PERIODICAL ROOM 
OENERAL LIBRARY 


AERICAN 
TEACHER 


IN THIS ISSUE 


Placing the Responsibility 


The Schools and the Future 
James E. McDade 


Workers’ Education and the Community 
Eleanor G. Coit 


Educational Breakdown—A National Problem 
Harry L. Tate 


The Inquiring Mind: A Plea for Maturity 
Herman Partnow 


Convention Committee Reports 
Economy Programs 
































: iE pUcKTon 
WHY FOR 74 


DECEMBER, 19332 
VOLUME XVII No. 


RGAN OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 


















































Table of Contents 


Placing the Responsibility 

The Schools and the Future........... 
James E. McDade 

Workers’ Education and the Community. . 
Eleanor G. Coit 

Educational Breakdown—A National Problem 
Harry L. Tate 


The Inquiring Mind: 
Herman Partnow 


The President’s Page.. 
Editorials ao 
Committee on Education—Report.......... 
Credit Unions—Committee Report.......... 
Exchange of Teachers—Committee Report... 


A Plea for Maturity.. 


Character Education—Resolution 
Economy Programs 

A Little Sunshine..... 
Academic Freedom 
Society Must Not Let the Schools Retreat 

George D. Strayer 

The Weathervane 
Books 
News of Our Members..... 
News from the Field...... 
Questionnaire 


ee ee ee ee ee ee ee 


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1932 


DECEMBER, 








Vor. XVII 


THE AMERICAN TEACH 


DeceMBeER, 1932 








ER 





Placing the Responsibility 


HE Chicago teachers are facing a discouraging if 

not an altogether desperate situation. They have 

been hopeful, patient and courageous while waiting 

for promised relief. This relief has been denied them 
not once but repeatedly. 

Many of these teachers know that without almost 
immediate relief, which is no longer even promised, 
they must give up their positions as their meager 
resources entirely disappear. Unless the help that 
was promised is forthcoming, they will drop out one 
by one to be replaced by others desperate enough to 
take the chance of future rewards, or they will de- 
cide to walk out en masse with the slight hope that 
such a wholesale dropping out may awaken the pub- 
lic interest in the public’s schools. The latter course 
could not in any sense be considered a strike. The 
American Federation of Teachers has an anti-strike 
policy, but this policy would not be affected by the 
fact than one or ten thousand members of the organ- 
ization refuse to work indefinitely without pay. 

Any action of this kind by the Chicago teachers 
would be accompanied by much unpleasant publicity 
for them and for Chicago and would cause great in- 
jury to the children of the city. The teachers will 
not take such action except as a last resort. 

For more than a year and a half the teachers of 
Chicago have received irregular, infrequent and mis- 
cellaneous kinds of payments for their difficult labors. 
They have taken “scrip” afterward declared illegal, 
tax warrants subject to huge discounts and small in- 
stallments of real money when they were able to get 
them. 

The teachers were led to believe last winter that 
the Chicago banks would buy Board of Education 
warrants if the tax assessing and collection machinery 
were changed to a system approved by the banks. 
The teachers helped to secure legislation demanded 
by the banks. The banks bought no warrants. 

Next, the teachers were told that the banks could 
or would not buy educational warrants unless large 
cuts were made in the present year’s school budget. 
The cuts were made. The banks bought no warrants. 

Then they were told that a certain law regarding 
the N. S. F. warrants must be repealed before they 
could expect help from banks. The law was repealed. 
The banks bought no warrants. 

Now these ever hopeful teachers are told that the 
banks will buy no educational warrants of the City 
of Chicago unless further cuts are made in school 
costs. 

Many disillusioned teachers are beginning to sus- 
pect that they have been the victims of bad faith 
upon the part of the banks. Are they not justified? 

The Chicago teachers received one-half month’s 
salary early in October, the first pay since August when 
they received two weeks’ salary. The last check re- 
ceived was for services rendered the first half of April. 
All salary earned since April 15 is wholly unpaid. 
A large portion of the salary for the year previous 
to April was paid in illegal scrip and depreciated 
warrants. 


With the exception of the latest two weeks’ driblet, 
the money for the past nineteen months has been 
paid with loans made from various city funds which 
have been exhausted. The banks have bought war- 
rants to furnish just one-half month’s salary. 

The banks seem willing to buy warrants secured by 
other city funds but none for the benefit of the schools. 
This attitude of the banks is dictatorial to say the 
least. If the banks are to go further than to decide 
whether the warrants of the City of Chicago are a 
safe investment or not, they become the real govern- 
ment of the city. The power to tax is one of the 
greatest powers possessed by governments. If the 
banks insist upon not only the right to determine the 
amount of taxes the city may raise but also how the 
taxes are to be used, they usurp the most vital func- 
tions of government. Under these circumstances 
elected officials seem superfluous and an unnecessary 
expense. 

The most unjust and ironical feature of the treat- 
ment of the teachers by the bankers is that the teach- 
ers are in no condition to weather a financial storm 
because of the failure of so many Chicago banks. 
Many teachers have lost their life’s savings because 
these savings had been entrusted to these self-ap- 
pointed guardians of public finance and welfare. 

The Chicago banks financed the “blue sky” under- 
takings of the Insulls and bought bonds in tottering 
European governments but refuse to invest in six 
per cent obligations of one of the greatest cities in 
the world, their own city upon whose welfare depends 
their own prosperity. They refuse to buy these se- 
curities notwithstanding the fact that current finan- 
cial news articles report that the banks are loaded 
with cash and are unable to make satisfactory loans. 

The attitude of the Chicago Board of Education 
as expressed in a recent action is also resented by the 
teachers. Through its acting president, the Board 
declared its purpose of keeping the schools open 
whether the teachers were paid or not. If the teach- 
ers were forced to quit, there were others to take 
their places. 

If the public officials of their own volition or through 
pressure of financial interests force the closing of the 
schools through continued non-payment of school em- 
ployees, the responsibility for what happens must be 
placed where it belongs. The consequences will be more 
serious than some financiers realize. The responsi- 
bility for closing Chicago’s schools will certainly not 
rest upon the teachers who have been more than pa- 
tient and have done everything asked of them by the 
bankers and Officials. It must rest upon the public 
officials or upon the banking leaders who have by 
implication promised relief repeatedly and have not 
given it. A study of the activities of the banking 
groups in other cities where similar attempts to 
crippple the schools have been made leads to the be- 
lief that most of the responsibility for the plight of 
Chicago’s schools is upon the lords of finance. 





RN Aree rape earner 


Address given at the Sixteenth Annual Convention of the 
American Federation of Teachers, June 28, 1932, Chicago 


DUCATION, like all other social functions, is in a 
E critical time for the reason that the economic 

structure is in a desperate plight, and all human 
affairs have to be rearranged, readjusted and reinter- 
preted. 

