Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 20

What is left undone by Science in keeping us immature is finally accomplished by System.

The world is getting organized. Except in some of the professions (and often even in them) we most of us start in on our life work at some small subdivided job in a large organization of people.

The work of the organization is so systematized as to concentrate responsibility and remuneration toward the top. In time, from job to job, up an ascent which grows longer as the organization grows bigger, we achieve responsibility. Till we do, we discharge minor duties for minimum pay.

This is just as true of the boy from a "middle cla.s.s" family as it is of the boy from a "working cla.s.s" family. There follows, however, a most important difference between them. The "middle cla.s.s" boy will have to work longer and go farther than the "working cla.s.s" boy in order to rise to the financial standards of his cla.s.s. In this respect the "working cla.s.s" boy will be a man, ready for marriage, long before his "middle cla.s.s"

fellow-worker.

It is among "middle cla.s.s" boys, then, that the period of infancy is most prolonged. They get a good deal of schooling. The stores of human knowledge are put in their hands, to some extent, and, to some extent, they catch up with the experience of the race.

This takes a longer and longer effort, particularly if real mastery of any real technique is attempted. Then, on going to work, they find that System, supplementing Science, has perfected such an organization of the world of work that they must stay for quite a while in the ranks of the organization. They will not soon be earning what is regarded among their friends as a marrying income. In money, as well as in mind, they approach marriage with increasing tardiness. Their prolonged infancy is financial, as well as mental.

They say that college girls marry late. It is true enough. But it isn't properly stated.

The girls in the kind of family which college girls come from marry late.

It can be definitively established by statistics here considerately omitted that the age of marriage of college girls is no later than the age of marriage of their non-college sisters and acquaintances.

College is not a cause. It is a symptom.

Out of the prolongation of infancy in the "middle cla.s.s" has come the conquest by women of the intellectual freedom of the world.

It was by no vagary of chance that the demand of women for the higher education came simultaneously with the change from the old industrial home to the new, more purely domestic home. (It may be a higher, n.o.bler type of home. We are not here discussing that point.)

As the home ceased to provide its daughters with adequate education and with adequate employment, what was their situation?

In the "working cla.s.s" it was simply this: That they went into factories and that their sweethearts married them somewhat later than had previously been the case, because their share as wives in the support of the family was increasingly smaller. But the "working cla.s.s" man soon reaches his maximum earning capacity in his craft and stays there. His financial infancy is short, compared with that of the "middle cla.s.s" man. He therefore marries younger.

In the "middle cla.s.s," however, Science and System began to lengthen the mental and financial infancy of the men to such an extent that the "old maid" of twenty-three became common. What were the girls in the "middle cla.s.s" to do while the boys were growing up to be men, in mind and in money?

The father of Frederick the Great used to go about his realm with a stick, and when he saw a woman in the street he would shake the stick at her and say "Go back into the house. An honest woman keeps indoors."

Probably quite sensible. When she went indoors, she went in to a job. The "middle cla.s.s" daughter of to-day, if her mother is living and housekeeping, goes indoors into a vacuum.

Out of that vacuum came the explosion which created the first woman's colleges.

There was plenty of sentiment in the explosion. That was the splendid, blinding part of it. That was the part of it which even to-day makes us veil our eves before the n.o.bility of such women as Emma Willard and Mary Lyon. They made Troy Female Seminary in the twenties and Mount Holyoke in the thirties in the image of the aspirations, as well as in the image of the needs, of the women of the times.

But the needs were there, the need to be something, the need to do something, self-respecting, self supporting. The existence of these needs was clearly revealed in the fact that from the early women's colleges and from the early coeducational universities there at once issued a large supply of teachers.

This goes back to the fountainhead of the higher education of women in this country. Emma Willard, even before she founded Troy Female Seminary, back in the days when she was running her school in Middlebury, Connecticut, was training young women to TEACH, and was acquiring her claim (which she herself subsequently urged) to being regarded as the organizer of the first normal school in the United States.

From that time to this most college women have taught school before getting married. The higher education of women has been, in economic effect, a trade school for training women for the trade of teacher.

