THE ETERNAL DEBT

Not long ago when a group of professors and school teachers banded together to form a union and strike for higher wages, their standing in the community was increased but not their salary. Teachers, like ministers, are still forced to live well on the same annual pay as grocerymen and expert automobile mechanics, and it is only when such men as Rockefeller take pity on them and give bequests that they "get a raise". Perhaps it is for this reason that, of the 178 positions as teachers in private schools offered to Harvard graduates during the year 1921-22, less than 35 were filled.

A circular letter sent out by the University Appointment Office to all members of the senior class urges, "men who have any athletic ability or interests, and scholarship enough to warrant them in undertaking to teach others, to consult the Office". There is a constant demand for college graduates as teachers in private and public schools--a demand which, under the present conditions, it is impossible to fill. More and more boys are going to school and college, but fewer and fewer men are appearing to teach them.

And yet, in spite of low salary and non-union hours, "the intellegensia as is" seems contented with its lot. Philosophers have always proclaimed the joys of "thought for thought's sake", and have extended a general invitation to all who cared to listen. The fact that few have heeded has bothered them not at all, up to the present. But now a critic, exclaiming that the teaching profession is in danger of falling into the hands of women, a possibility decried by all educational experts, sets before men the arguments to induce them to enter it: the interest offered by contact with younger men, the satisfaction of service rendered, the security from outside worry, the long vacations, and the pleasures of the work itself.

Yet these are not the most vital reasons. Far more cogent is the gradual realization that all professors and school masters are not absent minded nonentities, and that the real need is not merely for men but men who have done things. The professions most frequently ridiculed are the very ones which need the best material, and school teaching is no exception. Those who teach because they can do nothing else, fall notoriously in that, as every school boy knows. Only too often, however, necessity leaves to them the payment of "the eternal debt of age to youth--education".