MERIT AND THE DEPRESSION

In these days when the teaching profession is becoming more and more over crowded, and when lack of positions is becoming increasingly serious, the record of the Harvard Graduate School of Education in placing its graduates is distinctly surprising. The fact that there were 260 positions waiting for the 133 graduates seems almost paradoxical in the fact of present conditions.

Only last week in New York, a large group known as the "Association of Un appointed Teachers" stormed the State Board of Education demanding that they be given jobs. Not is this in any way an exceptional case. Recently a survey was taken of sixty-five educational schools throughout the country which showed that only one half of the graduates have obtained positions this fall. Yet a third of these teachers have doctors' degrees and another third have masters' degree.

The fact that the Harvard School of Education is hardly noted as a shining light in the field of education is a sad commentary on the situation. It serves to emphasize the mediocrity of the profession as a whole and it demonstrates the general inferiority and inadequacy in the educational training falsities of the country. Normal schools everywhere should be jacked up if they are not to be conspicuous for their uselessness. Perhaps an ideal school for training teachers will be an impossibility for a long time to come. But the successful placement of the graduates of the Harvard Graduate School is a striking illustration of the crying need for more satisfactory schools of education.