Delphi complete works of.., p.105
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 105
Now why should all this be? Why is it that there are no such things as wizards of the blackboard, boy wonders of the classroom, and alchemists of the chalk stick?
Let us look into the matter. Consider just who the teachers are and why they are teachers.
First of all there is the small, the very small minority, who, with a full choice before them, went into teaching because they wanted to; because they thought it a noble, honourable work at which to spend a life-time — not to be used merely as a stepping-stone to something else; because through their love of the profession they gave no thought to such drawbacks as the low pay, the slighted status of the teacher, the impossibility of marriage with a home equivalent to those of other men of equal industry and endowment — a home such as lawyers and doctors live in, such as kings of finance perpetually find too small for them, or such as those in which the senior clergy, in the pauses of their ghostly duties, take their lettered ease. To all of this the teacher — the enthusiast of whom I speak — has said goodbye at the threshold of his profession. He knew that he could never hope, as a successful schoolmaster, to dress as well as a successful lumberman or dog fancier, or join a club like a banker or play golf and drink whiskey and soda as a broker does. Yet some few men here and there make this deliberate choice. All honour to them for it — or at least all honour that ink and print can give them. They will get no other.
A few such men, and only a few, have I known. “Why did you go into teaching?” I asked long ago of one of my colleagues. “Because I think it a fine thing,” he said. At the time I thought him an abandoned liar. Later I realised that he spoke the truth. It took some five years of experience of things as they are to crush the enthusiasm out of him. He left the profession without illusions and without regret. His place was filled by the trustees without a pang: teachers were cheap that year.
The truth is that, as things now are, it is not possible, or hardly possible, for a man to go into teaching for the love of it and at a conscious sacrifice, and to stay in it for the rest of his working life. It can’t be done. Human nature is too weak. To make such a thing possible there would have to be no salary at all and the position marked out for the eyes of the multitude as one of conscious martyrdom. If a mathematical master at a collegiate institute were allowed to wear a long brown gown, with sandals and bare feet; if instead of being called Mr. Podge, he were called Father Aloysius or Brother Ambrose; if instead of feeding at a three-dollar boarding-house, he carried a bowl at his girdle into which people of their free will put lentils and peas and sweet herbs — then the job would be all right. Human nature is such that on those terms men would give forth a life of strenuous devotion, asking no higher honour. There would be plenty of applicants for the position of Father Aloysius. Indeed, I might take a shot at it myself. But the unrecognised half-sacrifice of the teacher-enthusiast is not good enough.
Yet after all the enthusiasts of this sort are only a small minority. The same element enters, no doubt, in part into the cases of many other teachers — but only in part and not as the leading motive. The chief cause of most of the schoolmasters being so is because of the peculiar ease of access to the job. It is like a fly-trap, or fish-net. All may walk in; few can get out. What happens is this. There are a great number of youths who begin life with the idea that the way to success lies through a college education. This proposition may or may not be true. It is very likely that the best chance of pecuniary success lies in going into a linoleum factory or a hardware store at fifteen and learning while there is yet time how many cents make a dollar. But at any rate a college education is the recognised and only gateway to the professions of law, medicine and engineering. These appear to offer the best chances of success and the most attractive form of career. They are trees with plenty of branches at the top. The young birds fly straight towards them.
But a college education is a costly thing. To make a college graduate you have to sink in him a thousand dollars in cash, and I know not how much in other things. Funds run low; the young man’s savings or his parents’ spare money is exhausted. He graduates, as it were, on the brink of bankruptcy. The tall trees look infinitely far and the flight to their branches long and perilous. But standing beside them, close and easy of access, is a stubby tree, a meanly grown thing but carrying all its branches stuck out sideways and very low. This is the teaching profession and into it the crowd of young men, “shoo’d” over the precipice of graduation, are precipitated in a flock.
Not one in twenty — no, not one in a hundred — of these young men means to stay “in teaching.” The idea of the average beginner is that he will stay in it long enough to save enough money to get out of it. It is to serve as a stepping stone to law or medicine, or something real.
Let the reader imagine the effect on the profession at the outset of this distorted point of view. Who would wish to be treated by a doctor who was saving up money to become a ship captain? Who would put money in a railroad if it were known that the president and the traffic manager and the rest of them were merely doing their work to get enough money to qualify to be opera singers? Is a judge saving money to be a poet, or a lawyer waiting to run a hotel? Never. But this bad element runs all through the teaching profession like a rotten streak in a board. The thing is used as a mere stepping stone. The young men, those who can and who are not caught, do struggle out of it. Just as they are beginning to know something about the job they leave it and a new set of young men who know nothing about it take their places. Meantime a lot of them — I should say, at a guess, fifty per cent. of them — get caught in it and can’t get out. The net has closed. Perhaps the young man becomes aware that one of the female teachers in the kindergarten department has eyes like a startled fawn and a soul like a running brook. The discovery is too much for him. By the time he recovers it is too late. He is a married teacher in a black lustre coat, saving money to put his eldest boy to college.
