Teachers have been picking up extra work in summers to make ends meet since there have been summers and teachers.

‘School Teachers: Exploited Intellectual Proletarians’ from The Weekly People. Vol. 10 N0. 18. July 28, 1900.

Summer Vacation Instead of an Unmitigated Snap is a Time of Toil–Continuous Study Required to Keep Abreast With the Times–The Woman Teacher in Summer.

The general belief about teaching as a career is that it may or may not be filled with hard work during several months of the year, but that, at any rate, the summer vacations, and other vacations at other times of the year, combine to make one long unmitigated soft snap. Isn’t there usually one holiday every week for teachers and students alike, and isn’t there a week or two at Easter. time and another week or two at Christmas time, and isn’t there the long vacation in the summer? To be sure. But then, general belief is at times all wrong. and in this instance it sways over three fourths of the way to error. For there is the summer school, an institution that has arisen for the benefit of the teacher and also to do her out of the long months of rest and idleness.

You seldom find the teacher now-a-days who pretend to get along without extra work in the summer. During the school year the work varies from the two or three or four recitations a day of the college teacher to the half dozen or more classes a day of the public school teacher. Those who seemingly have the least work are, however, the greatest workers. Take the teacher in a woman’s college who has science in any of its branches for her specialty. She may hear few recitations, but she must keep studying and reading and investigating all the time, if she doesn’t want her particular department to run down and become unpopular. Then she must keep her own enthusiasm at high tide or the students will become indifferent and lose their interest. In course of time when they go out as teachers themselves, it will get to be known that that one department is not so good as the others. What is true of science is true of history and literature. In none of these subjects can the teacher stand still for a moment or she will fall behind the times and rust. The keeping up with her reading and studying holds her quite steadily to work. Besides, if she is a scientist, she must organize out-of- door trips on recreation days to study bugs or birds or fungi or rock formation, or whatever has to do with the particular branch. She must make these trips so popular that every one will want to. go. Now, the person who isn’t keenly interested in bugs or fungi, and who feels that the fate of the world does not depend upon discovering a new member of the moss family, realizes that to remain keyed up to a degree of enthusiasm means something in the way of vitality. The college teacher, to be sure, isn’t bound to add the duties of a chaperone to her list. That duty belongs quite exclusively to the little teacher in a boarding-school, who, poor thing, has no let up from school life. Fortunately, she seldom needs to spend so great an amount of time over her class-room work. But if the college teacher escapes the duty of being chaperone she often assumes it for the sake of being accommodating.

In some of the women’s colleges, not in all of them by any means, the teachers are called upon to do all sorts of work aside from their teaching. They are put in charge of the different cottages, with the responsibility of looking out for the health, well-being and good behavior of all the young women in the cottages. One will be left to keep the books and discharge all the duties of the dean, besides having her full quota of classes. The treasurer, instead of being an officer all by herself, will be another of the teachers with work in plenty to do and with recitations interspersed in her daily life. Then, as has been said, there are the summer schools. Summer schools that belong to universities are taught by the university professors who stay right along. The teachers in the women’s colleges, many of them, go to such schools for the sake of getting well up in their own lines. Especially in those colleges where the teachers do much besides teach, it is almost a necessity for them to go to school again in the summer. They work hard, too, attending lectures and studying in between times to get all they can out of it, and since the summer school stretches over the hottest six weeks of the season, there is Bot so much fun connected with it as you might think. To find the summer school enthusiast in all her vigor you would need to visit one of the scientific schools, like Wood’s Hall, where the faculty is made up of teachers from all the different colleges and where enthusiasm is a mild name for it. Here you may find the teachers who for fifteen consecutive years, as soon as vacation has begun, have trotted toward Wood’s Holl to keep on investigating the real inwardness of biological questions.

It seems almost like a fate, indeed, that educational conventions light on either the Easter holidays or the Christmas holidays as the proper time to convene, and in that way manage to cheat the school teacher out of some more merely idle time. If she is a teacher in the common school it will be the State convention. She usually decides it is wise to attend, especially if her school principal is going to be there, for one must cultivate an interest in even conventions, if one is a teacher. Scientific conventions are what fall to the lot of the specialist who attends them out of choice.

Under the present arrangement of society wealth is produced so niggardly that it is also distributed still more niggardly. Under Socialism it would be produced abundantly, and it would be distributed generously. Hence there would be need of but a small amount of labor, either intellectual or physical, to produce abundance for all.

New York Labor News Company was the publishing house of the Socialist Labor Party and their paper The People. The People was the official paper of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP), established in New York City in 1891 as a weekly. The New York SLP, and The People, were dominated Daniel De Leon and his supporters, the dominant ideological leader of the SLP from the 1890s until the time of his death. The People became a daily in 1900. It’s first editor was the French socialist Lucien Sanial who was quickly replaced by De Leon who held the position until his death in 1914. Morris Hillquit and Henry Slobodin, future leaders of the Socialist Party of America were writers before their split from the SLP in 1899. For a while there were two SLPs and two Peoples, requiring a legal case to determine ownership. Eventual the anti-De Leonist produced what would become the New York Call and became the Social Democratic, later Socialist, Party. The De Leonist The People continued publishing until 2008.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/the-people-slp/000728-weeklypeople-v10n18.pdf