336 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



system of schools or a university? . . . These questions are not difficult to 

 answer but it is difficult to frame the answer in terms that the successful man 

 of affairs will find intelligible. The subject is one that he approaches with a 

 prejudiced mind, although his bias is not so much due to a perversity as to 

 sheer inability to realize the fundamental nature of the question at issue. He 

 is so fixed in the commercial way of looking at organized enterprise that he 

 can not so shift his bearings as to occupy, even temporarily, the professional 

 point of view. Now the idea of professionalism lies at the very core of educa- 

 tional endeavor, and whoever engages in educational work fails of his purpose 

 in just so far as he fails to assert the inherent prerogatives of his calling. He 

 becomes a hireling, in fact if not in name, when he suffers, unprotesting, the 

 deprivation of all initiative, and contentedly plays the part of a cog in a 

 mechanism whose motions are controlled from without. Yet the tendency in 

 our country is to-day strongly set toward the recognition of this devitalized 

 system of educational activity as suitable and praiseworthy, and the spirit of 

 professionalism is engaged in what is nothing less than a life-and-death struggle. 

 When a university president or a school principal can indulge unrebuked in the 

 insufferable arrogance of such an expression as " my faculty " or " one of my 

 teachers," when school trustees are capable of calling superintendents and prin- 

 cipals and teachers " employees," it is time to consider the matter somewhat 

 seriously, and inquire into the probable consequences of so gross a misconcep- 

 tion of the nature of educational service. 



There is one general consequence which subsumes all the others. It is that 

 young men of character and self-respect will refuse to engage in the work of 

 teaching (except as a makeshift) as long as the authorities in charge of educa- 

 tion remain blind to the professional character of the occupation, and deal 

 with those engaged in it as objects of suspicion, or, at best, as irresponsible 

 and unpractical theorists, whose actions must be kept constantly under control 

 and restricted by all manner of limitations and petty regulations. Membership 

 in a profession implies certain franchise, an emancipation from dictation, and 

 a degree of liberty in the exercise of judgment, which most members of the 

 teaching profession find are denied them by the prevalent forms of educational 

 organization. And the denial is made the more exasperating by the conscious- 

 ness that these rights (which are elementary and should be inalienable) are 

 withheld by persons whose tenure of authority is more apt to be based upon 

 the executive energy or the ability of the schemer or the success of the man of 

 practical affairs than with expert acquaintance with the conditions of educa- 

 tional work. The " business " president or administrative board is bad enough, 

 and the "political" president or board is worse; yet upon the anything but 

 tender mercies of the one or the other most men who devote their lives to the 

 noble work of teaching must in large measure depend. 



The inevitable consequence is ... to make the teaching profession more 

 and more the resort of the poor in spirit, to whom the words of the Beatitude 

 must have a distinctly ironical ring. To become a teacher in this country is, 

 except in the case of a few favored institutions or systems, to subordinate one's 

 individuality to a mechanism, and to expose one's self-respect to indignities of 

 a perculiarly wanton sort. Inadequate compensation is a grievous fault of our 

 educational provision, but it is not so grievous as the faults that undermine 

 professional self-respect, and sap educational vitality at its very root. Yet 

 these graver faults are easily remediable, and would be promptly remedied if 

 we could once rid ourselves of the obsession of the commercial or military type 

 of administrative organization. 



