Sex War

If jealousy and sex pride rankle in the hearts of U. S. schoolteachers of opposite sexes, they seldom find expression outside committee-rooms. On the surface, at least, men and women work together harmoniously in U.S. education as in U.S. business.

Not so in England. There the women schoolteachers, whose voice is heard most strongly in the National Union of Teachers, have been agitating for some years to obtain sex equality on the payroll. Last year the Board of Education adopted a scale granting women 83% of men's pay and the contest has grown hotter since.

The National Association of Schoolmasters constitutes, as its name would indicate, an old defensive phalanx of masculine supremacy in pedagogy. Meeting last week at Hull, this body passed resolutions to fight the women's "irrational" policy as relentlessly as the women were pursuing it. One speaker drew a dreadful picture of what would happen to the nation if wage equality were granted: young women would not have to marry.* Another fighting male explained: "It is a bold young man who today proposes marriage to a woman teacher, because he knows he will have to suffer adverse financial and social changes."

The schoolmasters further resolved that no man shall serve as assistant master under a headmistress.

At their conclave last year, these British schoolmasters condemned women teachers out of hand; said they were responsible, by their mollycoddling methods, for increase in juvenile crime; said that every boy over seven should be under the firm hand of a man. Meeting shortly afterward, the National Union of Teachers referred to the general activities of the National Association of Schoolmasters as "pugnacious prancings" (TIME, April 27, 1925).

At Harvard

The notion that the taught may somewhat teach their teachers -- a notion that went out of fashion as formal universities came in at the end of the Middle Ages, but which has been revived of recent years -- was reiterated last week by ten Harvard undergraduates who submitted the fruits of a five-month scrutiny of the socioeducational plant and plan to which they had submitted their so-called formative years. Unlike similar surveys lately made at Dartmouth and Bowdoin, the young Harvard gentlemen had been urged to their task by no authority higher than their own creative curiosity. They took their findings before a council of their fellows and then laid them, unanimously ratified, before the university, with the modest hope that "they may not be altogether valueless."

The prime feature of the Harvard report was its proposal for modifying the social life of a university of "mammoth proportions" in a way calculated to foster "healthy social intercourse and stimulating interchange of ideas" for the individual. The proposal was this: to subdivide Harvard residentially into six colleges constituted on the English university plan -- six bodies of students, 250 to 300 strong, housed in more or less segregated groups of dormitories, eating in their own dining halls, responsible to their own deans. The assignment of separate faculties is not included in the plan. The advantages were not elaborated beyond a hint that the policy of "athletics for all" would be furthered, and an observation that Harvard's buildings happen to be so arranged that only two of the six proposed building units would have to be specially erected.

Beneath this proposal lay the principle so often propounded by champions of "the small liberal college." The effect desired was much like the scheme which is being worked out, from the bottom up, at Claremont Colleges (Monterey, Calif.), in the creation of whose first unit, Pomona College, Harvard men have taken active parts. More interesting: the actual details presented were identical, save for one important exception, with the celebrated "quad" system which the late Woodrow Wilson sought, 15 years ago, to apply to Harvard's associate, Princeton, and which got him "kicked upstairs" into politics. Woodrow Wilson, thoroughgoing theorist, wanted to disband the Princeton clubs, that there might be no "undemocratic" associations running transversely through the undergraduate bodies. The Harvard surveyors left the shoe on the other foot. Their drastic vertical division of the student body needed in no wise to disrupt the Harvard club system, seen as a valuable series of horizontal planes upon which men of kindred interest meet from choice, just as they do in after-college life.

Frank Bolles, a onetime secretary of the Harvard Corporation 32 years ago, in an article entitled "An Administration Problem," published in the Harvard Graduates' Magazine, wrote, in part:

"There is something very ugly in the possibility of a young man's coming to Cambridge, and while here sleeping and studying alone in a cheerless lodging, eating alone in a dismal restaurant, feeling himself unknown, and so alone in his lectures, his chapel, and his recreations, and not even having the privilege of seeing his administrative officers who know most of his record without haying to explain to them at each visit who he is and what he is, before they can be made to remember that he is a living, hoping, or despairing part of Harvard College. . . ."

Bulwarks

Each and every state in the Union was asked last week to start thinking which one of its many schoolboys, which one of its many schoolgirls, and which one of its many female schoolteachers, are most courageous, most heroic, most self-sacrificing, most commanding ("leadership") and most patriotic. The 48 boys, 48 girls and 48 female teachers when finally designated are to be honored with American Youth and American Teacher Awards by the directors of the Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition, provided with traveling and living expenses, received at Philadelphia on June 28, entertained until July 5 "on the very spot where the stirring events of 1776 occurred," then whisked off for two days to Washington.

To facilitate the final choices, the directors promised to constitute a State Committee of Award in each capital, a body of 25 including (so far as possible) :

The state education chief, the two U.S. Sentors, two U.S. Representatives, two members of President Coolidge's National Advisory Commission to the .... Exposition, a school superintendent; a Rotarian, a Kiwanian and a Lion; a Protestant, a Catholic and a Jewish clergyman; an American Legion man and a Daughter of the American Revolution; a clubwoman, a Woman Voter, a Parent-Teacher representative; an adult executive each of the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and Camp Fire Girls.

Juries drawn from senior classes of capital-city secondary schools will select 50 boys and 50 girls (anonymously) from all the entries, to sit as state conventions to elect one of each sex from their number. The state committees will elect the teachers, who will then chaperone the chosen boys and girls going and coming on the parade that is to stir them all so imaginatively, and so deepen their patriotism, "that in future years they may be bulwarks of good citizenship in their own communities and in the nation."

The Sesqui-Centennial directors believed that they had devised "one of the finest tributes ever paid to the Youth of America."

* The numerical chance of a British woman marrying a fellow countryman is rather less than one in three. British population figures for 1921: males, 20,430,623; females, 22,336,907. These figures fail to indicate the decrease in males between 26 years and 56 occasioned by the War.