We read history and become accustomed to the slow 
evolutions by which great changes are brought to be, 
but we fail to realize when we are a part of them that 
sometimes those changes succeed one another with be- 
wildering rapidity. Things do not happen in history as 
a plant grows, by slow accretion; they seem to move 
along slowly year after year, and then various forces 
accumulate, pressures become intense, and finally some- 
thing like an explosion takes place and events succeed 
one another with enormous rapidity, relatively, to what 
went before. It is our fate not to live in one of the 
ages of history where we could easily get our bearings 
and where our grandfathers could tell us what to do. 
It is our fate to live in one of those almost cyclonic 
times when all our old bearings are swept away, and it 
is necessary for us to evaluate anew all our dearest 
principles and reexamine things for ourselves. When 
we look back just a generation or two we see some of 
the things that have been taking place to give us a sense 
of rapid movement at this time. For example, in the 
time of your grandfather or great-grandfather, let us 
suppose he was a long-lived man, the occupational dis- 
tribution that existed at the beginning of his life was 
practically that which existed at the end. But the occu- 
pational distribution that existed at the beginning of 
your life and that which exists today are two far differ- 
ent things. That change has taken place in a degree un- 
precedented in the whole history of the world. The 
change, of course. has been due to the great industrial 
development. 

Another great change that has taken place and which 
created new problems, is the rapid urbanization, the 
congregating of people in great cities in enormous 
numbers. As a result of the industrial revolution the 
greatest change of all, perhaps, has come through the 
almost miraculous improvement in ways of transporta- 
tion, and particularly in ways of communication, just 
within a short lifetime. These have improved far be- 
yond what they did in a half dozen centuries before, and 
that, particularly as regards the improvement in means 
of communication, has been enormously significant for 
us and for education, because instead of each individual 
coming in contact with a relatively simple environment 
in which he is placed, all of a sudden the walls are taken 
away and he looks out on the whole world. The remot- 
est part of the world has come close to us, and I sup- 
pose the farthest corner of this planet, China or any 
part of Africa, is closer to us than a place one hundred 
miles away was to our grandfathers. 

There is more intimate relation, closer knowledge, and 
altogether a more genuine connection The man who 
works today does not work for his neighbor across the 
street nor for the people in his community; he works 
for the whole world. It is necessary that we in educa- 


tion should think of our particular task in those same 
terms, that we are not serving an immediate community, 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


The Schools and the Future 


James E. McDade 


but that the work we do is shot through and through 
with significance for the remotest corner of the whole 
planet and for all of the human race, 

The old problems of existence are still present. We 
seem to be face to face with the same old problems 
of starvation and not enough to do, but they are changed 
problems for all that. We have starvation, but it is 
in the face of plenty in this generation. The means of 
production have been amplified and extended and no 
longer need the human race fear what it feared a hun- 
dred years ago—that it would outgrow its own capacity 
to supply the necessities, not to mention the luxuries, of 
existence, 

The production problem for hundreds of years to the 
thoughtful represented the serious difficulty in the way 
of the human race. Tennyson, in “Locksley Hall” speaks 
of starvation as a lion creeping nearer the human race. 
But that fear is on us no longer. The problem of pro- 
duction has probably been solved. The problem of dis- 
tribution, which in advance looked like the easier prob- 
lem, is right before us and the next few generations 
and the children you are now teaching must solve it. 

Here we are, with plenty of wheat, shoes, automobiles, 
and the capacity for producing all of these things, and 
we cannot get them to the people who need them. The 
problem of producing, as we now see it, involves an 
element that is very different from the problem of dis- 
tributing. Production can be carried on with unintelligent 
people, but the problem of distribution is radically dif- 
ferent. It requires an “I” and a “you.” You must get 
the thing that I have or I must get the thing that you 
have, and it is not even that simple. I must get the 
thing that is produced on the other side of the world, 
or in a place thousands of miles away. People come 
into relations with one another in order that vast dis- 
tribution may be effected. We are beginning to see the 
human factors in that, and a necessity for intelligence 
in the units that transact the business of distribution; 
and just at this time, when of all times the human race 
is desperately in need of intelligence and understanding 
and all that is implied by the word “education,” some of 
our leaders would tell us that we do not need educa- 
tion, Surely it is the one solution, it is the one way 
out. If education cannot point us the way to distribu 
tion that is just and equitable between man and man, 
where is the solution except blindly to put the power 
in the hands of someone and say, “Do the best you 
can and we will have to get along with it”? A democ- 
racy is not willing, and we hope it never will be willing 
to accept any such solution as that. 

In the picture that my friend Mr. Stillman drew of the 
leader in business who had had only an eight-grade 
education, and who said “Look at me,” he should have 
said, “We industrialists and financiers have had eight 
years of education and look at the splendid mess we have 
made of things.” That is just the trouble. These mem 
who control our affairs have found them too complex 
for them to manage. They think they are dealing 
with the old simple formulas of production, but they 
are dealing with an entirely new situation where largef 
sympathies, understanding and ability to deal with um 
dreamt of complexes are absolutely necessary, Edw 
cation, then, must meet the problem, and education % 














Ve ne ew CP cP 


_ Ss 


en 





DECEMBER, 1932 


in our hands. If we cannot in this immediate crisis 
solve this problem, then if we can take a step toward 
it, if we can only avert the inevitable for a few years 
until the young people are free from the old shackles, 
the old hampering traditions, and are enlarged and made 
free by us, then we shall have done something to avert 
the crash until a more intelligent citizenry can take 
control of affairs. 

The hope, then, of the solution of this whole prob- 
lem surely lies in our educating a generation of young 
people who have a new and fresh outlook on life, and 
who are not to be deceived by the old shibboleths and 
the old watchwords and slogans, but who demand to 
see things with their own eyes. I wonder if we do not 
need to set ourselves free from antiquated pedagogical 
doctrines that have been adequate to a simpler day, but 
that are not enough for this day. One of our leading 
doctrines runs something like this: We formulate into 
a definite unit something that we wish to teach the chil- 
dren. We decide how the children shall approach it, 
what is in their minds already, what then we shall pre- 
sent to their minds, and how, step by step, we shall lead 
them to this outcome and this mastery which we have 
predetermined for them. And then we lead these chil- 
dren along that appointed way, step by step, till they 
come through to the conclusion that we had already 
decided on. You are familiar with that doctrine; | 
am afraid you are acting on it—I am afraid we are all 
acting on it—and what is its real significance? It means 


that the things we have to teach are _ settled, 
they are closed issues, they are definite things 
to be absorbed, to be taken over. It means the 


child, when he has mastered these things which we 
have formulated for him, has become educated—and 
perhaps that was true in earlier days, and will be true 
again in more static ages than this, but in this age, when 
we are in a whirlpool, that kind of education will not 
do. I am not one of those who feel that there is 
a kind of essence which is called education that is the 
same in all ages. I think that the education we give 
must take account of the world about us and what is 
happening in it. We hear often nowadays that the 
education we give ought to take account of social ques- 
tions; it should even discuss the questions that adults 
about us are discussing, the millions of unsettled ques- 
tions. This unit education, which represents things as 
closed and definite conclusions, will fit a static age, as | 
say, but not an age which must itself deal with new 
problems. I should say that instead of getting our 
children to accept the things that we teach, and then 
retesting them and finding whether they have come up 
to the standard, and then reteaching them—you know the 
formula—and once more retesting them, finally ar- 
riving at the point where all of this class have come up 
to the standard and may be passed, instead of treating 
them as so many pieces of wood that are to be turned, 
and measured with the calipers and then turned and 
worked on a little bit more and finally shaped up to 
such a form as is desired, and passed on as completed 
products, we must have an education for a more dy- 
namic citizenship able to avoid a repetition of the things 
that have gone wrong. Where are we going to get the 
leadership for these difficult times in the future if not 
in the schools among the children with whom we are 
dealing. 