Or another fate may overtake the young man. He becomes, to put it very simply, lazy. All men do after the age of about thirty; though the successful ones are able to hide it by a great hustle of mimic activity. For the man on the make there is a whole apparatus of secretaries and subordinates, clubs, rendezvous, appointments, business trips to New York and so forth to cover up the fact that he has ceased to do any real work. Even from himself he hides it. He creates the fiction that he is working with his brain — an inner and mystic process which no one can dispute.
So the teacher, like all other men, gets lazy. It seems harder and harder to take the plunge, to face the loss of his salary, to re-enter a student’s boarding-house and open a text book to start the study of law. Something, too, of the mock dignity of his teacher’s office has got hold of him and eats into the sillier side of his mind. He has learned to set examinations; he hates to have to pass them. In his class-room he rules; when he says, “Jones, stand up,” then up Jones stands. It is hard to give this up and to have a professor say to him, “Mr. Smith, sit down.” No, it can’t be done. He means to give up teaching. He still talks of law or medicine, or hints that he may go west. But he will go nowhere till he goes underground.
A great part of this trouble springs from the teacher’s salary. It is too high. There it is, a hundred dollars a month, let us say, dead certain — no doubt and no delay about it. A lawyer makes (on the average and apart from exceptional cases) a few hundred dollars in his first year: perhaps not that; a young doctor makes on the average, something more than nothing; he walks hospitals, wears a white linen coat and says that his chief interest is in pathology; but what he really wants is a practice and after waiting a few years he gets it. These, and their like, the young engineer, lead a struggling life, subsisting on little, lying much and hoping very greatly. Meantime, the bovine teacher in his stall is as well paid at twenty-three as he will be at forty.
For there it is! The insane idea is abroad that a young teacher, a mere beginner, is as good or practically so as a man of experience. No difference is made; or none that corresponds at all with the vast gulf that lies in every other profession between the tried and successful man and the youth who is only beginning. Compare the salary of a bank junior (you will need a slide rule to measure it) with that of a general manager of a bank. And do the shareholders object to the difference? Not for a moment; the dullest of them will explain you the reason of it in five minutes. And does the bank junior object to the general manager’s high pay? Not for a minute; he means to have that job himself later on and he wants it to be as highly paid as possible: in fact that is why he is a bank junior just at present.
Let us reflect for a moment on what qualifications the real schoolmaster ought to have. First, he must possess the knowledge of the things he teaches in the school-room. This is a mere nothing. Any jackass can learn up enough algebra or geometry to teach it to a class of boys: in fact plenty of them do. But apart from the trivial qualification of knowing a few facts, the ideal schoolmaster has got to be the kind of man who can instinctively lead his fellow men (men are only grown-up boys, and boys are only undamaged men); who can inspire them to do what he says, because they want to be like him, who can kindle and keep alight in a boy’s heart a determination to make of himself something that counts, to build up in himself every ounce of bodily strength and mental power and moral worth for which he has the capacity. The ideal schoolmaster should be a man filled with the gospel of strenuous purpose.
Theodore Roosevelt (though he would shoot me for saying so) ought to be a schoolmaster. So ought Lord Kitchener and the Grand Duke Nicholas. Indeed, there are any number of unclaimed schoolmasters masquerading in the world to-day as kings and captains merely because the profession is not made such as to call them in. But even strenuousness itself, intensity of purpose, is not all. Strenuousness without the capacity to do things degenerates into mere vague desire of accomplishment, a vapid fulness of intention, which is a sort of mental equivalent for wind on the stomach. Such is the attitude of the man who is perpetually talking of the “full life” and of “developing himself,” who goes out into the woods to draw deep breaths and falls asleep after lunch while waiting to begin his life work. Our Schoolmaster must be other than that. He must be the type of man superior not only to the boys he teaches, but superior to the parents who send their sons to him; able to have been, had he so wished it, a better banker than the average bank manager, a better railroad man than the average one, with brains enough to give points to a lawyer and breadth enough to make even a doctor feel thin. This is the kind of man to be a schoolmaster. He is to be found perhaps in the ratio of one in ten thousand ordinary citizens. Things being as they are with the trade, such a man is seldom if ever actually engaged as a school teacher. He is more probably a general, or a bishop, or the head of a great industry or the manager of an international trust or a four-ringed circus, or anything else that knows a good man when it sees him and is prepared to pay a price for him. There lies the point. To get the man you must hand out the pay. And as the pay is not forthcoming all the men of merit either never enter the lists as schoolmasters, or abandon the job before they are twenty-five.
