Margaret Haley was the driving force in the early years of the Chicago Teachers Federation. She began her teaching career in a country school at the age of 16. At 21, she moved to Cook County where she taught for many years until going to work for the union in 1900. In 1901, she was the first woman ever to speak at a national convention of the National Education Association, which was then an organization of superintendents, college presidents, and other exalted educational leaders.
At the NEA convention in 1901, she gave a speech called “Why Teachers Should Organize.”
It is hard to find a copy of the speech. It is part of a collection called Readings in American Educational Thought: From Puritanism to Progressivism, published by Information Age, and edited by Andrew J. Milson, Chara Haeussler Bohan, Perry L. Glanzer, and J. Wesley Null.
Here are some excerpts from her famous 1901 address:
If the American people cannot be made to realize and meet their responsibility to the public school, no self-appointed custodians of the public intelligence and conscience can do it for them.
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The methods as well as the objects of teachers’ organizations must be in harmony with the fundamental object of the public school in a democracy, to preserve and develop the democratic ideal. It is not enough that this ideal be realized in the administration of the schools and the methods of teaching; in all its relations to the public, the public school must conform to this ideal.
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Why did schools not achieve their goals? These were the reasons she offered:
1. Greatly increased cost of living, together with constant demands for higher standards of scholarship and professional attainments and culture, to be met with practically stationary and wholly inadequate teachers’ salaries.
2. Insecurity of tenure of office and lack of provision for old age.
3. Overwork in overcrowded schoolrooms, exhausting both mind and body.
4. And, lastly, lack of recognition of the teacher as an educator in the school system, due to the increased tendency toward “factoryizing education,” making the teacher an automaton, a mere factory hand, whose duty it is to carry out mechanically and unquestioningly the ideas and orders of those clothed with the authority of position, and who may or may not know the needs of the children or how to minister to them.
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Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field, then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school as in the factory will become drudgery.
Margaret Haley: 1921, Freeing the Teacher [Freeing the child] can only be secured by the freeing of the teacher. … To the teacher it means freedom from care and worry for the material needs of the present and the future ‑‑ in other words, adequate salary and old age pensions, freedom to teach the child as an individual. … Last but not least, the teacher must have recognition in the educational system as an educator. The tendency is to relegate her to the position of a factory hand, or a taker of orders from above. ‑Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley, Robert L. Reid, ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982)
“Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. ”
True educators are people who view students as fellow people. I can think of no greater analogy to describe the corporate reform concept of “success” other than: “Student = Product.” I suppose we should expect nothing less from the “corporations are people” camp than turning people (teachers) into producers of measurable products, i.e. test scores that define students.
Dewey was also concerned about an over-emphasis on industrialism in society and its ensuing effects on the education of the public.
Thanks for posting this, Diane. It’s amazing that its veracity transcends a time-span of well over 100 years.
“Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life.”
Wow! She could have been speaking today! Point #4 sounds like a description scripted education programs.
“If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school as in the factory will become drudgery.”
From what I’ve seen lately, there is no joy in teaching or learning in “priority” (failing) schools. When a school is performing well, the school’s climate feels lighter.
I, too, was touched by that last sentence in this piece. So true and now so ominous. Thank you Dr. Ravitch for sharing.
From Bruce Baker’s work, cited in various posts, there is a simple way to turn a “priority” school into a “reward” school: get rid of the kids with low test scores. Have a test to screen kids coming in. Voila!
Humanity above all machines. Now THAT is something to live by.
Thanks to the HathiTrust digital library of public domain works, the original full-text can be viewed at:
Haley, Margaret. “Why Teachers Should Organize.” In National Associate of Education. Journal of Addresses and Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting (St. Louis), 145–152. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1904. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112039515827?urlappend=%3Bseq=161.