Education is no longer carried on exclusively under 
the charge of teachers, as it was a hundred years ago. 
A generation ago a child got in school practically all 
the education that he received. Is that any longer 


true? Of course it is not, because when you leave 
school other agencies of education still play upon you 
and influence you enormously. 

There are three agencies that have developed a most 
marvelous technology—the newspaper, with the machin- 
ery back of it—I mean the physical machinery—the 
radio, which has solved the question of human com- 
munication and education in another way, and the 
movies, which again show to the eye and reveal to 
the ear in a most appealing form the things that happen 
far away. The child of today that you are teach- 
ing must be taught with the idea in mind that when he 
leaves you he is going to be the recipient for the remain- 
ing years of his life of an enormous flood of education 
of a type which comes necessarily through these me- 
chanical agencies, The education that you give, and 
teachers traditionally have given, has been of an ideal- 
istic sort. It has been under the control of a high ideal- 
ism for the most part, but the education which they get 
after they leave you is largely under economic and com- 
mercial domination. I leave you to judge whether this 
education is of a type that dovetails perfectly into the 
education that you have given. Does it not rather 
reverse the lessons that you have given and mould the 
child into an entirely new way of living? Unfortunately, 
we discover at a time like this that all this method that 
we have used in teaching children to acquire this thing 
that we have laboriously put into shape for them, all that 
we have done for them, has turned them over to these 
mechanical agencies that operate on them when they 
leave school most amply trained to accept everything 
that those mechanical agencies give to them. You want 
the child in school to say, “Yes, I see that. You have 
made it clear to me. I see it.” You go on and make 
another lesson clear. He hesitates, follows you, and 
finally says, “I see that.” And year by year he has ac- 
quired that marvelous docility that we so much admire. 
And then he goes out and there play upon him all the 
slogans and propaganda, no longer the idealistic sort, but 
the kind that has too often ulterior motives, and the 
child that we have trained so admirably still says, “Yes, 
I see that. I believe it.” And he follows it, and fol- 
lows anything under creation if it is only repeated to 
him often enough, because he has never had any other 
kind of training. Another kind of training is necessary 
for us in this age. It may not be in the next age, but 
in this particular age with the conditions the way they 
are, it is necessary that we should develop in the child 
the attitude of challenge; that is, the first reaction should 
be not to accept at all. 

I should say that no child should ever accept any- 
thing whatsoever, any general statement whatsoever, 
without being taught at the same time—this is not a 
general pedagogical doctrine, but one that I say is fit 
for this time of storm in which we live—he should never 
be taught anything whatsoever without first searching 
for the strongest argument he can find against it. Here 
is the statement we want him to accept; here is the 
strongest argument against it. Then he would say, “In 
spite of this reason against it, I still feel that I ought 
to accept it.” Then we have taken one short step toward 
the right attitude. But if we could only send out a 
generation of children who are from Missouri, who 
have the, “Oh, yes?” attitude, they might have a whole- 
some skepticism and they might react negatively when- 
ever a new slogan came to them. Otherwise, the com- 
plete docility that we have produced, coupled with the 
enormous capacity for getting likemindedness which 
mechanical means have placed in the hands of a few 








people, those two combined will set at naught all the 
objections and all the discussions that a few people of 
a more intelligent sort may conduct apart. These may 
discuss among themselves until they are black in the 
face, but unless they have ideas which are sound and 
which recommend themselves to an intelligent public, 
and unless there exists an intelligent public no longer 
capable of being led, but rather inclined to doubt until 
there is overwhelming evidence in favor of positive ac- 
tion, until that time we shall be in danger that many 
of the questions will fail of solution, 

I think that perhaps out of all this may come a better 
situation. Many of us who were steeped in the aca- 
demic theories of education, and who felt that if we 
could only, as the progressives say, take the children 
and give them freedom, let them be themselves, let them 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


develop like flowers, then we would have the true and 
the right education. Many of us who have believed 
that are coming to see that after all it is no solution. 
The child doesn’t bear within himself the pattern that 
fits him for the age into which he is to go. He must be, 
perhaps not indoctrinated, at least fitted by intelligent 
teachers for the age into which he is to go. It is 
for us, perhaps, a very hard experience and a very dis- 
agreeable experience, but it will make us think over our 
education in new social terms, You cannot teach chil- 


dren in a world apart from the social activities that are | 


going on throughout the whole human race beyond the 
classroom walls. This may be a disagreeable way for us 
to get a real interest in the economic activities of the 
world, but we are getting it and the lesson is a whole- 
some one, 


Workers’ Education and the Community 


Eleanor G. Coit 


the country, former students of the Bryn Mawr 

Summer School for Women Workers in Industry 
met recently to discuss their educational and organiza- 
tional activities. One group of students had been study- 
ing unemployment; another, problems of the machine 
age. A third group has been endeavoring to analyze 
their own emotional experience and attitudes in an en- 
deavor to understand better not only themselves but 
the basis of their relationships with other people. Sev- 
eral members of one union represented at the confer- 
ence have introduced into their union the discussion of 
current topics of interest and through labor drama are 
hoping to interest a larger number in their class work. 


Is such study on the part of industrial workers worth 
while? What difficulties had to be overcome in organ- 
izing such a program? How could more effective ac- 
tivity be developed? These were important questions 
confronting this group of students. 


In the state capital of a northeastern state former 
summer school students recently asembled with other 
industrial workers to discuss with representatives of 
their State Department of Labor the problems of work- 
ers under inadequate legislative provisions and questions 
of proper enforcement of the law. How could these 
workers be instrumental in increasing the value of the 
State Department work? Through what channels could 
they express their point of view on how the State De- 
partment can better help workers? These questions 
were asked by both state officials and workers. 


Classes in all parts of the country grow out of the 
enthusiasm of Summer School students for further 
study of their own economic problems. After leaving 
the summer schools, students continue their study in 
over fifty communities and carry on their discussions 
of current topics such as unemployment, the tariff, spe- 
cific industries, the labor movement. Their work may 
be in the study of literature; often through this study 
they gain further background for their understanding 
of social and industrial problems, Many students are 


I A CLOTHING center in the middle western part of 


in study groups; others attend lectures; some carry 
further their interest in the world in which they live 
through their own reading. 

Important study is carried on by the students in con- 
nection with meeting specific situations. The Ohio stu- 
dents have this year an opportunity to work with the 


Commission studying Unemployment Insurance in their 
state. They need to study this method of dealing with 
the problem of unemployment and to know more of the 
effectiveness of legislative action in order to bring about 
the passage of an unemployment insurance bill in Ohio. 
In Rhode Island efforts toward a bill for the prohibition 
of night work have engaged certain Summer School 
alumnae in a study of the textile industry and legisla- 
tion in other states. 

In one city a former student is the chairman of the 
cost of living studies of the League of Women Voters. 
In another, students have been working on women’s 
bills before the legislature and have therefore given time 
to the study of government and legislative problems. 

