166 The Teacher's Financial Status facts illustrate in striking fashion the low They Wanted to Teach! AN are above twenty-five years of age, one "Identification test" held La Follette-A Frenchman who came Fiume A mountain in Japan. It is pointed out that most of the It should not be understood that all of the teachers in the 54 per cent. who do not possess the minimum qualifications are not now fitted to be teachers or that many of them are not good teachers. None of them of course were fitted to be teachers when they first undertook teaching. But thousands of them by reading and experience have succeeded in fitting themselves for their work. However, it should be remembered that they obtained their experience at the expense of the children placed in their care and that this same thing is going on at the present time in tens of thousands of cases. Teachers are fitting themselves for teaching at the expense of the next generation. The ment and distinction" and that each year there is a great influx of young, uneducated, inexperienced "little read school marms" to take their places. What are our cities doing to meet the situation? In 1923-1924, out of 495 cities reporting, only 115 were granting any increases in teachers' salaries. In 1924-1925, out of 474 cities reporting, only 57 are granting increases. But again, this is not the whole of the story. It is not sufficient to think of salaries in terms of dollars and make comparisons with former years accordingly. If we ask the question "What are we paying our teachers in clothes, food, rent, and in the other necessities of life?" it will be seen that the United States, instead of increasing their compensation, is actually reducing it. Take a concrete example which I shall call City X. In 1913 the average salary of teachers in this city was $1,143. In 1923 this average salary had increased by a series of annual raises to $1,860. But the cost of living in this same city had increased to such an extent that the salary of $1,860 would purchase only 94 per cent. of the amount of clothes, food, and rent which the 1913 salary of $1,143 purchased in that year. Although there has been an increase of more than 50 per cent. of the teacher's dollar salary, the actual salary has been reduced by 6 per cent. This condition of course does not exist in all cities. I have before me the figures of another community where the 1923 average salary translated into commodities is 127.2 per cent. of the 1913 salary. Unfortunately, this is not as creditable as it sounds, for in 1913 the average salaries of the teachers in this community was only $505. An examination of the question of teachers' salaries geographically is interesting but proves very little. Take for example New England. One thinks of New England as the home of supereducation. Yet in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont less than half of the public school teachers possess the minimum qualifications. On the other hand, in Massachussetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island between 87 and 90 per cent. do have the minimum qualifications or better, and a very large proportion have considerably more than the minimum. Or compare Pennsylvania and New York. While in New York 82 per cent. of the teachers possess the minimum qualifications, in Pennyslvania only 65 per cent. are in this class. It seems to be the general opinion that public school educational standards in the South are lower than in any other section of the country. The 1920 figures with regard to the qualification of teachers seem to bear this out and it was probably true a few years ago. I asked a nationally known resident of the state of Mississippi for his opinion. "Well," he said, "I will admit that the situation is pretty bad, but I think it can be attributed to the lack of regard for the education of the children of the colored population. Until recently it was always thought in the South that anything in the way of schools and teachers for these people was good enough. I think if you could make a detailed survey you would find that of whites are entitled to adequate education. This spirit, however, I am glad to say, is passing. Thinking Southerners realize that the future of the nation depends on the education of its children and that the further you go down the social scale the more care should be given to educational facilities. If we believe in the creed of Americanism, we must first of all educate the children of the masses so that they may have the mental development and understanding to uphold that creed. The educational progress of the South is proceeding rapidly, and I think if the figures for 1924 were available you would have positive proof of that fact." I can say from my own experience in the South during the past year that I believe this to be true. I am very sure that the time is almost here when the schools of the South will compare favorably with those of any other section of the country. There is also a popular superstition that as one travels westward the standards of the public schools become higher and higher. This is perhaps due to the splendid record of California. Only 7 per cent. of the teachers fail to have the minimum qualifications and these are in the more remote rural districts. We are getting exactly what we are paying for. The little red school house. may be passing and its place taken by modern, well-constructed, consolidated schools. But the "little read school marm" is not only with us but in constantly increasing numbers. The result will