Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 73.djvu/423

Rh of teaching is rare. The very scarcity of teachers in all parts of the country indicates that the competition can not be sharp. It is but natural that timid persons, or those doubtful of their powers, should drift into teaching as into a safe harbor. Having once become settled as teachers they tend to grow content and inert.

Almost the sole suggestion now offered for the improvement of the great body of citizens who teach is to increase the pay. The belief seems to be that a better class, of men especially, would enter the profession. To a certain extent the result expected would take place, but it is very doubtful if remuneration for teaching ever could or should be so great as to draw able young men from pursuits whose chief human interest is that they are profitable. There will, in all probability, always be professions in which more money can be obtained than by teaching. When educational systems undertake to compete with the corporations, for example, the educational systems must lose both the contest and the moral standing they should hope to win. The great danger is that higher salaries may add to the inefficient workers who are already in the work for the money, and thus tend to perpetuate a low ideal of service.

The idealist would have a gigantic task before him if he should undertake to substitute directly for the ideal of money the ideal of unselfish public service. The "practical" man would admit that "public service" has a pleasant sound, but "human nature" demands pay for its work. This is sadly true, even while men's thoughts dwell upon the high purpose of education. They remember the pay, while their souls should thrill with the mighty music of a great idea. True education develops power through knowledge, disseminates truth, instills self-reliance into the minds of the young, teaches the common rights of men, breaks the bonds of unreasoned authority and frees the mind of the future citizens of the republic; it gives them strength to withstand adversity, and leads them to love the beautiful, and to discriminate in all things that bear upon the daily joy of living. The practical thing to do is to put aside the fear that "human nature" is going to stand in the way of the best that can come to the race. The inevitable process of evolution will take care of that, and give us a new and finer human nature. Then the question will arise how to put the true, ideal education into practise, and how to obtain the workers to carry out the purpose.

Among the thousands of "settlement" and other kinds of social workers in the cities of this country there is a sympathetic interest and a point of view which if enlisted in public education would be productive of enormous good. Through the medium of the established and natural relation of teacher and pupil, the human purpose of the social worker now so fraught with discouragement and barren in results