Woman of 29

The average U. S. schoolteacher is a woman of 29. She never went to college, but, after high school, graduated from a teacher training institution (normal school). The 163 U. S. normal schools and teachers' colleges, many of which came into being during the teacher shortage of a generation ago, still hold a virtual monopoly of elementary schoolteaching jobs, since most State Boards of Education so frame their course and credit requirements that many ordinary college graduates are promptly disqualified. That the normal school subsists on a realm of privileged technical training is the belief of many a U. S. educational observer. Last week Professor Benjamin De Kalbe Wood of Columbia University's Department of Educational Research reported a survey of normal schools that provided their critics with authoritative ammunition. Said he:

"Students in teacher training schools . . . are substantially lower than comparable liberal arts students in the scores which they secure in nearly all tests . . . of intelligence, mathematics, foreign languages, natural science, social science. . . . No student should be admitted to professional educational classes who is at entrance to college below the present average of liberal arts college freshmen. Since this would exclude at least 60% of pupils now in teacher training institutions over the country, it represents an ideal rather than opinion. . . . Many of these students are literate only in the legal sense of the word."

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