Why It Costs More to Educate Our Young Today, March 17,1925

Twenty-five years ago it was possible to find young women and older in every community who could be employed to teach school at a very small salary. Usually they lived with their father’s family and had no means of making money. The small salary they received for teaching the district school was welcome. Today that condition is changed. If a young lady finds that she has to make her own way in the world, she is not limited to teaching. With a little preparation, she can qualify as a clerk or stenographer and be paid for working the whole year. To secure a teaching position, she must spend more time in training, and then find employment for only six or eight months a year, maybe nine months at the best. The result is that teachers are difficult to find; that is, good teachers.

This change in the economic status of women, together with the fact that salaries and wages range much higher than a few years ago, explain why it is that taxes for schools have so greatly increased. Then there is the additional fact that we are today trying to educate all the children of all the people, whereas formerly a large percentage of the children attended school for only a short time, or not at all.

--T.H.F.

From the editorial page of the Goldsboro Herald, Tuesday morning, March 17, 1925

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