WOMEN AS EDUCATORS.

BY MRS. MAY WRIGHT SEWALL.

NE who attempts the study of this subject encounters surprises at the very threshold of investigation.

Consider how recently the propriety of permitting women to become educated, was a frequent topic of heated discussion. Remember that up to a still nearer date the expediency of permitting women to be educated was seriously disputed. Bear in mind that the degree to which a woman may be educated profitably, and the extent and manner in which she may use her education without violating the laws of propriety and expediency, are considered still debatable questions.

In the light of these reflections, the mere phrase "Women as Educators" reveals a surprising situation.

Public schools were established in this country, i. e. to say, in Massachusetts, in 1642. For one hundred and forty-seven years, men monopolized the work of teaching; in 1789 a law was passed regulating the administration of the Massachusetts school system and recognizing women as legally eligible to the position of teacher. with all of the advantages that a monopoly lasting a century and a half might be expected to secure to them, men have lost the prestige of numbers in the department of education. The census of 1880 states the number of men then engaged in the United States in teaching and in Scientific pursuits as 73,335, while the number of women thus employed was recorded as 154,375.

Think of this number until both its real and its relative vastness are comprehended. Think of it as embracing teachers of every grade of culture, from the raw product of the country district school, who regards with pride the hardly earned third-class certificate which entitles her to teach without further examination for six months, to the fine fruit of College and Normal School, who, not content with the certificate of the one and the diploma of the other, looks from her

post-graduate degree to a fellowship at Bryn Mawr as the first goal at which she may safely rest. Think of this number as including teachers of every varying degree of professional rank, from the pupilteacher in the Charity-Kindergarten, to the Principals of High Schools and the Presidents of Colleges.

These reflections will impart to the phrase, "Women as Educators" a natural accent and will assist one to measure justtly its significance. The assertion that the home training of children is almost exclusively in the hands of women, passes without challenge. That more than two-thirds of the actual teaching in the schools is done by women, is, as has been shown, matter of statistical proof.

The student who has these two stupendous facts in mind, will, as she pursues her inquiries concerning this question, be astonished to find that the class currently toasted as the natural educators of the race, the class from which civilization, following the hint of Nature, is forming the professional educators of the race, has, notwithstanding, contributed so little to the theory or to the history of education. Lexicographers regard the words teacher and educator as synonymous; but as used to-day, the word educator implies more than the word teacher. To the popular mind the latter term presents a person actually engaged in the work of tuition, whose direct professional influence is measured by the number of pupils with whom he has personal relations; while the former term suggests a person who may or may not be engaged in the work of tuition, but whose professional influence in either case seeks broader channels than are afforded by the pupils whom he actually instructs. It is as true as it is amusing that in some sections of our country all women connected with the work of education, whether in high or in humble places, are called teachers; while all men so connected, whether in places humble or high, are addressed as "professor," and mentioned as "eminent educators." In other sections of our country, persons filling the lower places in the schools, without regard to sex, are always called teachers, while those occupying the higher places are named educators. These habits of speech are not without significance to the student of social science, but may not detain us here. Returning to the distinction made between the two terms by the popular mind, it must be admitted that of the 170,000 women probably engaged in our own country at this hour in the work of tuition, of the scores of thousands now similarly engaged in other countries, and of the many thousands

whom departed generations have employed in the same work, few relatively, would by the popular voice be named educators.

In a

Of the eighty-seven authors named in the list of standard books on Education, appended to Quick's "Essays on Educational Reformers," only three are women. Of several hundred authorities on different questions pertaining to education, quoted by Compayré in his invaluable "History of Pedagogy," but sixteen are women. series of Educational Classics, now being issued by a popular firm, of the twenty volumes that are already out, only one is by a woman, although several, the works of eminent foreigners, are indeed translated by women. These lists fairly indicate the percentage of writers on Education who are women. The facts above stated are not accidental; they are not without meaning; they show that in education as in other departments of labor, women tend rather to activity than to speculation; that their talents lend themselves more readily to the illustration of the principles of a science through its correlative art, than to the development and formulation of those principles. In short, they show that in education as in religion, women, for the most part, are content to practice what men preach. It is quite true that from the works and the Letters of Mme. de Genlis, de Maintenon, Pape-Carpentier, de Rémusat and de Staël, with those of Hannah More, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Hamilton, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody and Anna Brackett, there could be deduced a complete discussion of she Psychology of childhood; and from the same sources there could be compiled an invaluable treatise on Pedagogy, from which might be derived incomparable discussions of method in both mental and moral tuition.