A group of students from the Wisconsin Summer 
School for Workers in Industry reported on their winter 
work. One group reports their efforts to interest the 
women of the community in buying union made hose; 
another has started a class for the study of economics. 
A student has been giving time to listening to the radio 
programs on economics outlined by the National Ad- 
visory Council; another now on strike has been work- 
ing for his union on agreements with the employers of 
his trade. Other students have been helping to recruit 
new students for the summer school and to set up pre- 
paratory classes for these students. One worker has 
joined an industrial relations club which is making a 
survey of the mercantile establishments of their town 
preliminary to preparing a white list of stores. 

The growth and expanding interests of these workers 
who have spent six to eight weeks at one of the workers’ 
summer schools is interesting to those who believe that 
education should serve as the basis for more effective 
living. One student was immediately interested in in- 
creasing her facility in English and spent her energies 
in attending night school during the year following at- 
tendance at the summer school. She began to search 
for ways in which she could give some thought to com- 
munity affairs. The League of Women Voters was a 
group with which she could join forces to work in leg- 
islation in her state, She found, however, few industrial 
women in the League and little representation of the 
industrial women’s experience. With the cooperation of 
certain interested members, therefore, she formed an in- 
dustrial workers’ unit, through which special study of 
industrial bills has been carried on, and work conducted 
for the passage of the bills. 




















DECEMBER, 1932 


As this clothing worker became more articulate, she 
became increasingly interested in workers’ needs and 
decided that most effective activity could be accomplished 
through the union. She had been a scab in a strike 
some years before and remembered the force with which 
she realized, at Bryn Mawr Summer School, what it 
meant to have hindered the efforts of her fellow work- 
ers. She decided to help the union and thus to strengthen 
the endeavors of her group for higher standards of 
living. 

A shoe worker returned to her city to put her special 
efforts into trying to interest her fellow workers in 
further study. She attempted this through the more in- 
formal means of the industrial club of the Y. W. C. A. 
Through discussions, dramatics, classes, she interested 


‘these workers in further understanding industrial prob- 


lems. She found her official union group more difficult 
to interest in questions of study. In this, however, she 
has met some success. She has become increasingly 
active in the work of the union. She was elected as a 
delegate to the Joint Shoe Council. She has gained an 
unusual knowledge of the history of her industry. Re- 
cently she has been appointed to represent her union in 
the Administration Board working with the State De- 
partment of Labor. 

The Summer Schools for Workers in Industry are 
concerned in setting up a curriculum which will form 
the basis for further interest in industrial and social 
problems confronting the students, and a further de- 
sire to study these problems as a basis for meeting 
everyday needs. These Summer Schools—the Barnard 
Summer School, the Bryn Mawr Summer School, the 
Wisconsin and the Southern Summer Schools—develop 
their programs of study around everyday problems in 
the lives of the workers. To the academician, unem- 
ployment is a glaring evidence of the inefficiency of our 
economic organization and the inadequacy of a social 
system. To the worker—unemployment—as described 
by a textile worker of Pennsylvania, means “no food— 
insufficient clothing—sickness—worry—and bills.” The 
problem of wages is not primarily one of the theory of 
“money wages” or “real wages’; it is a problem of se- 
curity, of existence. 

Industrial workers from all over the country gather 
each summer at the Bryn Mawr Summer School, Bar- 
nard draws industrial workers from New York City; 
Wisconsin from the middle west; the Southern Summer 
School from the South. These students come with ex- 
perience in the garment industry, textile industry and 
the many trades in which women find employment, Their 
political affiliations may be negative or may embrace the 
“left” wing; they may never have heard of a trade 
union, or they may be active in radical groups. Some 
students come with a minimum of grammar school 
training; others have done some high school study. 
Some live in metropolitan communities, others know 
only the life of the mill village or the small southern 
mill town. The students come from agricultural com- 
munities, from “Middletown” and from metropolitan 
centers. Many were born abroad. Out of this varied 
background, the work of the Summer School is to find 
some common ground of interest, some basis for the 
_— Study of questions in industrial and economic 
ife, 

Suggested by their individual curiosities, projects are 
developed in which their own experiences form the 
stepping stones to an understanding of the industrial 
world as a whole. Professor Dewey has said that edu- 
cation is a process of the reconstruction of experience. 
‘We behave intelligently”, according to Dr. Childs, 








7 


“when we participate in the movement of events in 
such a way as to shape the direction of present happen- 
ings so that they terminate in outcomes favorable to 
growth and expanSion.”* The study program at the 
Workers’ Summer Schools is an effort to interpret the 
experience of this group of workers. Work is con- 
ducted in economics in order to analyze current prob- 
lems; in history and science to provide background for 
the present ; in literature to gain a cultural understanding 
of the world scene. 

Students return to their communities more clearly 
aware of their place in the community as workers. Their 
curiosities have been awakened, They are interested not 
only in pursuing their studies further, but also in mak- 
ing articulate through community activity their awakened 
interest in social and community affairs. 

Student activities are an important test of the value 
of Summer School work, Only in so far as the student 
is able continuously to study his own situation and 
through this study to find a more effective basis for 
living, can the school be said to be doing its work. A 
group of students recently setting up measurements for 
workers’ education decided that the study must be an 
interpretation of their everyday problems, must bring 
new understandings and growth within themselvs and 
form a basis for effective activity, This type of work 
the Summer Schools are carrying on in their year round 
program. 

The summer work is strengthened when it is part 
of a wider educational program. The Affiliated Sum- 
mer Schools conduct all year activities under the Edu- 
cational Department whose function it is to cooperate 
with the faculties of the schools in the study of teach- 
ing methods; to conduct research concerning the back- 
grounds and needs of the group of workers with whom 
the schools carry on their work; and to prepare material 
for use by workers’ groups and to conduct local work- 
ers’ classes where the need has evidenced itself in many 
parts of the country. A systematic winter program has 
been effected, including the establishment of workers’ 
classes in different parts of the country, and advisory 
work with many study groups; an active service of con- 
sultation through travel and correspondence for former 
students of the summer schools who are eager to turn 
what they have learned into a program of intelligent 
action; and the stimulation of interest in workers’ edu- 
cation by conferences of teachers, the study of educa- 
tional method, and the publication of bulletins on special 
projects. 

The Educational Department has published pamphlet 
material for workers’ classes, This material is the re- 
sult of experiment and testing through use in local sum- 
mer school classes. In addition, a number of research 
studies are in process, One of these deals with the use 
of psychological tests as a method of grouping adult 
workers in the class room; another analyzed the work 
experience of the students of the summer schools. Both 
of these studies have been conducted by faculty members 
of the schools. Such work serves to make more effective 
the educational program of these workers’ education 
schools. 

**“Education and the Philosophy of Experimentation.” Childs. 


756 
io. 


p. 





There is no depression in the munitions industry, 
say the employes in the Picatinny arsenal at Dover 
(N. J.). For the past seven months three shifts of 
workers have been kept busy manufacturing bullets.— 
Federated Press. 














