthly salary—never the degrading weekly stipend known as “wages.” Once or twice in a life-time, the teacher is invited to a banquet, and given an opportunity to listen to bankers and merchants and manufacturers grow eloquent upon the dignity and nobility of the pedagogical profession. These same compliments the teacher finds in her capitalist newspaper, and her capitalist “Saturday Evening Post,” and “Outlook,” and “Independent,” and “Literary Digest”; the compliments cost less than nothing, because the advertisements more than pay for the paper and printing.

Having spent my childhood in one of the larger-sized brick houses in Baltimore, I understand thoroughly the psychology of “ladies and gentlemen,” and the horror with which they contemplate common workingmen, with grimy hands, and overalls, and no collars—or worse yet, collars made of celluloid. Having left Baltimore thirty-five years ago, and spent the rest of my life studying modern economics, I write this book to tell the seven hundred thousand school teachers of the United States that the path to independence and self-respect for them is the path of organization, and of full and whole-hearted cooperation with organized labor.

We have heard from the hired educators of Big Business a chorus of denunciation of teachers’ unions; and their point of view is easy to understand. What I find hard to understand is their serene confidence in the inability of their wage-slaves to put two and two together. In the very same breath in which these Big Business educators denounce teachers’ unions, they praise the unions of bankers and merchants and manufacturers and lawyers, and urge the teachers to intimacy with these. Says J. W. Studebaker, superintendent of schools of Des Moines, in a circular for the National Education Association: “The schools are linked up with the business interests of the city.” Says C. L. Carlsen, director of part-time education in the San Francisco public schools: “The convenience of the employer must be the first consideration.” Says Dr. Frank M. Leavitt, assistant superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh: “Of very great importance is the matter of establishing friendly and intelligent relations with the employers of the juvenile workers.” Quotations such as this are scattered all through “The Goslings,” and I could collect another chapter full if it would help.

Why may teachers belong to employers’ unions and not to unions of their own? There are a few educators who have had the courage to put this question—one of them Professor John M. Brewer, of the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University. I owe an apology both to Professor Brewer and to Harvard, because in “The Goose-step” I forgot to mention him as one of our liberal educators. He discussed the question of teachers’ unions in an excellent article in “School and Society,” January 14, 1922, and no doubt he will send you the leaflet if you ask for it. He points out that the utmost the teachers have so far dared to ask in the way of tenure is the right to a hearing before their superiors. But in Filene’s department store in Boston, no worker can be discharged without a hearing before his fellow workers. When will the teachers of America have the courage to ask as much?

What could be more sensible, what could be more essential, if a teacher is really to be a free man or a free woman? Who is it that knows whether a teacher is competent and faithful, if not her fellow teachers? Who can really judge and protect the needs of the child, if not those persons whose business it is to be in daily and hourly contact with the child? I have on my desk a letter from a lady who was formerly a teacher in Terre Haute, Indiana, and who presumed to take an interest in an organization of the teachers, and was threatened with loss of her position. The superintendent told her it was because she was “incompetent”; she took up the fight on this issue, and wrote to the parents of every one of her children, and an actual majority of these parents appeared before the school board to defend this teacher, and not a single parent could be found to say that her work was not satisfactory, or that she was not beloved by her pupils. Yet this teacher was forced to move on to another city.

That is just one more illustration; I have given you a bookful of such stories, and I could compile an encyclopedia on the subject if I had nothing else to do. The point is clear: The present status of the American school teacher is that of a wage-slave, an employe of the school board and the superintendent; it is not the status of a free citizen, nor of a professional expert. It can only be made that, first, by the education of the teachers themselves—a process of organization and self-discipline, guided by the more active and intelligent and courageous of the profession. In this process there will be many martyrs, and each can take to himself such comfort as martyrs through all the ages have had—the knowledge that each one is adding to the sum total of human progress, and that without this heroism and unselfish idealism, there would have been no progress in the past, and will be none in the future.

One of America’s really great educators, who supports the unionizing of teachers and has had the courage to join a teachers’ union himself, is John Dewey. Just so that you may not think of the teachers’ union as the notion of cracked-brained radicals like myself, I quote three paragraphs from an address delivered by Professor Dewey at a mass meeting of teachers in New York, and published as a leaflet by the American Federation of Teachers, located in Chicago:

We have not had sufficient intelligence to be courageous. We have lacked a sense of loyalty to our calling and to one another, and on that account have not accepted to the full our responsibility as citizens of the community.

To my mind, that is the great reason for forming organizations which are affiliated with other working organizations that have power and that attempt to exercise the power like the Federation of Labor; namely, the reflex effect upon the body of the teachers themselves in strengthening their courage, their faith in their calling, their faith in one another, and the recognition that they are servants of the community, and not people hired by a certain transitory set of people to do a certain job at their beck and call....

We should have an organization which shall not on the one hand merely discuss somewhat minute and remote subjects of pedagogy with no certainty as to how their conclusions are going to take effect in practice, nor simply look after the personal and more or less selfish interests of teachers on the other hand. But we should have a body of self-respecting teachers and educators who will see to it that their ideas and their experience in educational matters shall really count in the community; and who, in order that these may count, will identify themselves with the interests of the community; who will conceive of themselves as citizens and as servants of the public, and not merely as hired employees of a certain body of men. It is because I hope to see the teaching body occupy that position of social leadership which it ought to occupy, and which to our shame it must be said we have not occupied in the past, that I welcome every movement of this sort.