One of my best friends was a high school history teacher and is now an assistant principal. He claims the biggest problem they have educating kids is the parents don't give a damn about their kid's education. He recently told me that when he taught he thought the problem was other teachers, but now that he's had the opportunity to observe the other teachers they're more than competent.

There was a lot of other stuff going on at the same time, though. The push to public education was tied in to (among other things) increased immigration and the shifting of public opinion against child labor. But more to your point, would you believe me if I said that part of my dissertation deals with changes in the way teachers were trained (along with changes in the general construction of education as a field)? I mean, I know that I can tie everything in to my dissertation if you give me a half a chance, but I'm spending part of next week in the archives at what used to be the Trenton State Normal School, and I've got a lot of reading ahead of me on the topic of teacher training.

But, since I'm right here in the archives at Bryn Mawr right now, let me give you a quote.

"Hitherto practical traning has been thought necessary for teachers of primary schools only, but in the future a similar training will be required of teahers in hgih schools and colleges also, and it is becoming increasingly difficult for college graduates without practical and theoretical pedagogical knowledge to secure such positions." That's from the 1898 description of the brand-new department of Pedagogy at Bryn Mawr.

I'm wandering a little from your point. You're mostly right about the vast pool of educated women who expected little by way of either salary or career advancement; in most schools women weren't allowed to continue working after they married, and most women chose their personal life over their professional. That's why, for instance, all the prominent female scientists from before 1970 or so either never married (Maria Mitchell, Rosalind Franklin) or worked off-the-books as partners to their husbands (Marie Curie).

Marie Curie was hardly off the books -- she was just about the most famous scientist of her generation. Or do you mean at some point early in her career?

A related point I've gone on about muchly: the feminism of the 1970s convinced a great number of women to go out to work, and hardly any men to stay home and take care of the kids. As a result, the paid-labor supply grew enormously. A decade or two later, people started wondering aloud in great numbers why real salaries had dropped to the point that in most middle-class families, both parents had to work...

Simultaneously, the perceived value of childcare fell to the point where I recall at one point, a series of Cabinet nominees were negged for having had illegal-immigrant nannies -- that's how common the practice was.

At the same time, I remember a co-worker b1tching about the fact that their nanny was forgetting to speak English with his kids, and their first language was in fact Spanish. (Why have kids, I wondered, if you are going to outsource raising them?)

Thankfully, this trend has reversed somewhat, in that I'm noticing an increasing number of people making economic and personal sacrifices (mega-long commutes being a common example) to arrange things so that only one parent works. Unfortunately, it's still mostly mom at home. (Though I'm coming across more and more stay-at-home dads, I imagine it's still a smallish minority).

More unfortunately yet, these families -- the ones that value childcare highly, and are thus natural allies of efforts to rebalance patriarchy -- have been alienated from feminism -- perhaps in part by years of high-profile feminists disparaging stay-at-home moms (or at least, by the media portraying it that way).

And no one in America seems to be interested in the obvious solution. In a really free, flexible labor market, workers would choose to assign different relative values to work and leisure depending on their life situations -- and parents of small children would mostly be working part-time.

Stay-at-home dads have virtually *zero* social support, and are flying in the face of what they've been taught since childhood that society expects of them. *And* many women are not comfortable with the idea of their husbands being the homemakers (which is a problem because, for the stay-at-home dad thing to work, both members of the couple have to be ok with the situation).

Granted, this is changing. But it isn't changing quickly, nor is it likely to.

Yes, Ben. Thank you.

Quick response, days late--Ben, what I meant by "off the books" was that Marie Curie had no faculty position or official employment until very very late in her life, and even then it was considered more of a courtesy to a widow than an actual job. She was an off-the-books researcher in her husband's laboratory, not a researcher with a lab of her own. As it were.