Fact and Comment

In an article entitled "Schoolmastering: A Growing Profession" appearing in today's issue of the Alumni Bulletin, Rev. S. S. Drury '01, rector of St. Paul's School at Concord, N. H., disposes of many of the fallacious notions which are common in regard to the profession of teaching. The conviction, he says, that teaching school is not a first-rate career for first-class men is fast going out of date. It is in the boarding schols that the universal ambition to be somebody and to influence the character of somebody else finds its widest scope. Salaries in boarding schools, moreover, compare favorably with salaries in colleges. No one going into schoolmastering should look for financial gain and no one should stay out fearing financial loss.

Mr. Drury closes with the following admonition: "Let men under thirty, of good education, consider the call to be all things to all boys. Let the men in the cage downtown, who see life through a wire mesh, put the problem of bonds versus boys. There are many misfits and many sad dislocations. Let the man who has mistaken a chance vacancy for a vocation think twice before he spends his life persuading himself that the one is the other. There are men selling dry-goods who ought to be breaking bronchos; there are men in the mills who ought to be in the forests; there are men adding columns who ought to be leading columns; there are men filling office inkwells who ought to be rounding the Horn . . . . . .

"No vocation faces so much opposition from advisors as a purely personal work, for it embodies all the hazards of failure. Teaching is this pastoral personal opportunity. Do you know a man who is eating his heart out in an uncongenial trade into which custom has forced him? Might he not be teaching? The sooner the better, let the possible misfit and his friends investigate the work of the boarding schools."

Mr. Drury is conducting morning prayers in Appleton Chapel this week