No. 1 Problem

To the parents of some 26,000,000 U. S. public school children the all-important question as they send their youngsters to school each term is: Who will his teacher be? Parents well know that whether a school is Progressive or Traditional, palace or shack, a good teacher is still a good teacher and a poor one a menace to their children. To conscientious educators, who are everlastingly amazed that the same parents who insist on a fully qualified doctor will gamble on a teacher, improving the quality of the 1,000,000 U. S. teachers is the nation's No. 1 educational problem.

It is so alarming that Harvard's President James Bryant Conant last month devoted much of his annual report to it, the Rockefeller General Education Board gave $520,000 to a commission* to study it and throughout the land teacher training is undergoing an overhauling. Last week Cornell University launched a significant new teacher training plan.

Sweeping are the indictments against U. S. teachers: 1) they know too little about a) the subjects they teach, b) social conditions, c) children; and 2) they don't like children. Average training of U. S. elementary schoolteachers is less than two years of normal school. Teaching attracts a less able group than any other profession. Moreover, the chances are seven-to-one that a pupil in twelve years of public schooling will get two teachers who are neurotic or downright psychopathic for these reasons:

> Teachers are poor. Average salary of U. S. teachers is about $1,200. In Arkansas country schoolteachers average as little as $238 a year.

>Teachers are worried. Teaching is so wearing and insecure (less than one-third have long-term tenure) that the average teacher lasts only eight to twelve years.

> Teachers are sexually maladjusted. Most women teachers are not permitted to marry and hold their jobs (only one-sixth are married). Of the unmarried, one-third report themselves made unhappy by that condition.

Nevertheless, teaching is an honorable profession, and some 100,000 earnest if not top-notch young people prepare for it each year. Busy turning them out are some 1,200 institutions, including normal schools (now rapidly being converted into teachers' colleges) and liberal arts colleges. Because the liberal arts colleges expect more of their graduates to enter teaching than any other single profession, liberal arts and teachers' colleges today are deadly competitors. Teachers' colleges are busy awarding points in many professional courses but fail to give their students a broad education. The liberal arts colleges turn out many graduates more interested in scholarship than in the children they are to teach.

Last week Dr. Julian E. Butterworth, director of Cornell's Graduate School of Education, announced a compromise between these extremes. Next fall Cornell will start a five-year training course for high-school teachers. It will stress cultural education, but students will also spend one-fifth of their time learning to understand teaching and children. Most radical advance: tests to weed out unfit teachers at intervals, before they graduate. Students will be required not only to pass their courses but also to give evidence of mental fitness, emotional stability, poise, ability to use the English language properly.

*American Council on Education's Commission on Teacher Education. With another G. E. B. grant, Progressive Education Association next summer will start ten summer workshops for teachers in universities from coast to coast.

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