Women Workers in Seven Professions | Page 5

assumed that the elderly governess, driven to teach by poverty and lack of friends, with no qualifications but gentility, good manners, good principles, and a humble mind, is a figure which is mercifully becoming less and less common. It is still necessary, however, to insist on the fact that brains and education and training are not by themselves sufficient to produce a successful teacher. Quite literally, teaching is a "calling" as well as a profession: the true candidate must have a vocation; she must mount her rostrum or enter her class-room with a full conviction of the importance of her mission, and of her desire to undertake it. This earnest purpose should not, however, destroy her sense of humour and of proportion; it is possible to take oneself and one's daily routine of work too seriously, a fault which does not tend to impress their importance on a scoffing world. No girl should become a teacher because she does not know how else to gain her living. The profession is lamentably overstocked with mediocrities, lacking enthusiasm and vigour, drifting more and more hopelessly from one post to another. But there is plenty of room for keen and competent women, eager to learn and to teach, and this is true of all branches of the profession. No work can well be more thankless, more full of drudgery and of disappointment than that of a teacher who has missed her vocation. Few lives can be more full of happy work and wide interests than those of teachers who rejoice in their calling.
Yet there is need to call attention to certain drawbacks which are common to all branches of the profession. As a class, teachers are badly paid, and many are overworked. The physical and mental strain is inevitably severe: in many cases this is unnecessarily increased by red-tape regulations that involve loss of time and temper and an amount of clerical work, which serves no useful purpose. Teachers need to concentrate their energies on essentials: of these the life intellectual is the most important, and this, however elementary the standard of work demanded in class. No one can teach freshly unless she is at the same time learning, and widening her own mental horizon. Too many forms to fill up, too many complicated registers to keep, too many meetings to attend--these things stultify the mind and crush the spirit. They are not a necessary accompaniment of State or municipal control, though sometimes under present conditions it is hard to believe that they are not the inevitable concomitants of official regulations. Anything which tends to make teachers' lives more narrow, is opposed to the cause of education. This truth should be instilled into all official bosoms. Wherever the State or the local authority intervenes, wherever public money has been granted, there regular inspection obviously becomes inevitable, but the multiplication of inspectors, each representing a different authority, is not necessary or sensible. At present, in all grant-aided institutions, whatever their status, inspectors do not cease from troubling, and teachers as well as administrative officers, though weary, find no rest.[1] This is as detrimental to the pupil as to the teacher, for it lowers the intellectual standard by substituting form for matter and the letter for the spirit. Thus the inspector of an art-school who enquires only about what are officially termed "student-hours," and not at all about the work therein accomplished, does not make for artistic efficiency either in teacher or taught. Yet this instance is of very recent occurrence, and there are countless parallel cases. No wonder the Universities demand freedom from State control; no wonder Training Colleges and subsidised secondary as well as elementary schools groan under its tender mercies. The present forms taken by this control are mostly obnoxious to all practical educationists. They arise from lack of trust in the teaching profession on the part of administrators--a mistrust which it is of primary importance to allay by increased efficiency, independence, and organisation. Nationalisation of the schools is necessary, if a real highway of education is to be established: it must be obtained without irritating conditions which make freedom, experiment, and progress too often impossible. The task before the teaching profession is to retain full scope for initiative and experiment, whilst working loyally under a public body. This should be specially the work of the socialist teacher, while the socialist administrator and legislator must see that their side of the work leaves full room for individuality.
In the following section it is obviously impossible adequately to consider all branches of the teaching profession, and it has therefore been thought the wisest course to select the leading varieties of work in which women teachers are engaged and to treat them in some detail. The writers of the various articles express their own points