The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on EducationPalmer, Alice Freeman
Philosophy
The Teacher: Essays and Addresses on Education
Palmer, Alice Freeman
Education; Education, Higher; Women -- Education
since there are not competing places striving to draw them away. In the
two countries the educational situation is exactly reversed: in England
there are more trained men than positions; in America, more positions
than trained men. It seems probable too that this condition of things
will continue long, so far as we are concerned; at least there is no
present prospect of our reaching a limit in the demand for competent
men. Whenever a college has a chair to fill, it is necessary to hunt far
and wide for a suitable person to fill it. The demand is not from the
old places alone. Almost every year a new college is founded. Every year
the old ones grow. In twenty-five years Harvard has quadrupled its
staff. Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, the University of Michigan,
the University of Pennsylvania,--indeed almost every strong college in
the country,--shows an immense advance. A Western state is no sooner
settled than it establishes a state university, and each of the sects
starts from one to three colleges besides. No such perpetual expansion
goes on in England. The number of learned positions there is measurably
fixed. If more experts than can fill them, or than care to enter
political life, the liberal professions, and the civil service, are
manufactured in the course of a year, the surplus stock is at the
disposal of the extension syndicate. Many of these men too are persons
of means, to whom a position of dignity is of more consequence than a
large salary. The problem, accordingly, of organizing popular
instruction out of such a body of waiting experts is a comparatively
simple one; but it is not so simple here. In our country any man who has
a fair acquaintance with a special subject and moderate skill in
imparting it, especially if he will be contented with a small salary,
can be pretty sure of college appointment.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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