Expenditure for current school expenses, per capita of children in average daily attendance,

1917-18-Continued.

From the foregoing table the following facts are obvious:

1. Brunswick's expenditure was below that of Athens and Columbus in her own State and considerably below the average for the cities of her group in Georgia.

2. She is above the average of cities of her group in Alabama and South Carolina, but below that of similar cities in Louisiana, North Carolina, and Virginia.

3. Her expenditure was only about 38 per cent of the average expenditure of cities of her group in California.

THE QUALITY OF EDUCATION OFFERED.

In order that the board might keep within these financial limits, it has been necessary to deny the children all but the cheapest kind of educational opportunity.

An education limited in the elementary grades to reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography, and spelling is the cheapest type of education which can be offered for instruction in these subjects. It can be given by teachers without special technical training; in classes which are of a size limited only by the capacity of the classrooms; and with a minimum of equipment relatively inexpensive in quality. When a program of enriching school opportunities by introducing training in music, art, handwork, cookery, sewing, and household arts, manual training and industrial work, and providing for the needs of exceptional children is entered upon, classes must be made smaller, teachers with a more specialized training must be obtained, and a better and more expensive equipment must be secured. In short, whenever a board is unable to expend more than $25 per child per year on his education one invariably finds such education limited to the conventional school subjects. And so in Brunswick and Glynn County educational opportunity for the elementary school

child is limited to a training which secures but little more than mere literacy.

While a generation ago this was all the schools attempted or thought within their proper province, nevertheless, it is now clear that owing to the shift in the nature and character of our life the school must increasingly assume a larger share and responsibility in the education of our youth. There is a growing conception to which the school is increasingly responding that the true educational process does not consist in the accumulation of encyclopedic knowledge; that it is not effected from without inward; that it is not achieved by the imposition of authority but that it is based, rather, upon the pupil's individual activity; upon personal investigation and observation; upon forming judgments, reaching tentative conclusions, and testing out and checking up hypotheses. The school's business from the standpoint of this conception is to provide the opportunity, the leadership, and the coordinating influence without which the pupil's activity would be completely lacking in organization, having no objective, and, in consequence, valueless. It is needless to remark that work of such character can never be accomplished with any success under the conditions in which our overcrowded, inadequately supported, understaffed, poorly equipped schools are working.

So, too, with high school education-the cheapest type of education-the type requiring the least outlay for equipment, for teaching staff, for housing facilities, requiring the least adaptation to individual needs, is the type comprised in the conventional college preparatory education. The Brunswick high school (Glynn Academy) has gone a step beyond this, however, for a course leading to business activities of a commercial type has been introduced; so, also, there is being organized a course for girls in household arts. It should also be added that in the bond call for $250,000 just passed upon favorably by the people provision is made for a memorial high school which shall give special attention to the vocational arts. To this extent high-school instruction in Glynn County is responding to the modern movement toward providing richer educational opportunities for the young people. To extend such work beyond the present beginnings, however, a considerable increase in maintenance is needed, it is obvious.

TEACHERS' SALARIES TOO LOW.

Moreover, to keep within the average per capita school expenditure of $25 it has been necessary to ask teachers to work at salaries which under present conditions are below a living wage. The annual salaries of white teachers in the elementary schools of Brunswick range from $720 to $775 with an average of about $750; with the white teachers in the high school the range is higher, running among the

women from $900 to about $1,200. In the rural schools salaries are lower, ranging from $50 to $70 per month for white teachers and for a six-months' term in several instances. The colored teachers in both city and country get much less, their average in the city being about $450 for a nine-months' term, while in the country the prevailing salary of colored teachers is $30 per month for a term usually not longer than six months.

Board, room, fuel, and laundry cost the teacher who lives in Brunswick $50 to $60 per month. The teacher who receives the average salary paid of $750 has from $210 to $300 left after the cost of eating and sleeping for nine months has been deducted. Out of this margin she must live during the remaining three months of the year; provide her clothing for the entire year; pay for her amusements, her dentist bills, her insurance, and her church contributions; lay by a percentage for the "rainy day"; improve herself professionally through attending summer normals, through the purchase of books and magazines, and through travel; and, in many instances, in addition, she must contribute to the support of dependents. It is clear that as matters now stand, on a yearly margin of from $200 to $300, the teacher is faced with an impossible task. In consequence of this inability to meet even the minimum essentials of such a need, so many teachers have left the classrooms to enter other lines of activity offering a more ample margin that the country is now literally facing a teacher famine.

