Teachers’ Salaries

Press, Volume XCVI, Issue 28472, 30 December 1957, Page 6

Teachers’ Salaries

The adjustments in teachers’ salaries should satisfy the reasonable claims of teachers in secondary schools that some recognition should be given to scholarship, and application to study. Graduates now enter the salary scale at a higher level; and at the other end of their service they receive substantial advantages over teachers without any special academic or technical qualifications. . Secondary school principals need not expert this measure of justice to solve all their staffing problems, as they seemed optimistic enough to think earlier in the year. The increased allowances may bring some additional graduates to the profession by removing a discouragement to study. They will not be an incentive to able young men and women, with other inclinations, to take up teaching, and such an incentive would be regrettable. Teaching is a vocation, not a way of making money. Now that teachers are well paid for their contribution to the community they can best help themselves by encouraging the idea of service implicit in their profession.

Although the new allowances benefit some primary school teachers, most graduates are on the staffs of secondary schools. Their higher salaries should not be regarded as recognition of the special merit of teaching in secondary schools but only as recognition of sacrifices made to acquire academic as distinct, from practical qualifications. Teaching in primary schools is at least as important and, for the conscientious, more arduous. By the time a child reaches secondary school his good and bad habits have been largely formed and he should have attained a reasonable standard in basic subjects. The most brilliant graduate and

devoted master can do little with a boy who has become untidy or lazy, or who cannot read, write, and calculate with some proficiency. -A much greater educational reform than the attraction of graduates to secondary schools would be to raise the standard of leaching throughout the primary schools. The new adjustments, for which the former Minister of Education (Mr Algie) is to be thanked, make a modest start in this direction. The graduate allowances apply to all teachers, so that more primary teachers may be expected to pursue, their studies. An additional allowance for training college students with university entrance will work in the same direction, and will certainly induce some students to remain longer at school, if they do no more than that. Education does not begin in' the third form; apart from the important lessons of the home, it begins in the infant room of the primary school.