Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XIII · JUSTICE TO THE BOY

It comes down to the teacher in the end, and there are ten thousand of them in our big city.[39] To them, too, a day of deliverance has come. Half the machine teaching, the wooden output of our public schools in the past, I believe was due to the practical isolation of the teachers between the tyranny of politics and the distrust of those who had good cause to fear the politician and his work. There was never a more saddening sight than that of the teachers standing together in an almost solid body to resist reform of the school system as an attack upon them. There was no pretence on their part that the schools did not need reform. They knew better. They fought for their places. Throughout the fight no word came from them of the children's rights. They imagined that theirs were in danger, and they had no thought for anything else. We gathered then the ripe fruit of politics, and it will be a long while, I suppose, before we get the taste out of our mouths. But the grip of politics on our schools has been loosened, if not shaken off altogether, and the teacher's slavery is at an end, if she herself so wills it. Once hardly thought worthy of a day laborer's hire, she ranks to-day with a policeman in pay and privilege. The day that sees her welcomed as an honored guest in every home with a child in school will break the last of her bonds, and do more for the schools and for us than any one thing I can think of. Until that day comes the teachers, as a class apart, will have interests apart, or feel that they have, and will be bound to stand together to defend them; and they will work for pay. But for the real work of a teacher no one can ever pay her.