be a nation of only partially educated persons, an easy prey for all sorts of half-baked socialistic, radical, and even anarchistic ideas, and with the exception of a comparatively small group nobody seems to give a damn-not even the parents. Crime and Eugenics B Mendel's Law a Detailed Statement of the ILL NYE once wrote an essay that "the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation." Nye's comment on this was that he did not believe it: in fact, he "would sit up all night to doubt it." In this remark, Nye reflected the feeling that has dominated the churches themselves for the last half-century. The clergy and the congregations alike have stressed the doctrines of love and redemption so much that sight has often been lost of the stern truth that a person's acts have inevitable consequences, and that these consequences may be very unpleasant and far-reaching, and may even be irremediable. Most people prefer to believe that nothing can be so bad that it cannot be mended. And, indeed, the works of philanthropy and social service which have grown out of this benevolent feeling have enormously increased the comfort of millions of unfortunates. person possessed of common humanity would wish these works lessened or undone. No On the other hand, scientific students of human society are coming to realize that benevolence bears the same relation to social ills that morphine bears to cancer-it relieves the pain but it does not cure the disease. No humane person would stop doctors from using morphine to relieve the pain. But no doctors suppose for a moment that morphine cures the cancer. Yet millions of well intentioned people do believe that benevolence can cure poverty. They believe also that religion can cure crime. Indeed, "crime, poverty, and disease" are usually linked in their minds, as if these three things were essentially alike. But they are not. Crime and poverty are not diseases. They are only symptoms. In other words, scientific students of human society are finding more and more reasons for believing that the Second Commandment contains sound science as well as theology. The "visiting of the iniquity of the fathers upon the children' is usually read as a threat. Probably it was not so intended. More likely it was meant to be read as a plain statement of a fact which, by its very nature, is also a warning, but not a threat. If a footpath. skirts a precipice, it is not a threat to put up a sign reading, "Persons who step beyond this sign will fall three thousand feet." The nature of this piece of information is such that it is a warning; but, aside from that, it is merely a plain statement of an ascertained fact. That this fact is awful does not make the statement a threat. Much more important than that, it does not make the statement untrue. Nor does it make the fact itself an injustice. Nobody would cry out against the injustice of heaven if some poor child should plunge over the precipice in the dark-at least no one would base the complaint on the injustice of there being such a thing as a law of gravitation. A heart-rending tragedy?— yes! But precipices and the force of gravitation are inevitable parts of the order of nature. Exactly so are the laws of heredity. Like the other laws through which God or nature, as you will, controls the operation of the universe, these laws operate uniformly and invariably. If the law of gravitation worked differently on different days, or if it stopped working entirely on certain days, the order of the universe would become chaos. Imagine what would happen if suddenly, when anybody jumped over a mud-puddle, he were not pulled back to earth on the other side, but went sailing off into space. No less unreasonable is it to expect that a law of heredity shall not work with equal uniformity. Nor is it less unreasonable to expect that there shall not be any law of heredity. So long as human life is a gift from an earlier life, there must be some ordered and invariable process by which this gift may be passed on. Unfortunate results of misuse of this process are no proof of injustice, even if the misuse arises from ignorance. TH NOT A THREAT HE Second Commandment is not a threat. It is a plain statement of one of the laws of heredity. Its truth has been confirmed by ages of human observation. The children of cretin imbeciles are cretin imbeciles, "to the third and fourth generation," for example. Of recent years, the Second Commandment has been "scientifically" confirmed, which means merely that it has been tested by innumerable conscious experiments, which have uniformly given the same results. Scientists would not use the word "iniquity," which involves a question of morals that is beside the point of their immediate interest. They would probably substitute the phrase "certain known characteristics.' Indeed, they would re-phrase the whole sentence to read: "Certain known characteristics of the fathers, including undesirable as well as desirable characteristics, are passed on to the children to the third and fourth generation." That is a statement of known physical fact, which is the sole province of science. All that follows in this article will be much clearer if we turn aside for a moment to explain what is here meant when the word "science" is used. The Latin word scire, from which it comes, simply means to know. But when does anybody know anything? A man says he knows Miss Smith when he has danced with her twice; but a year later, after several months of married life, when he ought to know her much better, he