684 IOWA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 



One of the great needs in the country schools today is a public opinion 

 which will demand a high grade of service and willingly pay for it, one 

 which will equip the school for its work as well as the modern farm is 

 equipped for its work. Another need is a supply of efllcient teachers, 

 teachers of culture, training and character, teachers whose whole hearts 

 are in the work. 



A few years ago a State superintendent in our State asserted that we 

 had 5,000 teachers in Iowa who had no farther training than that gained 

 from the country schools. No doubt some of these people are by nature 

 good teachers and do good work, but what shall be said of the schools of a 

 majority of these teachers? A competent teacher at $60 per month will 

 accomplish three times as much as an incompetent one at $30 per month. 

 Waste in time is not the most serious thing with children in a poorly 

 conducted school. Low ideals of duty and of the value of effort are far 

 greater evils than loss of time alone. A noted educator has said, "You call 

 no uneducated quack or charlatan to perform surgery upon the bodies of 

 your children lest they may be deformed, crippled or maimed physically 

 all their lives. Let us take equal care that we entrust the development 

 of the mental faculties to skilled instructors of magnanimous character, 

 that the mentabilities of your children may not be mutilated, deformed 

 and crippled to halt and limp through all the centuries of their never- 

 ending lives. The deformed body will die and be forever put out of sight 

 under the ground, but a mind made monstrous by bad teaching dies not, 

 but stalks forever among the ages, an immortal mockery of the divine 

 image." 



But you say we must take the teachers we can get. How can we 

 better conditions? Teachers are very scarce now. The secret and the 

 solution of the whole thing is in the wages paid the teachers. When 

 uneducated, unskilled laborers are paid from $30 to $40 per month and 

 board besides for farm or any other kind of labor it is very unreasonable 

 to expect to get educated labor for the same wage and pay for board. 

 It has been suggested that our financial prosperity causes our peda- 

 gogical poverty. Many who used to desire positions as a means of liveli- 

 hood are no longer under the necessity of working for the salary offered. 

 Public opinion yet tolerates the filling by very young women of the 

 ordinary positions while they are awaiting new honors, but ridicules the 

 young man who teaches in a country school unless he does it as a make- 

 shift while he is preparing himself for a life work. The reason for all 

 this is not that the work itself is debasing, but that the financial results 

 are inadequate and belittling. Not until the remuneration is put upon a 

 basis that will compare with other professions, not until the skilled teacher 

 is paid fully as much as the unskilled laborer, not until as desirable a 

 livelihood, not for a year, but for life, as is found elsewhere Is assured, 

 can we expect fully prepared, professional teachers. This wage must be 

 increased to a point that will restore honor to the work, to a point where 

 men as well as women will respond to the call, to a point where a 

 family and not the individual alone may derive support. 



The brevity of the term in our rural schools also affects the problem. 

 Few of us can afford to be idle four or five months of the year. This 