AMERICAN TEACHER 





THE 


Educational Breakdown 


A National Problem 
Harry L. Tate 


cipal of the Riis School of Chicago, had the op- 

portunity of speaking before the Resolutions 
Committee of the Democratic National Convention last 
summer on an educational matter of vital importance to 
every school district in the United States. Our ob- 
jective was to secure a plank in the Democratic Plat- 
form pledging the party to institute and support legis- 
lation which would allow the lending of federal money 
to the individual states on good security, said money to 
be passed on to the school districts that needed it, they, 
in turn, putting up their security with the respective 
states. The plank read: “We favor making federal 
loans through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation 
on security approved by it to states, upon their applica- 
tion, for the purpose of temporarily supporting public 
education.” 

Two main objections arose. First was the almost uni- 
versal belief that Chicago was asking for itself alone. 
The terrible financial mess in this city had been so well 
publicized that delegates from most other places could 
not see their own educational situation, or at least took 
opportunity to minimize it by magnifying circumstances 
in this locality. The provincialism manifested was a 
glaring example of the inability of most political lead- 
ers to think in terms other than purely local and selfish 
interests. Lesser political luminaries were more ex- 
pressive of an understanding of the possibility of not 
only the crippling of educational opportunities but of 
an actual breakdown. Here and there a big leader did 
what he could, however. 

During the process of lobbying chance was afforded 
us to get at the feelings and thoughts of some of the 
delegates. Senator Walsh of Montana was outspoken 
to the point of saying that half the school districts of 
his state had either to close down or to close early. If 
that situation prevailed then imagine what it will be a 
year from that time and then in two years, for the evi- 
dence of an economic recovery with which, of course, 
the school problem is fixedly intertwined, is at the date 
of this writing indicative of a psychological recovery 
only. Senator Walsh was so busy with matters relating 
to the chairmanship of the convention, however, that 
he could not give his time and energy to the cause. 
William Gibbs McAdoo was another great influence. 
He has worked hard in California for better schools and 
supported progressive school measures. That back- 
ground together with his experience as Secretary of the 
Treasury, during which time he had to lead in the 
financing of the greatest war of all time, eminently fitted 
him to grasp the full import of the possibility and the 
serious consequences which will result from a partial 
or total suspension of the education of any generation 
of young people. He used his influence but to no avail. 
Governor Parnell of Arkansas was an extremely en- 
thusiastic exponent of the proposed plank. He stated 
that for the past year he had been working on a similar 
proposition, which is the much mooted question of 
federal aid to states that are, even in normal times, in- 
capable of financing education to the point where their 


Te writer, together with Mr. Homer Davis, Prin- 


children have advantages equal to those of more pros- 
perous members of the Union. 

By and large, though, delegates said it was up to 
Chicago and Illinois to solve their own problems; that 
we had no right to toss our troubles into the laps of 
our neighbors; that rotten political conditions acquiesced 
in by the people for years and years past had, through 
waste, extravagance and graft, created the local financial 
collapse, and such conditions precluded any community 
from requesting a federal loan. Only a few seemed to 
have the slightest knowledge of the delay in the quadren- 
nial assessment in Cook County as a result of which 
not a dollar of tax money came into the school board 
treasury for a period of twenty-six months. A few 
knew of the organized tax-strike and of course used 
that against the community. 

The second main point of resistance was put very 
well by Mr. McAdoo who remarked that the proposed 
plank should be adopted but predicted its failure because 
the delegates’ minds were so full of the booze question 
they could not give proper consideration to questions of 
real sociologic or economic import. The wild spirit 
manifested by that convention at the slightest reference 
to beer or repeal was ample proof of the soundness of 
the prediction. 

I have set forth the above facts somewhat at length 
in order to show the reader that, no matter how well 
he is acquainted with the possibility of a national break- 
down in education, convincing some of our eminent 
politicians or even interesting them in this nation-wide 
problem is quite a different matter. Every teacher in 
the country should be arming himself with data on every 
conceivable phase of education so that he can put up an 
intelligent defense. He should not wait until an at- 
tack is actually launched but should be informing rela- 
tives, friends, neighbors, 6n the purpose, value and 
need for elements in the educational system that are not 
understood by the citizen who has few or no direct con- 
tacts with schools. Most people have not kept abreast 
of professional advances and hence cannot see the value 
to the individual or to society of many advantages now 
offered to young people. They did not have them and 
why are they so necessary now? 

Statistics to prove that there is a trend toward a na- 
tional breakdown are difficult to obtain. It is doubtful if 
a very thorough study has been made on account of the 
cost attendant on such an undertaking. By the time data 
would have been collected the problem would have 
changed so that they would be irrelevant. In lieu of a 
more accurate method that of the questionnaire yields 
some results that are very worthy of consideration and 
tends to prove that the schools of the nation are in for 
some drastic curtailments in the future. 

Mr. Clyde R. Miller, Editor of School Management, 
awoke early to the value of knowing what is happen- 
ing to the schools throughout the nation in the line of 
deflation. In the April, 1932, issue he asked executives 
to write in and tell how expenses were being reduced 
in their schools. A sampling of several hundred replies 
from cities, towns, and villages in states throughout the 














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DECEMBER, 1932 


country revealed that of those replying, 

62%. were reducing teachers’ salaries, 

50% were reducing administrators’ salaries, 

37% were employing fewer teachers, 

6% were employing teachers of little training and ex- 
perience at the lowest salary levels, 

19% were reducing the length of the school year, 

38% were increasing the size of classes, 

33%. were postponing the erection of new buildings, 

54% were postponing the purchase of equipment and 
supplies, 

8% were eliminating subject matter, 

8% were eliminating free text books, 

3% were reducing the top age limit of compulsory 
school attendance, 

10% were attempting to reduce the budget by other 
means. 

The above results published in the June issue are 
probably fairly good indices of what is happening in 
general. The same percents in all likelihood would hold 
in a nation-wide survey. Various and conflicting views 
were offered by the executives as was to be expected. 
Some stated that it is foolhardy for teachers to refuse 
to accept cuts, that industry has had to do so and there 
is no valid reason why the schools should be excepted. 
Let me pause right here to answer that absurd state- 
ment. It is either just another proof of the deplorable 
ignorance of educators regarding their economic status, 
or an outcropping of that asinine attitude of extreme 
civic mindedness whereby a teacher is led humbly and 
gratefully to reduce himself to the miserable condition 
of near poverty in order that the welfare of the com- 
munity may be served. It is merely the missionary 
spirit we used to talk about in the guise of civic duty. 
On the other hand other executives said that education 
has never been inflated—and could see no excuse for 
deflation. In Chicago we know that to be true. There 
were no increases in teachers’ salaries all through the 
most prosperous years the country has ever experienced. 
While the line of wages for labor and profits for busi- 
ness were rising sharply, ours remained horizontal. In 
fact we were suffering a loss in comparison to other 
earners. Our real wages were cut. In short we were 
having a depression while most other workers were 
enjoying prosperity. It is important that the teachers 
of each locality know how their remuneration compared 
with industry and business before and during the period 
of prosperity so that their salary demands and defenses 
to unjust demands against their salaries can be put on 
a basis of fact and intelligence. Few of those who 
answered saw deeper into the problem of taxation, into 
the revision of archaic taxing systems and the just dis- 
tribution of the returns from a just levy. 

