Need for Professionalism

. In most rural areas it was common for teachers to "board around," living for a week or more in the homes of each of the children enrolled at their schools. Connecticut in 1846 reported that 84 percent of the state's teachers boarded around. Not surprisingly the practice of boarding around was not conducive to maintaining a stable teaching force as few but young, single, and inexperienced teachers were willing to accept the constant packing and moving. Such men (few women taught in the early nineteenth century) could perhaps provide basic instruction in the "three Rs" of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but with the general extension of public education and the expansion of school curricula to include more subjects teachers themselves needed to have more education to do their jobs. To address the problems of transient teachers and unqualified instructors, reformers...