Conference Calls Teaching Field a Benign 'Disease'

Teaching has variously been described as a "profession, an art, a predicament, and a disease," noted Arthur B. Perry, headmaster of Milton Academy, last night at the Career Conference on Education.

Nevertheless, he urged students who "like the idea of helping young people" to ignore the heavy-handed implications of "Blackboard Jungle" and stressed the "wonderfully durable satisfactions" involved in teaching.

Striking a less sanguine note, the educator reminded the prospective teachers of such occupational hazards as a continual drain on their energy from dealing with many people, among them "fools" and mixed-up adolescents. He warned the audience at Leverett House of the financial sacrifices and of the foolishness of thinking of education as an "idealistic and sheltered profession."

Oscar Handlin, professor of History and chairman of the Committee on Teaching at the University, noted three considerations that should influence the choice of teaching as a career. He noted that the salaries among teachers were higher only than those of ministers in the Classes of '25 and '52, which his committee has subjected to special studies. He added parenthetically that perhaps this pointed up the "relation between social utility and remuneration" in American society.

Besides the salary consideration, which all of the speakers deplored, Handlin mentioned the matters of the sharply distinguished, hierarchical levels of superiority and inferiority in college teaching, and the uniqueness of the ideal college community, which is a self-enclosed, "cloistered place."