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XLVIII.
the German standard.
At a private discussion lately held among persons interested in collegiate and other education it seemed to me that there was too general a deference to German standards.
It was assumed, in particular, that schools for young children must necessarily be far better if taught by university-bred men, as in
Germany, than if taught t by young women, as in this country.
To all this I should demur.
No man in
America ever studied the German systems of common-school instruction more faithfully than
Horace Mann; and it was chiefly to him that we owe, as a result, the general substitution of women for men as teachers.
Tie greater economy of employing women has no doubt assisted the change; it would have been simply impossible, in fact, with the greater expensiveness of living in this country, to obtain the services of a sufficient number of men to give to our public-school system anything like the vast spread it has now obtained.
Yet
Horace Mann urged the change, not on the ground of economy alone, but because he regarded women as the natural