On Sept. 27th the writer sent an inquiry to Mr. 
Miller for further information and his reply is so il- 
luminating that it is quoted at length. 

“I have not made any later survey but as Director of the 
Bureau of .Educational Service here at Teachers’ College, 
Columbia University, I am in a position to know fairly well 
what is happening throughout the country. As you know, we 
receive in a normal year requests from thousands of em- 
ployers in education and from quite a number of employers 
tn business to recommend candidates for positions. This year 
m July the number of requests received was 63% less than 
the number received in July, 1931. In August the number was 
53% less than the number received in August, 1931. The 
number of positions filled was slightly more than half of the 
number filled in July and August, 1931. Salaries are measur- 
ably lower—most of them at or near the legal minimum, so 
far as education is concerned. 


“What is my guess as to probable cuts during the school 
year of 1932-33? Well, what I say is, of course, only a 








9 


guess. Unless there is marked economic improvement in this 
period there will be further cuts both in salary and in per- 
sonnel, At the same time the burden upon the schools will 
increase; and more and more young feople will be in high 
school longer because they have no place else to be. Classes 
will be larger; the teaching load considerably larger. Fewer 
replacements will be made to fill vacancies caused by death, 
marriage and resignation. Teachers will simply double up 
on their work. There will be more marked prejudice against 
married women teachers and against teachers who come from 
other communities. Capital expenditures will be less even 
than at present. 

“I suspect that for some time to come few elaborate schools 
of the type which were erected during the prosperity era 
will be built. Maybe this is just as well. I would guess that 
new school buildings are likely to be of very simple con- 
struction. ; 

“The likelihood of some of these things coming to pass 
presents a sharp challenge to the professional organizations 
of teachers to maintain high teaching standards. My own 
feeling is that there ought to be a national committee set up 
jointly by the Progressive Education Association and the Na- 
tional Education Association, but operating independently of 
either, to help marshall public opinion against present tenden- 
cies which threaten to cripple the schools. When we con- 
sider that the latest federal budget involves an expenditure 
of more than four billion for army, navy, bonus and pensions, 
and other expenditures connected with war; and when we 
consider that this is by all odds the largest expenditure on 
our national budget it becomes apparent that the greatest 
competitor of public education is the military establishment.” 
Mr. Lewis W. Williams, Secretary of the Appoint- 

ments Committee, University of Illinois, answered as 
follows: 

“I can give you some information which will be of service 
to you though I am unable to give you facts concerning all 
of the points which you mention. Our placements during the 
past season were about one-half of the number of one year 
ago. The average salary of beginning teachers placed through 
our Appointments Committee was $1104.00. This is about 
$200.00 less than the figure for one year ago. These beginners 
naturally go into the smaller schools where, I imagine, most of the 
cutting has been done. I am sure the salaries have been cut 
in the larger schools but the communities backed by rural dis- 
tricts have had this as a much more acute problem. ; 

“The High School Visitor’s office is getting information 
from the high schools of the State which will give definite 
information concerning the cutting of salaries, the eliminating 
of studies and the shortening of terms. This probably will 
not be available for a little while yet as the reports are just 
coming in.” 

The following specific case is ample evidence that 
Mr. Miller’s guess is not by any means too wild. In 
one of the suburbs of Chicago is a large school with 
conditions that are semi-barbaric both for the students 
and the teachers. In a plant built to accommodate 
twenty-five hundred students is operated a high school, 
continuation school, junior college, a night high school 
and a night junior college. Teachers are assigned to teach 
in any or all of these organizations so that the length 
of a teacher’s working day depends upon how spotted 
his program is. Classes in the day school begin at six- 
thirty A. M. and extend to five-thirty P. M. except on 
Saturday which is the short day. It runs from eight 
A. M. to four P. M. for classes in vocational and lab- 
oratory subjects. On Sunday the building is kept heated 
for teachers who have no other time to direct extra- 
curricular activities and to do routine work. Nearly all 
teachers have seven teaching periods. The freshman 
English classés contain from eighty to ninety-five stu- 
dents. Many classes are in charge of girls who have 
only a high school education. No replacements were 
made for a dozen teachers who did not return, in spite 
of an increase of eight hundred in enrollment in the 
high school alone. There has never been tenure at this 
school, a yearly contract with a thirty-day dismissal 
clause having constituted the basis of employment, and 
even that has been denied for the current year. The 








10 


teachers have the same status as day laborers. They 
have gone without cash much longer than Chicago teach- 
ers and have discounted as high as fifty per cent one 
form of paper given as salary. They have had to accept 
a twenty-five per cent cut in salary besides the loss from 
closing two weeks earlier in June and opening two weeks 
later in September. The above is a sample of actual hap- 
penings and circumstances in a so-called civilized urban 
community. 

Are you next in line? How many of us and in what 
order will we be shanghaied into such miserable con 
ditions? Is such a type of education worth much to 
the student or to society? May it not mean an irre 
parable damage to both? Should not such conditions 
arouse every individual teacher and group to a full real- 
ization that a strong national aggressive organization 
for teachers is necessary for the preservation of the 
heritage of the race? In other words, what are the 
teachers going to do about it? Talk? Action is what 
is needed. 

Few among the rank and file of the profession seem 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 
to realize that a breakdown in education means a crum 
bling of the very foundations of civilization itself. Al- 
ready we have a hobo army of two hundred thousand 
youngsters, both boys and girls, of high school and col 
lege age roaming around the nation. It reminds one of 
the child gangs of Russia. Few among us seem to real 
ize the importance of education in a world that is be 
coming more and more industrialized. A glimpse into 
the future must convince us that the days and hours of 
labor must be shortened to obviate the kind of unem- 
ployment known as technological. If the work of the 
world is going to be done in less time, the coming adults 
will have to put in their leisure hours in idleness or 
wholesome activities of some kind. If people are un- 
trained for the proper use of time, very little that is 
good and much that is very bad will result from mech 
anizing the world any further. 

We are brought back forcibly to a realization that the 
prime purpose of education is the making of desirable 
human beings in order that civilization may endure 


The Inquiring Mind: A Plea for Maturity 


Herman Partnow 


ossips, decent puppies and keepers of rooming 

houses have plenty of curiosity. So have most 

people—it may be fish, fancy diseases, night- 
courts, bargains. Something there is that keeps them 
looking outward. However, because their inquisitiveness 
consistently lacks objectivity, it cannot be called inquiry. 
On the other hand, consider a child. More amazingly 
avid and pure questioning I have never observed, Coldly 
and hungrily it turns toward everything—sticks and peb- 
bles, scraps of paper, flying leaves, aunts, admiring 
grandmothers. Nothing escapes its omnivorous objec- 
tive examination. 

Why this hunger, great as bread-hunger, is later sub- 
merged tragically and with finality I do not intend to 
explain, It is sufficient to mention that whenever this 
naive scrutiny of facts is salvaged and in time re-di- 
rected to ideas and abstractions, social, ethical, religious 
—to art, perhaps, to science, perhaps—the result is the 
Inquiring Mind. 

The concept, therefore, is an aristocratic one. In- 
deed, so unnatural is it and so little found that it may 
be conceived of as almost a human depravity. 