However, for the reasons already intimated, we shall find it most profitable to discuss "Women as Educators," not with a view to ascertaining what they have contributed to the Literature of Pedagogy, but with the intent of finding out how they have already modified the practice of Pedagogy; of indicating the further modification that may reasonably be expected from their influence; and of measuring the responsibilities which their present dominant numbers imply. Briefly, in this discussion, we shall consider the term educator equivalent to to the term teacher.

Nothing more bare and hard than the common school under the undivided sway of man, can be imagined. Pestalozzi recommended sympathy and tenderness as the proper agents of discipline, saying if

one would teach and control a child, he must apply his heart to the child's heart, his soul to the child's soul. A century and a half before Pestalozzi's time, the gentle Comenius, whom Michelet calls "the first evangelist of modern pedagogy," had inculcated the same sweet and wise doctrine, but so long as men continued to be the sole instructors, physical force remained the measure of disciplinary power. Compayré tells us that so late as 1782, (only seven years before women were accorded the legal right to teach in the public schools of Massachusetts), a Suabian school master, dying, left a record of the punishments he had inflicted upon his pupils during his professional career, as follows: canings, 911,527; whippings, 124,010; boxes on the ear, 10,235; thumps on the head, 1,115,800; he had, moreover, compelled boys to kneel on triangular sticks, 777 times; had caused the fool's cap to be worn 5,001 times; had caused boys to hold the sticks in the air 1,707 times. Surely teaching in the time that could produce this record, could not be classed with the sedentary professions. It would seem that no man but a trained pugilist could accomplish such feats, and that only a lightning calculator could keep the account of them. The first result of the entrance of women into the teacher's profession, was the modification of school discipline. Women supplanted physical strength by moral power, and in cases of extremity resorted to tact rather than to muscle; but, so closely identified in the public mind were muscle and school government, that women's lack of physical strength seriously impeded their advancement in the profession for many years after their admittance to it. For years women were employed only in primary city schools, and for only the summer term in country schools, it being assumed, first, that the discipline of small children of both sexes and of large girls, could be maintained with relatively small and infrequent drafts upon the physical strength of the teacher, and second, that pupils of these classes would be less able to resist the teacher when corporal punishment should be administered. It is within easy memory of the present generation of teachers that parents and trustees united in recommending to a young teacher the free use of the switch and the ferule; and sixty years ago, the suggestion of abolishing corporal punishment in schools seemed to most people like the deliberate inauguration of misrule and the final abolition of the school itself. It is easy to say, and it has been said, that the gentler discipline of women results solely from their physical inferiority; it is true that tact is the resource of weakness, and that

this quality, the substitute of strength, through doing double duty, long since doubled in women its original proportions.

Without introducing obnoxious comparisons between the qualities of men and women, one may say that in women the physical and the spiritual forces are so mixed and proportioned that women can more easily submit their own physical natures to their spiritual and can therefore more easily bring others to submit to the same force. It has been charged that while whipping decreased under women's rule, scolding increased; they who charge this, urge, what many others will concur in, that whipping is preferable to scolding. The charge is unsustained by proof and to it may be opposed the fact that scoldings and corporal punishments are all manifestations of faith in the same kind of force and of the same state of temper. The inference that scoldings and beatings are the fruits of the same force, is supported by the testimony of the doughty Suabian quoted above, who concludes the summary of punishments inflicted by stating that he had also used 3,000 different words of abuse.

If an ameliorated discipline was the first result of woman's becoming a teacher, the second was an improvement in the material surroundings of the school. The desolate aspect of the old time schoolroom cannot be wholly explained by the poverty of pioneers; for when brick and frame school houses began to express the improved condition of the people, they were even less lovely than the rude log structures which they superseded. The benches, the counters, and the blackboards were all adapted to large boys. Girls and little boys looked and felt like usurpers as they sat perched on planks whose height would not permit their toetips to touch the floor.

With the advent of the school-mistress came improvised foot stools and movable blackboards. She transformed toys into the tools of labor and thereby gave to labor an air of play. Under her supervision walls as well as hearths were made "with aspen boughs and flowers and fennel, gay." The air of comfort and homelikeness now characteristic of American schoolhouses, is largely due to the women who teach in them, and it is no unimportant modification of the ancient school. Some who admit that women have improved the moral tone of the schools by substituting a spiritual for a physical supremacy, assert that to the same degree they have impaired the mental tone, by substituting in their own work, skill for knowledge; these critics maintaining that as tact in government is the resource of weakness, so skill in instruction is the makeshift of ignorance. The