In her presidential address to the annual conference of the National Union of Women Teachers, which opened at Swansea Jan. 4, Miss A. Teece (head of the history department at the Levenshulme High School for Girls, Manchester), thanked Mr. H. G. Wells for his insistence on the importance of education, but protested against his recent express sion in a novel of the view that no profession but motherhood was "really worth while for a woman," states the "Manchester Guardian.'
Miss Teece stressed the need that education should train the child for a world in which change is rapid and impacts are swift, and in which he must, for his own sake and for that of the community, use his physical and mental powers to the greatest advantage, They might disagree, she said, with much that Mr. H. G. Wells had to say—they might feel that much he condemned had long died in the educational world, and that much he urged would not create those wide-thinking citizens who were. needed—yet as educators they owed him a debt of gratitude for the insistence with which he had underlined the importance of education in the modern world. The widespread interest in the schemes for physical wellbeing and the approval and criticism which had greeted those schemes; the spate of books on educational policy and practice; the eagerness to read and to profit by the experience of those carving out new ways; the emphasis on the necessity for some kind of preparation for the obligations of citizenship if democracy was to keep its place in a growingly undemocratic world—all those things testified to a widespread belief that education was the most important of the social services and the foundation upon which all rested.
How did they as women teachers view those matters? They were appredative of advance sin many directions but still found much that was overdue and much that was not yet considered important which they regarded as vital.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.