On the shore of this vast and violent controversy we discreetly pause. We shall not enter it. We cannot refrain, however, from extending our finger at three reefs of solid fact which unsubmergably jut out above the surface of the raging waters.
First. The colleges instruct their pupils in the subjects which those pupils subsequently teach.
Second. The pupils specialize in the subjects which they are going to teach.
Third. The colleges, besides providing the future teachers with subjects, almost always offer to provide them with instruction in the principles of education, and frequently offer to provide them with instruction in the very technique of class-room work.
Our verdict, therefore, which we hope will be satisfactory to counsel on both sides, is that 71 the college is by no means a trade school, but that if the woman who is going to earn her living will choose the one trade of teaching, she can almost always get a pretty fair trade training by going to college.
Passing beyond even the suspicion of controversy, we may observe, uncontradicted, that the amount of trade training which a teacher is expected to take is increasing year by year. In teaching, as in other trades, the period and scope of preliminary preparation continue to expand.
In the last calendar of Bryn Mawr College, the Department of Education, in announcing its courses, makes the following common-sense remarks:
“It is the purpose of this department to offer to students intending to become teachers an opportunity to obtain a technical preparation for their profession. Hitherto practical training has been thought necessary for teachers of primary schools only, but similar training is very desirable for teachers in high schools and colleges also. Indeed, it is already becoming increasingly difficult for college graduates without practical and theoretical pedagogical 72 knowledge to secure good positions. In addition to the lectures open to undergraduates, courses will be organized for graduate students only, conducted with special reference to preparation for the headship and superintendence of schools.”
There could hardly be a clearer recognition of the vocational duty of a college. There is meaning in that phrase “to secure good positions.” Bryn Mawr is willing to train girls not only to be cultivated but to secure good positions, as teachers.
But the teaching trade is getting choked. There is too much supply. Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from college, looking for work, there is usually just one kind of work toward which they are mentally alert. Their college experience has seldom roused their minds toward any other kind of work. They start to teach. They drug the market. And so the teaching trade, the great occupation of unmarried educated women, ceases to be able to provide those women, as a class, with an adequate field of employment.