=The Educational Rights of All Children.=--The right of every child to
a minimum of education, which was our eighth point, is also conceded,
and the duty of making public provision in tax-supported schools for
these essentials of reading, writing, fair knowledge of arithmetic and
the rest, is acknowledged. The idea, however, that some people have
that all the children in the United States have an elementary
schooling is erroneous. This is not a treatise on education, and
elsewhere the statistics of length of schooling per year for the
different parts of the country and of dearth of school seats in cities
and famine of teachers everywhere must be considered. From the side of
the family, however, the claim must be made that equal rights in some
accepted minimum of school training, and that determined in quantity
and quality of teaching by those who know what education means, should
be the demand of all fathers and mothers. In the older time young men
going through college on the way to one of the three learned
professions then listed, law, theology, and medicine, taught often in
the country school to earn an honest penny. Such teaching on the way
to some form of vocation deemed far more honorable was not of a sort
to make teaching a profession in itself. Later, some measure of higher
education was given young women in Normal Schools to fit them for
teaching little children, and the teacher of the elementary school
became, thereby, a professional. To-day few young men teach to help
themselves through college and only a few choose teaching as a
profession. To-day, also, the profession of teaching, which once was
almost the sole opening for higher vocational work for women, now
competes with a large number of professions or types of business or
applied art, and fewer women proportionally are headed for the
schoolroom when they leave college or normal school.
This tendency to take other lines of work increased to unprecedented
extent during the Great War, which opened new worlds of paid work to
women. This gives us the present teacher shortage, which all who know
conditions feel to be the most serious menace to universal education.
There are not only not enough teachers to go around, there are still
fewer teachers fit to teach. If it is the right of every child to have
a good education in essentials, to be well taught as far as he goes in
schooling, how shall that right be realized if the teacher famine
continues?
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