But isn't it the purpose of the colleges to avoid training their pupils for specific occupations? Isn't it their purpose to give their pupils discipline and culture, pure and broad, unaffected by commercial intention? Isn't that what colleges are, and ought to be, for?

On the sh.o.r.e of this vast and violent controversy we discreetly pause and stealthily sidle off, taking note of just 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 cla.s.sroom work.

Our verdict, therefore, which we hope will be satisfactory to counsel on both sides, is that 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.

We are more interested in observing 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 the 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 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 heads.h.i.+p and superintendence of schools."

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 "middle cla.s.s" women, ceases to be able to provide those women, as a cla.s.s, with an adequate field of employment.

It is a turning point in the economic history of the cla.s.s.

At the 1909 annual convention of the a.s.sociation of Collegiate Alumnae, in Cincinnati, Miss Susan Kingsbury (acting for a committee of which Mrs. Richards, of the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, and Miss Breckenridge, of the University of Chicago, were members) read a real essay on "The Economic Efficiency of College Women."

This essay was not written till detailed reports on income and expenditure from 377 self-supporting college graduates had been got together.

Out of these 377 there were 317 who were teachers. There were 183 who had followed up their regular college course with from one to eight years of graduate study. The capital invested in education was from $2500 to $3500 and often amounted to $7000 because of advanced work and travel. After all this preparation, the average income achieved may be sufficiently disclosed in the one fact that, among those graduates who had been at work for from six to eight years, more than seventy per cent. were still earning less than $1100.

After drawing a complete statistical picture of the case, Miss Kingsbury concluded with certain questions and recommendations, here condensed, which show the new economic needs of "middle cla.s.s" women knocking at the door of present "middle cla.s.s"

education:

"Should not the over-supply of teachers be reduced by directing many of our graduates into other pursuits than teaching? This will place upon the college, just where the responsibility is due, the obligation of discovering what those opportunities are and what preparation should be given.

"This organization should endeavor to arouse in our colleges a sense of responsibility for knowing the facts with regard to their graduates, both social and economic, and should also endeavor to influence our colleges through appointment secretaries, to direct women, according to fitness, into other lines than teaching.

"Should not courses be added to the college curriculum to give women the fundamental principles in other professions, or lines of industry or commerce, than teaching?

"May not required courses be added to the college curriculum to inculcate business power and sense in all women?"

This philosophy seems to aim at making the modern school as informative about modern industry as the primitive home was about primitive industry. It seems to be the same educational philosophy which produced the course on Chicago in the Chicago elementary schools, which produced the Manhattan Trade School in New York, which produced the School of Salesmans.h.i.+p at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union in Boston.

At that Women's Educational and Industrial Union, at 264 Boylston Street, you may see the evolution toward the age of trained women proceeding at all levels of educational equipment.

There, before you, at one level, are the Trade School Shops--a shop in hand-work and a shop in millinery. The pupils are graduates of the Boston Trade School for Girls. They have had one year of training. They are now taking another.

Florence Marshall made the Boston Trade School, with a committee of women to help her. It has now been taken over by the public authorities and merged into the public-school system. What looked like a private fad has become a public function. The training of women for self-support has been recognized as a duty of the state.

The Trade School Shops at the Women's Educational and Industrial Union were started for the express purpose of supplementing the work of the Boston Trade School for Girls. One year was not enough.

In the Trade School the prospective milliner had spent four months on plain sewing, four months on summer hats, four months on winter hats. She had also taken short courses in Personal Hygiene, Business Forms, Spelling, Business English, Color Design, Textiles, Industrial Conditions. These latter courses were not, strictly speaking, "technical." They were "vocational."

They were in the "middle ground" between general and technical training. They went beyond the general training of the elementary schools and furnished the girl with the background of her future vocation. But she often needed a little more of the foreground, a little more of actual trade technique.

Thus does her education divide itself up into periods:--general, vocational, technical.

The Trade School Shops are designed to give the girl her final technical finish. They are really more like a factory than like a school. Although the object of them is to convey a broad instruction, the pupil gets wages, the stuff she makes is sold, and the organization is that of a commercial establishment.

So, at the end of two years from the time she left the elementary school, the young milliner is ready to go out into the world organization. She is better fitted for her world than many a college girl is for hers.