Digging to the Roots of a Dying Tree 25 



Educational results are largely determined by the 

 quality of teaching. A study of urban and rural con- 

 ditions on this score is strongly in favor of the city 

 teacher. Country schoolma'ams serve, on an average, 

 only about one year, against the average of 12 years on 

 the part of the city schoolma'am. In the one case 

 school-teaching is treated as a temporary expedient a 

 stepping-stone to higher education or some other pro- 

 fession, and often to marriage; in the other, it is re- 

 garded as a permanent career. It requires no argu- 

 ment whatever to demonstrate which condition is favor- 

 able to the child. 



Salaries have something to do with the matter. 

 These are considerably higher in town than in the 

 country. This condition is governed somewhat by the 

 inexorable rule of overhead expenses. It is the large 

 school that can afford to pay the highest salaries be- 

 cause the expense is divided among many more individ- 

 uals ; consequently the higher rewards are held out by 

 the larger schools, which are invariably in centers of 

 population. Urban conditions are also much more 

 favorable to the careful and thorough grading of 

 schools, and the old-fashioned, one-room school can 

 not begin to offer so much to the child as the graded 

 school. Not only is the teacher overburdened with work 

 in the one-room school, but she has no opportunity to 

 specialize and become highly expert in any single de- 

 partment of her work. Here, as elsewhere, the whole 

 trend of our times favors the modern art of specializa- 

 tion ; and this is a forbidden art for the country teacher 

 in many instances. 



For the same reason vocational training, which has 



