A Chance to Teach

All the schoolboys knew that the ancient Romans wore togas. "But what did a toga look like?" the tubby, jolly man of 44 asked his ten-year-olds in Leeds, England. When none could answer, Student Teacher Philip Lyons whipped a toga out of his briefcase. A tailor's cutter only a few weeks before, Lyons had just run it up on his own sewing machine. Last week, like 100 other middle-aging student teachers, Lyons was well launched in a startlingly successful effort to help beat Britain's shortage of 10,000 teachers. The scheme: Britain's first mixed adult teachers training college, brainchild of white-haired George Taylor, head of state schools in Leeds.

Swinging a Pickax. Last year, with the Leeds area short of several hundred teachers, Educator Taylor hit on the sound idea that people in their 30s and 40s might like to switch careers. He aimed at restless mothers of teen-aged children, at bright older men with dull jobs who "feel quite desperate because their lives are being wasted." Britain's Ministry of Education pooh-poohed the idea, but Taylor persisted with a plan to set up a two-year college in a grimy, abandoned Leeds school building. This fall the unenthusiastic ministry finally agreed, and Taylor was in business. After one newspaper ad, "we were inundated with replies, and the telephone didn't stop ringing for weeks." For its 100 places, the college got 3,000 inquiries, 1,400 applicants.

By eliminating those who looked on teaching as a kind of vacation on the analyst's couch, Taylor mustered some highly promising recruits. An insurance salesman had long studied classical Greek in night school "for fun." A naval radio instructor had spent all his liberties in the Mediterranean haunting archaeological digs. Others were just as hungry for academic pursuits, though a bit rusty. Most needed help in such forgotten arts as ordering their thoughts in a coherent essay. "At the beginning," recalls Principal Thomas Hollins, "they acted as if they were trying to paint a picture with a pickax."

Smartening Up Mummy. To become teachers, most of the 29 men gave up higher-paying jobs. Ernest Knight, 43, has six children, earned $2,800 a year as a textile salesman. His income for the next two years will be $588, and he has sold his car to help squeak by ("I know I've made the right decision"). A father of two, David Miller, 37, not only sold his grocery store, but got his wife to attend college as well. "We're budgeted to the last penny," says he. "Our kids will get threepenny ice-cream cones instead of sixpenny ones. But I think we'll just manage."

Most of the students are married. Going back to school, they say, has brought many a family closer. Impressed husbands are tackling the dishes at last, and housewives who were bored before are now hitting the books to the awed astonishment of their children ("Mummy will soon be as smart as teacher," boasts one five-year-old). "There aren't any dodgers among us," says Pamela Buckley, housewife. "We're here because we want to be here. We've just got to make good." Says delighted Educator Taylor: "It seems as if there are literally thousands of older people ready to jump at a chance to teach."

Tackling the U.S. teacher shortage, Yale last week announced the results of a three-year project directed by Yale Education Professor Emeritus Clyde M. Hill. Eight Connecticut housewives (aged 30 to 45) attended special classes at the University of Bridgeport, taught part time in the public schools of Fairfield. All the women got higher academic scores than the norm for college girls, compared favorably with new college graduates. All taught better for having broader life experience than the average young teacher. Yale's total training cost per teacher: $750, much less than for younger student teachers. With five of the women now fulltime teachers, concluded Yale, college-educated housewives are clearly "a dependable reservoir of teaching supply."

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