ching on the way
to some form of vocation deemed far more honorable was not of a sort
to make teaching a profession in itself. Later, some measure of higher
education was given young women in Normal Schools to fit them for
teaching little children, and the teacher of the elementary school
became, thereby, a professional. To-day few young men teach to help
themselves through college and only a few choose teaching as a
profession. To-day, also, the profession of teaching, which once was
almost the sole opening for higher vocational work for women, now
competes with a large number of professions or types of business or
applied art, and fewer women proportionally are headed for the
schoolroom when they leave college or normal school.

This tendency to take other lines of work increased to unprecedented
extent during the Great War, which opened new worlds of paid work to
women. This gives us the present teacher shortage, which all who know
conditions feel to be the most serious menace to universal education.
There are not only not enough teachers to go around, there are still
fewer teachers fit to teach. If it is the right of every child to have
a good education in essentials, to be well taught as far as he goes in
schooling, how shall that right be realized if the teacher famine
continues?

=The Use of Married Women as Teachers.=--The interest of the family is
specially concerned in one way to ease that shortage of teachers. That
way is the use of married women in the public schools. All women who
have "verified their credentials" as good teachers should be held on
to when they marry with all possible strength of appeal to fulfil a
social duty as a part of the teaching force of the locality where they
live. The old absurdity of making women resign from the teaching force
when they issued wedding cards, or conceal the fact of their marriage
if they were not scrupulous, so as to keep their positions, is fast
passing. Few communities hold on to this penalizing of the woman
teacher when she marries, but many school boards retain a sentiment
against urging the continuance of any married woman on the staff. This
must give way to an intelligent understanding of two things: one, that
experience in teaching is an immeasurable asset to the schools and
must not be lost in so great proportion of women as it has been; and,
in the second place, that teaching lends itself in unique manner to
half-time work, to vacations for maternity du