Nevertheless, there are pupils in high school who 
already are capable of this mature and disinterested in- 
vestigation of reality. If we, as socially minded teachers, 
are to save their talent from a doom behind office doors 
and factories, we must make these students conscious 
of their special possession by a suitable training. It is 
our duty, I believe, to plan and construct a unique cur- 
riculum for them. 

Already we have helped effectively the backward 
students. With patience and kindliness it has been found 
possible to teach so-called morons. Why not experi- 
ment with the superior students? I don’t mean the stu- 
dents with high I. Q.’s and grades. I am referring to a 
particular type of student possessed, as I think, of the 
peculiar ability to observe detachedly. Who are they? 

Here is a calm, lonesome pupil who is dubbed wishy- 
washy, selfish, lazy, shiftless. He lives in tension, per- 
plexed, charged with rebellion. Somehow he has es- 
caped the hypnosis of society, evaded the stupefying 
tyranny of tabu morality. Intuitively he feels some- 


thing is wrong. Bright with disobedience, he finds him 
self stifled in an educational system which still con 
sists of certain traditional attitudes of authority and 
obedience, punishment and reward. High school to him 
is a wasteland to be crossed on the way to college 
and he looks hopefully outwards only. Of all the prej- 
udices and attitudes offered in an ordinary education 
consecrated to docility and meekness he can choose 
none. Each one seems to him confinement to the spirit. 
This student is unable to accept the established ideas of 
family and Creator and none that are new are offered 

the dictations of authority are distasteful to him. He 
is full, as Carlyle puts it, of the Everlasting Nay. 

All this he feels intuitively. He searches and searches, 
like Walt Whitman’s inquiring child, “peering, absorb- 
ing, translating.” 

lor this student | would prepare a course of reading 
from every phase of modern investigation—psychology, 
ethics, anthropology, astronomy, sociology. The object 
of this course would be to grant expression and con- 
fidence to an attitude which already he feels and is 
prepared for, but which, from lack of necessary tools, 
he is unable to make palpable. 

These people it is futile to threaten into being good. 
We must point out the good to them. Briefly this 
would be as follows: 

First, they must learn that the world is not constituted 
as they might wish it to be. It is a dirty trick, but it is 
so. Life is no plot to make them laugh or cry. The 
universe is no scrupulous and tender nurse. Through 
anthropology and astronomy they might acquire a sense 
of time and a sense of space. Man against the sky. 
against universe piled up eternally, galaxy upon galaxy; 
man against death. Through biology they would be 
made to realize that birth, growth and decay are real; 
through psychology and sociology, that other people 
have wishes too. 

“Man can no longer count on possessing whatever 
he may happen to want. And therefore,” says Walter 
Lippmann, “he must learn to want what he can possess; 
learn to hold on to things, not by grasping but by un- 

(Turn to page 19) 











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DECEMBER, 1932 


The President’s Page 


Politics and Education 

In the discussions incident to 
cent natidnal election, there has 
enough material for thought to last a life 
time. With the eco- 
nomic depression, the numerous speeches 
of the their sup- 
porters have had significance in propor- 


the re- 
been 


the background of 


candidates and active 
tion to the ability or the willingness of 
the speakers to face the facts and to offer 
statesmanlike proposals for a solution of 


the complex problem. 


Where We Come In 

As teachers we have our own economic 
interest in these discussions, because of 
the numerous proposals to solve a social 
situation by reducing the income of wage 
earners at a time when the lack of cash 
and credit is one of the very phases of 
the situation to be corrected. As citizens 


interest in these dis- 
cussions, because like vote to 
continue a regime, or to change it for an- 
other. But as teachers involved in a so- 


cial responsibility to the children we teach, 


also, we have an 


others we 


we have the deepest concern of all. 


Training for Citizenship 

The leadership in education has accepted 
the objective of training for citizenship as 
part of our educational program. Boards 
of education have also accepted this ob- 
jective. We have even gone so far as to 
agree that the children, in accordance with 
age development to comprehend, should 
be taught the basic facts of government 
and the responsibilities of citizenship. But 
we have stopped short before the facts of 
government, when the consideration of 
those facts threatened to involve the 
school authorities in risks, real or imag- 
ined. The result is that the honest aspira- 
tions of teachers to be helpful in prepar- 
ing pupils for intelligent citizenship are, 
for the most part, inhibited. 
Some Realities 

There are several phases in this prob- 
lem of training for citizenship which we 
must take account of. First of all, unless 
some specific method is developed for 
the schools to pursue, young people must 
wait for their social education until they 
pick it out of their adult experiences, if 
ever. In default of some substantial so- 
cial education, our present pupils will 
enter adult life with minds immature, un- 
disciplined or conditioned to become case- 
hardened. Such attributes characterize 
those who later accept their political phil- 
osophy from district leaders, or from their 


Dr. Henry R. Linville 


Incidentally, we must rec- 
the intellectual im- 

and childish 
irresponsibility in young men and women 
as a menacing to kind of 
adult The fail 
miserably even to consider this condition. 


own ancestors 


ognize existence of 


maturity the continuance of 


condition any 
responsibility. schools 

In the second place, the intellectual at- 
titude of public education authorities to- 
ward facing the facts of government, as 
the im- 
maturity in our young people, is at pres- 


well as toward facing facts of 
ent too vague and too uncertain ground 
on which to erect a program. How many 
of us know superintendents, or principals 
who are bold enough to believe that the 
schools have a responsibility in bringing 
young people to a condition of grownup- 
ness through the development of intellec- 
tual and emotional integrity and stability? 
Yet that is a job befitting the scope of the 
responsibility of the schools. 

In the third place, if the existing ma- 
terial relating to the facts of government, 
with the background of political and eco- 
nomic control, is to be used by the schools, 
what kind of teacher would be required to 
handle the material, and what would be 
the relation of such teaching to the re- 
mainder of the study? The 
obstacles to the effective teaching of the 
facts of government and its background 
seem well-nigh insurmountable, and would 
be insurmountable, if there were not the 
high degree of probability that public edu- 
cation must concern itself more and more 
with all the problems that relate to life. 
The tendency toward the development of 
a curriculum of specific concern with prob- 
lems of individual and importance 
is clear. Even a cursory of this 
movement shows the tendency. 


course of 


social 


review 


In Spite of “Insurmountable” Obstacles 


Superintendent U. G. Wheeler, of New- 
ton, Massachusetts, has performed a use- 
ful service in reviewing in a recent annual 
report the history of the expansion of the 
elementary school curriculum covering the 
period from 1775 to 1925, 150 years. In 
1775 they had the Three R’s and nothing 
else. 
mentary school program, and by the ex- 
pansion of the secondary school curriculum 
from 1850 on, a very large range of in- 
terests in social and economic and cul- 
tural life came to be features of the public 
school program. A brief summary includes 
the divisions of language, mathematics, the 
physical and biological sciences, the social 
sciences, geography, civics, history, eco- 


By gradual additions to the ele-. 


nomics, household arts, fine arts, prevo- 
cational and vocational subjects (espe- 


cially commercial subjects), physical edu- 
cation, manual arts and problems in citi- 
senship. 

far as the matrix for ideas 
the realities of life 
we have it already. No one put 
comprehensive program in the 
sense, “It did it itself”! 
I mean, of course, that ideas have never 
been destroyed by convention, or by fears, 


Thus, so 
dealing 
cerned, 
over a 


with is con- 


schools. In a 


and no one has ever been able to keep 
The thinking of such minds 
as were active combined to organize the 


them in jail. 


wide range of subjects for school curricula, 
and to give them such content as was 
workable. But as in every range of 
thought, the ideas related to school sub- 


jects have been modified by criticism con- 


tinually. For example, in 1875, some high 
schools taught “moral science”, “logic”, 
and “civil polity’. How these subjects 


disappeared as such, perhaps few know, 
but we can be certain that experience in 
the classroom and ideas out of experience 
had a lot to do with the fact that these 
subjects have disappeared, at least as de- 
scribed. 