A first step of practical character which the board of education of Glynn County could well take in meeting this situation would be that of extending the present monthly payments, now 9 in the city of Brunswick, to 12. If this were done, teachers now receiving $720 annually would be increased to $960, those now getting $765 would receive $1,020, and others in like proportion. The terms of rural schools should be increased to nine months and the salaries of teachers increased in a manner similar to that suggested for city teachers. Even this advance, though it would mean an immediate increase of about 33 per cent in salaries, is not sufficient as a permanent schedule. Neither, it should be said, would a flat advance of such character give the needed opportunity for recognizing special merit in terms of increased salary. In turn, for such salary increase, it would be entirely fitting for the board to require teachers to take work from time to time at summer normal schools or in other ways give evidence of professional and academic growth.

Every one knows that some teachers in a department are worth much more than others, and every one knows, too, that this worth is not dependent upon length of service. The present plan upon which the salaries of Glynn County teachers are based offers no inducement for special industry or for sustained effort to secure self

improvement, for the teacher who does just enough to escape dismissal gets quite as much as does the teacher whose heart is in her work. Again, there is a strong tendency among teachers as among all workers on salary, when middle age is reached and the maximum salary is attained, to permit the desire for a comfortable, easy-going life berth to outweigh the ambition for a steadily increasing personal efficiency which can be gotten only at the expense of hard work and many denials of personal pleasure. A salary schedule should be so planned that not only can individual merit be recognized but self-improvement encouraged as well. The schedule which follows is designed to meet these conditions. Under present living costs it offers no larger remuneration to teachers than they ought to have. It is suggested as a goal which the Glynn County board should earnestly seek to reach at the earliest possible moment. A proposed salary schedule.

When the maximum of each group is reached the following alternative courses should be open to the board of education:

1. Termination of the contract (permissible each year in group No. 1). 2. Reappointment annually at the group maximum.

3. Promotion to the next higher group.

The promotion from group to group beyond that of the three-year teachers should be granted only to those who have shown special merit and have given evidence of valuable professional study. To satisfy the latter condition, the board might require the candidate for promotion to spend a year in study at some recognized college or university, or a year in teaching in some good school system in another part of the country, or perhaps a year in study and travel combined. In this connection a system of exchanging teachers might easily be established between Brunswick and other cities to their mutual advantage.

A schedule such as the one prepared would have teachers who enter the first group looked upon as being on a probationary status, subject to reelection each year for three years. Those who are rated as "successful" at the end of this period may be promoted to the group of three-year teachers, where they will advance automatically by $75 increments for a period of three years. Those who are rated as "unsatisfactory" can in turn be continued from year to year at the maximum of the probationary group or dropped from the corps. When a teacher has reached the maximum of the "threegroup, the board can then promote her to the "five-year" group if she has met the requirements demanded for promotion, reelect her from year to year at the maximum she has reached or dismiss her. And so when the maximum of the "five-year" group

year"

is reached, the teacher who has won promotion by her success in the classroom and by her efforts at self-improvement can be made a member of the "permanent teacher" group where she will remain until she retires. If, in the judgment of the officials, a teacher has not merited this promotion, she can be retained for a time at the maximum salary granted to the group she is in or be dropped. In this manner an adjustment can be worked out between the teachers' proper desire for security of tenure and the board's proper desire to eliminate the teachers who do not continue to grow in efficiency. At the same time the teacher knows that efforts at self-improvement will find tangible reward in terms of salary increase.

In this connection the analysis of the teachers' needs made by the Massachusetts Teachers' Federation in a recent report will be of interest. The three possible types of wages discussed in the report were represented and defined as follows:

SALARY RECOMENDATIONS OF THE MASSACHUSETTS TEACHERS' FEDERATION.

An existence wage pays for those least fit to undertake the responsibility of teaching. Their minds are unnourished, and they are distraught with worry about the future.