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Selected Writings of Eleanor Roosevelt

Originally published in Woman's Home Companion 61 (March 1934): 4.

1. Someone said to me not long ago, "You seem to be interested in education!"

2. Of course I am interested in education. Who is not at the present time? It is the one subject that we cannot afford to neglect no matter what happens to public and private finances. By that I do not mean that we are going to continue to spend money in exactly the same way as we have spent it up to now, but that we must spend money and spend it wisely on education is, I believe, an incontrovertible fact.

3. For the purpose of this article, I want to begin by stating that I am not unfamiliar with the attitude of certain citizens who claim that the education which they received was good enough for them and that therefore there should be no change and no increase in cost at the present time. But they do not realize that conditions have changed and that we are educating for new conditions and that the type of education needed requires more money spent on the preparation of teachers than ever before.

4. At the present time we are confronted with this picture: Everywhere our economic situation has been difficult. In some places it has meant that whole communities have needed help to achieve the bare necessities of life and therefore throughout the country we find unsatisfactory conditions in the schools.

5. According to the National Education Association and the office of the division of education in the Department of the Interior, there are a million more children in the schools of the United States today than there were in 1930. This is partly the normal increase and partly the result of the fact that with greater numbers of people out of work we are trying to keep children longer in school in order that they may not enter the competitive industrial world.

    

6. While the number of children in our schools has increased, there are twenty-five thousand fewer teachers employed today than there were in 1930; and more than one out of every four cities have shortened their school terms in the past year. The sale of textbooks has dropped over thirty percent and expenditures by cities for other school supplies have been reduced. Of course, where it is necessary for the children attending school to buy their own supplies, the tools with which the teacher has to work are pitifully inadequate. I have lived much of my life in New York State, where we pride ourselves upon expending more of our state income for education than for any other single activity of government. Yet in a rural school in northern New York I found that the children whose families were obliged to buy the schoolbooks were totally unable to have any new books this year. It is easy to see what a handicap that situation would be to teacher and student alike.

7. In education the thing which counts above everything else is the preparation of the teachers. Here we have always been inadequate, lavish though we have often been in the past in spending too much money on the embellishment of our school buildings.

8. But granting that our teachers are prepared and have started on their teaching careers, if their salaries are pitifully inadequate and they have to scrimp and save, they cannot have the quiet mind which is a requisite for good teaching. Neither have they money enough to continue to improve themselves and this also is necessary to good teaching.

9. Many a time have I heard people say what an easy life a teacher has with her long vacations.

10. They little realize that money received for the teaching year usually must be made to cover those long vacations unless the teacher turns to other work during these periods. Nor do they realize that a teacher's work is not over when she leaves the classroom. A really good teacher devotes much time to the children outside the classroom and spends much of her leisure time in acquiring more knowledge and more background so that she will have more to give her pupils. I wonder if you think this can be done adequately by those teachers who are receiving less than seven hundred and fifty dollars a year? One out of every four teachers receives not more than this sum. Eighty-four thousand rural teachers this year are receiving less than four hundred and fifty dollars a year, and one out of every thirteen Negro teachers in the United States receives twenty-five dollars a month or less.

11. In at least eighteen states teachers are being paid in warrants cashable at a discount ranging from five percent up, and nearly forty million dollars in back pay is due to approximately forty thousand teachers. It speaks volumes for the ideals of this profession and the devotion to their work and to the welfare of the children that our public schools are functioning during this period as well as they are.

     

12. Schools are dependent upon taxes—in many places they have been supported by general property taxes. Now private incomes have gone down and of course the public income has gone down also. Therefore there hasn't been as much public money as usual to spend on education, but I have often wondered, if women throughout the country really made an analysis of the way the tax money is spent, whether they might not find certain things that they would eliminate. I for one would like to see the women of the world sit in at the disarmament conferences for I have a feeling they would reach an agreement—which our governments seem to find so hard to reach—and if we could reduce our armaments one big outgo for our federal tax money would be forthwith removed.

13. But this perhaps is a far-away vision. Nearer at home each of us has city and county and township and village governments where a large portion of all tax money is spent. Why do not the women s clubs throughout the country study the small expenditures of local government with an eye to reducing them in order that there may be more money in their communities for adequate education?

14. This is a time when not only that education which will enable us to earn our living is needed, but education which will enable us to use our leisure profitably is needed. I heard of a locality the other day where what one man called the frills of education had been cut off on the plea of economy—the frills were music, art, drama, recreation, health education, nature study—all the things which make an art out of living, and in our ever increasingly mechanized world we have got to make living an art.

     

15. Lack of education in leisure-time interests and occupations will most certainly mean more people in our jails, more people cared for in our insane asylums and more children who are defective or delinquent.

16. This subject is one which lies very close to my heart and I have always thought that James Madison had stated a truth which our nation could not afford to forget when he said:

    Knowledge will forever govern ignorance and the people who mean to be our governors must arm themselves with the power that knowledge gives.