AN ARMY OF WOMEN TEACHERS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXI, Issue 9134, 6 July 1908, Page 4

AN ARMY OF WOMEN TEACHERS.

"In the public schools of all grades in the United States, only twentythree per cent, of all the teachers are males," write* Mr Stanley Hall, in the "World's Work." In several states there are less than ten petcent, and this proportion is steadily decreasing. If we eliminate the high school, where the proportion of male teachers is larger, and also the principals of the grammar schools, mostly men, the proportion of women becomes still larger. In fact most, and in many cities nearly all, of the grade teaching of children from six to fourteen, to say nothing of the kindergarten, is done by women. Indeed, a very large proportion of boys and girls who only satisfy the requirements of the law in their attendance never come under the influence of a male instructor. Occasionally, a boy even graduates from the high school and is taught by a man for the first time after he enters college. This army ot women teachers is now the main bulwark in our republic of citizen-voters against all the evils of illiteracy and ignorance. They are paid only a wretched average wage of 43 dollars, and not infrequently less than 30 dollars a month. More than half of them have had no

professional training whatever, and but relatively few have taken full normal courses. More than a quarter of the whole army of teachers leaves the profession every year. No..intelligent man or woman justifies this state of things, but practically all deplore it." Mr Hall attributes much of the increasing hooliganism in America to the extensive absence of male teachers in the public schools.