Moreover, from the point of view of the family, it is injurious for social practice to keep women who have the qualities of good teachers from marrying lest they lose their beloved profession. It is one of the best, although one of the least tried, ways of bringing the school and the home together by giving a good many teachers a clearer idea from personal experience of what the home needs from the school, and giving mothers a clearer idea of the reasons for school rules by having them serve in both capacities. The normal school education of women was obtained by appeals based on the fact of the first half of the nineteenth century that unless women teachers were secured and trained for the task the elementary school could never be enabled to fill the need of the public school system. The fact of the early part of the twentieth century should be as deeply pressed, the fact that there are not enough women teachers of education and character for elementary school service unless we mix teaching and marriage for many of them. This fact should make a social appeal to-day equal to that of Horace Mann's great mission.

If we are to have enough elementary school teachers and continue to increase the number from the most fit women for the task, we must also institute a new social backing for the profession. In this connection one is obliged to deal with the disrespect shown the average teacher of little children and even of the high school and college instructor as compared with leaders in other professions. The teacher of little children is most often a woman, and if a woman away from home and especially in some rural communities is very nearly a social outcast. The "teacherage" is just beginning to be called for as the suitable home for the teachers of a school; a "teacherage" which can become a social centre if near the school building, and thus be uniquely useful. The jointure of all the best homes in a community with all the wisest teachers in that community, not alone for the occasional discussion of "School Problems" or "Home Problems," but for some common public work which will link both teachers and parents to the larger life of the community - this is a necessity if we would have enough teachers of the right sort.

The attention to the physical details of school housing, school gardens, school playgrounds, school lighting and seating, all these the family life which furnishes the children must be keen about in the interest of each child. The curriculum must not be left to a school board chiefly interested in other matters than text-books, except it may be for a business interest in the latter. The supply and testing of teachers must not be left to a body more concerned in getting places for relatives and friends than for securing the best available teaching staff.

In all the things that experts should direct, and in all the things that mean health and comfort and happiness to individual children, parents, even if not very learned, should have a voice and seek to make their convictions work to actual progress.

Individual Sharing in the Social Inheritance. - For the last point of our list, namely, the right of every child to be made a conscious heir to the social inheritance of his time and place in the world, little need be said. The tendencies in American life which give thoughtful people the most satisfaction are the tendencies toward extension of culture privileges in public libraries, lectures, tax-supported and educationally supervised playgrounds, in young people's organizations like the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, in summer camps (not all for the rich), in vacation houses full of the flavor of the best of life, in the varied clubs and classes of the settlements, in the pageants and other forms of pictured world-life - all these, and more that might be named, show an exuberance of effort to share with utmost speed and fullest generosity the things that seem to the privileged few the most precious heritage of our race.

Yet, with all our effort so much more needs doing that multitudes live and die wholly ignorant of the world they have come to or of the race-life of which they are a part. Doctor Du Bois, in his classic appeal for human comradeship for all, The Soul of Black Folks, has shown what suffering comes to the cultured black man who finds all cultured men and women of white races forcing him to be an alien because of his skin. There is a sadder and more terrible, because unconscious, deprivation; it is that of any one, white or black, rich or poor, who loses the chance to partake of the culture of the past. The man or woman, whether able to accomplish much or little on the practical side of vocational service, whose outlook is bounded by the narrow, the superficial, the personal, the ephemeral, is missing the best part of his social inheritance, the capacity to "look before and after and pine for what is not."

Such a little time we are here! Even a Methuselah might wish to have in his mental furnishings the glory of the past and the prophetic hope of the future. All children, not merely a fortunate few, should have this sense of a group-life of which each is a part, should be able to see life and see it whole in the social inheritance that belongs alike to each one of us. Children make a large order upon each generation as they come into a vast group of all that have been and reach consciously toward the expanding life of the coming time.

The family must begin that culture by which the order shall be filled, but no family can answer even the least of the social demands by itself. "Culture," says Emerson, "shall yet absorb chaos itself," Every child has a rightful citizenship in that order-giving world of thought, of history, of poetry, of art, of science, and of religion.

What a nation we might become if only every child had this, its right, recognized and fulfilled!

Copyright, 1923 by J.B. Lippincott Company

Tags: Parenting and Families

About the Author

Anna Garlin Spencer (1851-1931) was an American educator, feminist, and Unitarian minister. Born in Attleboro, MA, she married the Rev. William H. Spencer in 1878. She was a leader in the women's suffrage and peace movements. In 1891 she became the first woman ordained as a minister in the state of Rhode Island.