Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 169, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1918 — LACK OK TEACHERS BECOMING A MENACE [ARTICLE]

LACK OK TEACHERS BECOMING A MENACE

United States Commissioner of Education P. P. Claxton is sending out appeals from Washington to former teachers to get back into harness for the duration of the war. The threatened lowering of the standards of efficiency in teaching and general education, built up through long years of effort, presents a serious outcome of war conditions, says Thomas M. Balliet, dean of the school of pedagogy of New York university, in an article in the New York Times, in which the lack of teachers at the present time is pointed out as a menace to the nation. Thousands of trained teachers are leaving their posts for war service and for enrollment in industries paying much higher salaries than they received for educational work. Standards of efficiency in education are being lowered just at a time when it is more important than ever, not only that they should not be lowered, but that they should be raised, because, as Commissioner Claxton points out, conditions that will follow the war will demand a higher standard of general intelligence, industrial efficiency, and civic equipment than has yet been attained. This can only be had through education. “One might well say that the safety of the nation and the welfare of the people are involved in the crisis threatened by the great and growing lack of teachers,” declares Dean Balliet. GovernonManning, of South Carolina, in discussing this problem, agrees with Dean Balliet that the problem should be solved wherever possible by the simple process of raising teachers’ salaries to meet the larger pay offered in commercial and clerical occupations, and that the increase should be in proportion to the increased cost of living. The justice of this demand is emphasized'when it is remembered that the 740,000 teachers throughout the land, including rural schools, north and south receive an average salary considerably less than S6OO annually. “There must be a devitalizing of the nation’s educational forces,” declares Dean Balliet, “and teachers who are not actually compelled by circumstances over which they have no control to leave their posts for higher pay in other work are certainly, it seems to me, not acting patriotically by going into outside employment for temporarily higher pay.”