The Survey, in an editorial, also quotes in refutation of the seven-year theory, the findings of the commission which inquired into the pay of teachers in New York.  The commissioners found that forty-four per cent. of the women teachers in the public schools had been in the service for ten years or more, and that only twenty-five per cent. of the men teachers had served as long a term.

It can hardly be doubted that the tendency is towards the lengthening of the wage-earning life of the working-woman.  A number of factors affect the situation, about most of which we have as yet little definite information.  There is first, the gradual passing of the household industries out of the home.  Those women, for whom the opportunity to be thus employed no longer is open, tend to take up or to remain longer in wage-earning occupations.

The changing status of the married woman, her increasing economic independence and its bearing upon her economic responsibility, are all facts having an influence upon woman as a wage-earning member of the community, but how, and in what degree, they affect her length of service, is still quite uncertain.  It is probable too, that they affect the employment or non-employment of women very differently in different occupations, but how, and in what degree they do so is mere guess-work at present.

Much pains has been expended in arguing that any system of vocational training should locally be co-related with the industries of the district.  Vain effort!  For it appears that the workers of all ages are on the move all the time.  Out of 22,027 thirteen-year-old boys in the public schools of seventy-eight American cities, only 12,699, or a little more than half, were living in the places of their birth.  And considering the wanderlust of the young in any case, is anything more probable than that the very first thing a big proportion of this advancing body of “vocationally trained” young men and women will want to do will be to try out their training in some other city?  And why should they not?

If there has ever been voiced a tenderer plea for a universal education that shall pass by no child, boy or girl, than that of Stitt Wilson, former Socialist Mayor of Berkeley, I do not know it.  If there has ever been outlined a finer ideal of an education fitting the child, every child, to take his place and fill his place in the new world opening before him, I have not heard of it.  He asks that we should submit ourselves to the leadership of the child—­his needs, his capacities, his ideal hungers—­and in so doing we shall answer many of the most disturbing and difficult problems that perplex our twentieth-century civilization.  Even in those states which make the best attempt at educating their children, from three-fourths to nine-tenths, according to the locality, leave the schools at the age of thirteen or fourteen, and the present quality of the education given from the age of twelve to sixteen is neither an enrichment in culture, nor a training for life and livelihood.  It is too brief for culture, and is not intended for vocation.