admits that he "never knows what she will do next." This phrase suggests exactly what the scientist means when he says he knows something-he means that he does know what that something "will do next." He knows, for example, if he mixes two parts of hydrogen with one part of oxygen that what happens next is something apparently different from either, namely, water. And he knows that invariably this same result will follow from this same cause. This ability to predict correctly is his test of whether or not he really knows a certain thing. Scientists know many things that they have never seen. Nobody ever saw electricity, or the force of gravitation, but everybody knows that they exist; and though even scientists do not know what they are, they do know how they work. When work. When they get this kind of knowledge about something that cannot be seen, they have to invent an imaginary picture of that something and give it a name, so that they can have some tangible object to think about when trying to figure out more about how it works. Thus, for practical purposes, it was necessary for electrical scientists, in order to have a common language in which to discuss electricity, to invent the ether to express the idea of free space in which electricity does a lot of things that they knew it did, but that did not fit in with the facts known about plain air. Air doesn't extend into the spaces between the stars, but electricity does, so without the idea of the ether, a lot of ideas about electricity would become confused in the mind with ideas about the air. What, then, do scientists know about the physical operation of the second of the Ten Commandments? Consider the size of the humble punctuation mark that ends this sentence. This "period" is a little speck of soot, about one sixtieth of an inch in diameter. Yet, tiny as it is, it is just about twice as large as the human cell from which you, the reader, grew. "Great oaks from little acorns grow" is as nothing to what happens when the seed of human life starts expanding. If that seed were one inch in diameter instead of one onehundred-twenty-fifth of an inch, and if the adult grew proportionately, men would be nearly seven hundred feet high. That is like saying that the Woolworth Building in New York grew from a pebble. This comparison gives a fair idea of the relative size of man and the speck of matter from which he came. But, tiny as that speck is, scientists have looked inside of it and have found that it is only a house that shelters a much smaller and even more important group of occupants. Most of this house is filled with a fluid, but about one eighth of it is occupied by a more solid mass which, when dyed with chemicals, reveals itself as a group of pairs of little strings of varying lengths. These are called chromosomes, because the Greek word chroma means color, and the only way chromosomes can be seen, even microscopically, is by coloring them. Thus far, scientists have seen the things they are talking about, with the aid of a microscope. From this point on, what they say is based upon what they have seen only with the eye of reason, backed by experiments which worked out the way the theories said they ought to work. BEADS DETERMINING HUMAN CHARACTER is, in hereditary in human beings; and scientists know at least how these genes (beads) work, even if they do not know that they actually look like beads on a string. Furthermore, the scientists know that every species of animal has its distinctive number of chromosomes, which never varies within the species. Thus they know, for example, that human beings have twenty-four chromosomes in every cell, and that the banana fly has only four. In this latter species (the banana fly) they know which beads (genes) are on which strings (chromosomes); and still further, they know the order in which they are strung. they are strung. Thus, if we imagine a red bead to stand for color, and a black bead to stand for size of wings, and a purple bead to stand for male sex, they know whether or not these three beads are on the same string, and, if they are, whether the black bead is strung between the red and purple beads, or however. These relations control certain kinds of inheritances. They explain, for example, why color blindness is fairly common among men and extremely rare among women, though that explanation, being rather complicated, is too long to be given here. It is an interesting fact that the chromosome device for transmitting life from one generation to another is essentially the same for all species, from insect to man. One word in passing: No scientific eugenist regards it as any of his business how or for what reason people marry. His business is to find out the facts and present those facts to the world. What the world does with the facts is the his. He knows these beads is the determiner of a specific characteristic of the adult human being. who will grow from the cell in which it is housed. Thus, there is a bead that determines that this adult shall have red hair; a second, that he shall be colorblind; a third, that he shall be high tempered, and so on. These three qualities (and many more) are known to be people who are sufficiently far-sighted to use them as a good many wise people are now doing. But he has not enough facts to claim the right to offer the world a panacea for divorce, unhappy marriage, or the ills of society. The most he hopes is that some day he will have so many facts, so clearly proven, that only the very ignorant will not know how nature |