Woman's work in municipalities. Mary Ritter Beard
EDUCATION
Women’s connection with the schools and the educational system lies both in professional, or official, and volunteer service. We shall consider their professional relation to the schools in the first place, because it is the older.
The history of the education of women from the early days, when to educate “shes” was viewed with horror as an immoral proposition, to the present time when more “shes” graduate from the high schools than “hes,” is an interesting record in itself. Even more significant, however, is the fact that both hes and shes are educated largely by women in the secondary schools which are the schools of the “people.”
The dominance of women in the secondary schools does not meet with universal approval. The more vigorous of the opponents of the educational monopoly by women argue that women teachers do not comprehend the realities of modern business and political and social life, and are therefore not fitted to give a wide social training to the young, especially to boys.
There is a certain truth in this contention undoubtedly but women are facing this objection, as far as it relates to the mental and moral equipment of teachers, by insisting that women with a broad social training and enlarged outlook can be found today and that the crux of the question is one of pay. They incline to the point of view that equal pay for equal work and better salaries for women teachers generally are two of the means for securing women equally capable with men of imparting the type of education demanded by modern industrial and social conditions. Preparation for such teaching is expensive and can only be entered upon when there is reasonable hope of something approaching a suitable reward. The better pay of men teachers gives them an added stimulus for prolonged study and preparation and the same stimulus will operate in the same way with women, is the reply to the critics who seek a sturdier and more virile leadership in education.
Another reply made to those who criticize the monopoly by women of secondary education is that equal educational facilities for men and women will promote wider social knowledge and sympathy on the part of women students. Certainly in those colleges where courses in Politics and Government, Law, Medicine and technical sciences are now open to women, they are registering in large numbers, and manifesting a readiness to fit themselves properly for the occupation of teaching, among other professions.
This question was recently discussed at length in The Educational Review, where Admiral F. E. Chadwick pleaded for male teachers. Miss Laura Runyon of the State Normal School at Warrensburg, Missouri, in an answer to him said:
Everyone familiar with the history of education knows that men predominated as teachers before the Civil War, and, therefore, if the American boy has been under woman tutelage for generations, it has been the tutelage of his mother. … The American nation has developed more in the last fifty years than in the preceding one hundred. Does this show the evil of women teachers? …
Admiral Chadwick is wrong in his conception of what is wrong in education. Unquestionably, we have confined the school curriculum too closely to a book-course—but throughout the United States courses of study are made chiefly by men. The notable exception is in the Chicago system, where a woman has introduced most radical changes for both boys and girls, and changes which are being hailed as the most satisfactory progressive educational work of the country, and these are due to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young.
Our school courses need revising, and the long hours need to be spent in vigorous, active occupations as well as book and desk work. Along this line should the evolution proceed, not by excluding the efficient and cheap workers who have been discovered.
If the teaching by women in the schools has been narrow, ineffective, and unsuited to the realities of American life, the responsibility lies in part upon the colleges and normal schools that train them, and these institutions, in administration and curricula, have been largely dominated by men. By concentration of attention upon unapplied and inapplicable natural science, narrative history, English literature, and empty “methods,” women actually have been deprived of the educational opportunity for discovering what the world is really like. It will be only when more women alive to the necessities of modern social life, industry, and government gain some power in the training colleges and schools that curricula will be devised to supply the needs of women teachers for the great tasks that, in present day society, fall upon them.
In passing from this problem of the influence of women upon the content and systems of education, it is worthy of note that one of the first names in the field of education today is that of Maria Montessori. Her ideals have spread rapidly in the United States. Speaking of her recent visit to this country, The Survey said:
Most people in the United States had to wait until Maria Montessori came to this country to learn that her educational ideas are being applied in scores of schools here and that Rhode Island has officially indorsed her methods. Experimentation with Montessori practices is being conducted in the Rhode Island Normal School. It is declared that out of a class of eighty-odd teachers who took the Montessori four months’ course at Rome last year, over sixty were Americans.
Madame Montessori’s brief visit is giving rise to a more active discussion of her educational “system” than usual. Those who think it is destined to revolutionize child-training and those who see in it no advance beyond the ideas of Froebel are giving their reasons over again. How much new light will be thrown on the real content of her methods remains to be seen.
Madame Montessori’s way of spreading her gospel during her visit has been by public lectures in large cities. At these she has talked through an interpreter and has illustrated her work with children by motion-picture films. Her visit has been under the auspices of the newly formed American Montessori Association, in whose leadership are Mrs. Alexander Graham Bell, Margaret Wilson, Frederick Knowles Cooper, Anne George (Dr. Montessori’s first American pupil), William Morrow, S. S. McClure and others.
Although we talk of equal educational opportunities for men and women, as a matter of fact in many states, particularly in the East and South, there is nothing approaching equal facilities. There are many “opportunities” for education in most states, it is true, but until the best opportunities are open to women, there is nothing like equality. In states where adequate facilities are not open, we find women awaking to the obligation to see that they are soon provided through public or private funds.
New Jersey club women have been pushing the work for the establishment of a state college for women “to fit our girls to render the best service to New Jersey in many lines as well as to fill teaching positions better, 80 per cent. of which are now filled by women.” The population of New Jersey is over 2,537,167, of whom 1,250,704 are women, yet no provision is made for their higher education. Only in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, besides New Jersey, is that now true. A state college with free tuition is demanded. New Jersey has Princeton, Rutgers, Stevens, for men, but only normal schools for women.
School Administration
Moreover, when the charge of inefficiency is brought against women teachers, it must be remembered that the administration of the schools very largely has been in the hands of men, and the women have been merely routine agents of the authorities. The type of person always content to carry out some other person’s orders is not likely to have either force or initiative. Women seem to have both. Women are no longer content to be mere agents of school authorities. They are seeking and obtaining high administrative positions, and demonstrating by their efficiency and capacity for sustained and unselfish labors their fitness for such work.
For example, “four states, Colorado, Idaho, Washington, and Wyoming, have women at the head of their state school systems, and there are now 495 women county superintendents in the United States, nearly double the number of ten years ago. In some states women appear to have almost a monopoly of the higher positions in the public school system. In Wyoming, besides a woman state superintendent and deputy superintendent,