Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 40, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1907 — SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES [ARTICLE]

SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES

From Maine and Missouri come complaints of low wages paid 'to teachers in the public schools. A committee of the Maine Teachers’ Association has investigated conditions in that State, and reports that the average monthly salary of men teachers is $11.61 below the average far the nation, and $21.27 below the average for New England. For women teachers the average monthly salary is $12.91 lower than that for the entire country, and $11.90 below the New England average. The majority of women teachers in the State work for from six arc paid more than ten dollars. Over 2,000 elementary -and high school teachers board at home, and this explains how it is possible for many teachers to sustain themselves on their small salaries. Maine has good teachers, and 1,876 of them have taken partial or complete normal training courses. The committee finds that 6,530 women working in the Maine cotton mills get an average weekly wage of $5.99, while the average pay of women school teachers is $6.90 a week. The average weekly pay of men in the cotton mills is SB.OI, according to this report, and the men teachers receive $9.18. The committee says that the only other occupation in Maine for which figures are available is that included in the woolen industry, where the annual wages run filkn $327 to SSOO. The average pay of school teachers, including principals and superifitCndents, is $421. In an address before the National Educational Association at Los Angeles recently, President Benjamin Ide Wheeler of the University of California criticised the prevailing custom of prescribing a college education for all mental ills and condemning when the potion failed to cure. He said the public school must be made and kept the school for all, without recognition of classes or conditions- and that it must shape its work and plan so as to close no door, but rather open the freest opportunity for the best achievement and the highest advance. He thought, however, that the present rigid system of the grades, whose chief excuse has been economic -necessity, must yield to permit the more rapid advance of gifted and diligent pupils, and that it should be borne in mind that the school exists for the child and not for the grade. * Supt. Maxwell of New York has urged principals to give the group system of teaching and grading a trial. The general principle is to so arrange the progress of pupils that each may have individual attention. Classes are separated into divisions and definite times are fixed for study. This allows bright pupils to do more advanced work by going from one division to another as fast as they are able. It now appears that Lord Curzon, who recently was appointed chancellor of the University of Oxford, is to take up residence there and devote much of his time ■ to injecting new life into the old institution. From this vantage ground he will push his public appeal for funds and carry ogt a scheme for modernizing-the course of study. < The New York Board of Education has decided to restrict the use of feather dusters and to introduce the vacuum-cleaning process in one of the new school houses as a trial. President Schneider of the Chicago School Board is advocating the Japanese imperial rescript on education as the standard of ethical and moral teaching in the Chicago public schools. A copy of this rescript, which recently has been translated, shows it to be a sort of educational creed, issued some thirty years ago by the Emperor of Japan. It includes such injunctions as devotion to parents and family, modesty, moderation, benevolence, pursuit, of learning, cultivation of arts, advancement of the public good, respect for law and loyalty to tbe StatA -