TEACHERS’ SALARIES.

Gisborne Times, Volume V, Issue 94, 30 April 1901, Page 2

TEACHERS’ SALARIES.

(To the Editor of the Times.) Sik, —Your correspondent, M. H. Sicvwright, makes out a fairly good case for the public teachers, but allow me to draw llC" attention to a few facts which she has evidently overlooked. First, a girl when she enters the teaching profession does not do so, as a man generally does, with the intention of making an occupation of a life-time of it. She gonorally waits until the right man comes along, and then she turns her back on the school and directs her attention to household economy, which I contend is her proper sphere. Secondly, a girl is not fitted to control a school, and has not the same powers of enforcing discipline, therefore she should be paid accordingly. . The Minister of Education is a far-seeing gentleman, and no doubt in drawing up the scheme which your correspondent complains of, has given the question serious consideration, and viewed it from many points of view. It is most unreasonable to ask that a woman’s salary should be the same as that of a man. Those persons who seek to place them on an equality in regard to salary cannot have carefully thought over the question. As far as I can see their efforts in the direction indicated is more likely to bring the salary of the man down to that of the female teacher rather than to raise the latter to the level of the man’. “'What constitutes a living wage in this country” and the other questions that your correspondent refers to are matters that I must leave for the present.—l am, etc., Wakeful.