THE SCHOOL AND THE FAMILY 93 



subvert both the school and the family. The lack of initiative and 

 vitality in our entire school system is appalling. The influence of our 

 half million teachers on the problems of democracy and civilization is 

 entirely insignificant. The attractive and normal girls and the few 

 able men tend to drop out, leaving the school principal, narrow and 

 arbitrary, and the spinster, devitalized and unsexed, as the dominant 

 elements. Boys get but little good from their schooling and leave it 

 when they can. Girls, who need men teachers even more than boys, 

 predominate in the upper classes. Women are good teachers, especially 

 young girls with their intuitive sympathy for children and mothers 

 who have bred children of their own, and women are cheaper than men 

 cf equal education and ability. But the ultimate result of letting the 

 celibate female be the usual teacher has been such as to make it a 

 question whether it would not be an advantage to the country if the 

 whole school plant could be scrapped. 



It has been urged that the backwardness of the middle ages was 

 due to the fact that the ablest men were selected for celibacy; with 

 equal plausibility it might be argued that the 400,000 American 

 women teachers withhold the million children who might give to our 

 country the intellectual distinction that it lacks. However this may 

 be, it is certain that the homes and the children are lacking; and in 

 every school patterns are set to be copied in the next generation with 

 disastrous results. 



It will doubtless be thought by most of those who read this paper 

 that the futility of our present educational scheme and tbe evil effects 

 of the school on the family have been exaggerated. The rhetorical 

 phrases that have been used to give emphasis may leave an impres- 

 sion of lack of sanity and humor. It is indeed true that the shadows 

 rather than the lights have been depicted. It would be possible to 

 write in praise of universal education and the humanity of modern 

 civilization, to tell once more how the American school opens the gate- 

 way to any career to every child, and how woman has been freed from 

 a slavery as 'Complete as that to which any race has been subjected. 

 But it is not the object of this paper to relate the progress of civiliza- 

 tion; its aim is to draw attention to certain poisonous by-products in 

 the hope that antidotes may be found, and to make a suggestion tend- 

 ing in this direction. 



The proposal — not likely to be heeded, for if it were, then its need 

 would largely disappear — is that the teacher should be the family and 

 so far as may be that the scholar should be the family. 



In the last of the often-read tales that give distinction to American 

 literature, we learn how the traveler, after a weary world search for 

 the three fatalities that should give him love, treasure and influence, 

 returns to his native New England village to find them there in a wife 



