Teachers Wanted

Fifty years ago, educational standards in American schools and colleges were even lower than today. But if in 1900 our schools did their job inadequately, they at least knew what they were trying to do and how they should do it. They were going to teach subjects which over two thousand years had proven valuable. And the people who taught these subjects were supposed to have mastered their disciplines and, therefore, be competent to incalculate others with them.

The last fifty years have seen a vast change in the scope of the schools. Schools no longer teach only academic disciplines. They have expanded their function to include every variety of learning, from home economics to life adjustment.

Faced with this and the additional fact, that more people are now in America's schools than at any previous time, educators have panicked. They have not got enough time or money or teachers or skill to do the job assigned to them.

This panic has resulted in what educators call "the new philosophy of education," which is summarized in the seemingly sound hypothesis that "we are teaching students, not subjects."

This principle in turn has helped exclude those who wish to teach subjects from the public schools. Anybody who wants to teach in the public schools is rated on the courses he has taken on how to be a good teacher rather than those on the subject he teaches. If he wants to be promoted he must take more courses in teaching, not in the "subject matter fields" he teaches.

Yet in the secondary schools there will continue to be a great need for people with good intellectual training. It is the historian or critic who can inspire students in his field, not the classroom administrators.

The public secondary schools should, therefore, undertake a drastic re-evaluation of their policies in hiring teachers. The first step in this effort is to decrease the number of courses in education required for hiring or promotions. This would help restore the emphasis in public education to hiring academically qualified teachers instead of classroom psychologists; it would also encourage more college students who like their own specialty but do not wish to study education extensively, to enter high school teaching.