To get and keep the right man it is necessary to pay him an income that will enable him to live with the same comfort and dignity as others of his endowment. There is no need to pay him this at the start. No man with a future before him cares a rush about the initial pay. But the thing must be there as a future, as a possibility, as something to work towards, so that from the first day of his work the man feels that his life is sealed to his chosen profession forever.
I do not mean to argue for a moment that a mere increase of salaries will at once transform the teaching profession. It cannot. You cannot make an incompetent man any better by merely raising his pay. The present situation cannot be remedied by such a simple process as that. Nine out of ten of the present teachers ought not to be schoolmasters at all. They might, at a pinch, get along tolerably well in the law, or on the bench, or as clergymen, but the idea of entrusting to them the supreme function of training the rising generation is nonsense.
I wish that I had time to organise a school, and that some good fairy would stand the expense of it till it got started. I mean, of course, a real fairy like Carnegie or Rockefeller, not the imitation one of the picture books. I would undertake to show to the world what a real school could be and, more surprising still, what a harvest of profit could be made from it. For the buildings and apparatus I would care not a straw. I wouldn’t mind if the gymnasium contained a patent vaulting horse and a pneumatic chest exerciser or whether it just had wooden sides like a horse stable. These things don’t matter at all. But I would engage, regardless of cost, the services of a set of men that would make every other school look like — well, look like what it is. I would select the senior masters with the same care and at the same salaries as if I were choosing presidents of railway companies and managers of banks. Let me try to give the reader an idea of what the staff of a first-rate school would look like. The list would read something after this fashion:
RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL FOR BOYS
(Beautifully situated in the Ozark Mountains, or the Adirondacks, or the Laurentians, or any place fifty miles from a moving picture.)
Headmaster
Mr. Woodrow Wilson
Treasurer and Bursar
Pierpont Morgan, Esq.
Instructor in French
Mons. Poincaré
Russian Teacher
Nich. Romanoff
Military Instructor
T. Roosevelt
English
{Sir James Barrie
{ Mr. R. Kipling
Piano
Ig. Paderewski
Other Music
Al Jolson
Deportment
{ Sir Wilfrid Laurier
{ Miss Jane Addams
Matron
W. Jennings Bryan
Chaplain
The Rev. W. Sunday
There! That looks pretty complete. I have not filled in the customary office of janitor and messenger. I admit that I might fill that myself.
Readers who are unacquainted with the subject may think that the above list contains an element of exaggeration. If so it is very slight. If the profession were what it ought to be these are the very men who would have been drawn into it. If the list sounds at all odd, it is only because we have reached a stage where it seems quite comic to make out a list of eminent and distinguished men and imagine them schoolmasters. The reader, if he did not appreciate it before, can easily estimate by his attitude towards this list, what he thinks of the status and importance of the school teacher.
But behind this list are facts. All of the instructors above, or people of their class, could be engaged at salaries ranging from thirty to fifty thousand dollars a year. I am not quite sure of the Czar and Al Jolson. But we may let them pass. A school with a staff like this would easily draw a thousand pupils at a yearly fee of two thousand dollars a head. There is not the slightest doubt of it. That would give an income of two million dollars a year. The salaries of the junior teachers would cut but little figure. They would serve, and be glad to, on the same terms as young lawyers or doctors entering on their professional life. With such a staff the simplest of buildings would serve the purpose as well as marble colonnades and Greek porticos. School buildings, as things are, are chiefly used to cover up the schoolmaster. They are like the white waistcoat and three-inch collar of the feeble-minded man.
“But,” the reader may exclaim in his ignorance, “where are the parents to be found who will pay two thousand dollars a year in school fees?” Where? Why, my dear sir, you may find them anywhere and everywhere. You may see them in any up-to-date grill room eating asparagus at a dollar a plate; in any of the clubs where they drink whiskey and soda at thirty-five cents; on Pullman cars where they have to ride in a drawing-room to save them from the horrors of an ordinary bed; in steamers where they need a private promenade deck de luxe to keep them untainted by common intercourse. Two thousand a year! It is not worth talking about. You may stretch a string across any fashionable thoroughfare in any prosperous city and in ten minutes catch enough parents of this kind to fill an asylum. True, they don’t pay two thousand dollars now. But that is because nobody asks them for it. They have been accustomed to think of a school teacher as a sort of usher, about half-way up in dignity between a ticket clerk and a furnace man. But once let them be able to boast that their little Willie is taught music by a man who costs ten thousand dollars a year, and you will see them on the stampede.
Nor is it only the parents who can afford it who will pay the high fees. There will be also the still larger class of those who can’t afford it. There will be no holding them back. In this imperfect world people really appreciate only the things that they can’t afford. That is what gives real pleasure. A motor car that is only half paid for, a Victrola that may be removed from the house at any moment, an encyclopedia with payments reaching beyond the grave — these are the true luxuries of life.