Have We Given Credit to Evolution? 


Obviously, there are factors at work in 
the evolution of school curricula, as there 
Among the most important 
of these factors are the ideas of what 
thinking teachers want. The number of 
teachers who are thinking makes some dif- 
ference, but the clearness of ideas, and 
their adaptability to conditions, to needs 
and to ultimate objectives perhaps con- 
stitute the major elements in the deter- 
mination of the selection of ideas. We are 
accustomed to think that new ideas in 
education are developed by great leaders, 
and that we have to wait for their great 
minds to work. Moreover, we are in- 
clined to believe that nothing can be done 
until we can break down the political in- 
fluence and the economic domination of 
the schools. But in spite of these pre- 
conceptions of ours ideas have gone on 
being born, and a lot of us may be their 
parents. 


are in nature. 


Anyway, I believe there is enough of 
reality in this view of the emergence of 
constructive ideas from the background 
of the existing general social situation, 
even including the incompetence of our 
official educational leadership, to give us 
profound encouragement. 











12 


Democracy in Education 





American Federation of Teachers 
Organized April 15, 1916 


Affiliated with the American Federation of 
Labor 


506 South Wabash Ave., Chicago, III. 
President 
Henry R. Linvitte, New York Local 5; 
70 Fifth Ave., New York, N. Y. 








Secretary-Treasurer 
Fiorence Curtis Hanson, Chicago Local 3; 
506 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago, III. 





THE AMERICAN TEACHER 
Official Organ 
Apvisory Epiror1aAL Boarp 


Lucire W. ALLEN RutH GILLeTre Harpy 
Chicago Local 3 New York Local 56 


Mary C. Barker Henry R. LINvILLE 
Atlanta Local 89 New York Local 5 


Secma M. Borcwarpt A. D. SHEFFIELD 
Washington Local 8 Wellesley College 


Joun M.Graysirer CxHartes B. STILLMAN 
San Francisco Local 61 Chicago Local 2 


FLorENCE Curtis HANSON 
Executive Editor 
Publisher 
H. G. Aparr Printinc Co. 

107 N. Wacker Drive, Chicago, III. 
ae 








THIS MESSAGE IS 
FOR YOU! 


Every Member Requested to Read 
This and Comply with Request 


The Federal Post Office De- 
partment now imposes an extra 
postal charge of two cents on 
every notice sent by them of 
any change of address or non- 
delivery of THE AMERICAN 
TEACHER. This means a 
cost to the National office of 
four cents on every undeliv- 
ered magazine. 

Hundreds of magazines are 
being returned to us with no- 
tices of new addresses. This 
is an unnecessary added ex- 
pense to the National office, 
which may well be avoided if 
ony member will promptly 
notify us of any change of ad- 
dress or of failure to receive 
THE AMERICAN TEACHER 
regularly. 

Just drop us a postal card. 

Help us to save YOUR 
money in order to give you a 
better magazine. 











Go Ahead! 


The crisis in school affairs every- 
where has brought to the teachers 
and especially to teachers’ organiza- 
tions the necessity for united action 
on the part of teachers in meeting 
this crisis. 

Union teachers, through their or- 
ganization, should be willing to co- 
operate with other groups of teach- 
ers in this crisis and even take the 
lead in trying to get unity of action 
of all the teachers even if these 
short-sighted members of our craft 
are unwilling to join our unions. 
However, when such unity is not 
accomplished, our organizations 
have a program and should go ahead 
independently to protect their mem- 
bers and incidentally the teachers 
outside the organization. 

Leadership of this kind will do 
more to gain prestige and member- 
ship for the organization than any- 
thing else. 


Racketeers 

Taking advantage of the great 
necessity of the times and the con- 
sternation of many teachers at what 
is happening to them or is about to 
happen, self appointed leaders who 
would like to be considered mes- 
siahs but act like racketeers are of- 
fering their services in attempts to 
create one hundred per cent organ- 
izations of teachers. 

Union teachers, conscious of the 
difficulties of organization work and 
the value of experience, are not 
likely to be taken in by these im- 
posters, but the inexperienced, un- 
organized teachers are often a ready 
prey. Union teachers should re- 
double their organization efforts in 
this time of stress to counteract 
such influences. 

Recently, in Chicago, where 
teachers are experienced in organ- 
izations, such a_ racketeer was 
“taken for a ride” (not in the worst 
Chicago manner) after having called 
a meeting of delegates from the 
whole teaching body for the purpose 
of building a “one hundred per 
cent” organization upon the ruins 
of all existing unions and other 
teacher groups. 

The teachers in other cities should 
be on the lookout for this racketeer, 
who will very likely shift his base 
of operations, and for any of his 
kind. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


Mass Education; Gang Rule 
and the Status Quo 


We live in a racketeering age. 
Government has become a racket 
in the sense that it functions not 
for the productive many but for the 
manipulative few who dominate it. 
Hence $2,000,000,000 for the Recon- 
struction Finance Corporation to 
stabilize securities even for substan- 
tially bankrupt roads but not a 
penny for 30 millions of workers 
and their dependents. Billions for 
Big Business but starvation and 
ragged individualism for those who 
toil. Under a government domin- 
ated by a desire for special privi- 
lege, corruption is inevitable. Hence 
the dominance of milk racketeers, 
booze racketeers, educational rack- 
eteers, labor racketeers, rack- 
eteers more numerous than Heinz’s 
57 varieties. 

Why has America so little poli- 
tical intelligence? 
tion a commonly accepted phase of 
our political life? Why is the phil- 
osophy of violence practiced against 
ininers or other workers or against 
so-called “reds”? Because of our 
mass education dominated by Big 
Business which seeks to turn out 
just hewers of wood and drawers 
of water. Hence a memoriter, me 
chanistic, lock step type of educa- 
tion which turns out unquestioning, 
uninspired, uncritical beings ded 
cated to 100% Americanism and the 
“Status Quo”. 

Our future citizens are taught to 
accept unquestioningly such uneth- 
ical concepts as: “My Country 
right or wrong, my Country”; “De 
mocracy is the rule of the majority’; 
“Unemployment Insurance is 4 
Dole”; “the Sales Tax is the fair- 
est tax,” etc., ad nauseam. Hence 
the veiled propaganda for a fascist 
dictatorship! Is it any wonder that 
the present social order has _ been 
indicted by the churches especially 
the Methodists, who criticize the 
present order as “un-christian, ur 
cthical, and anti-social because it is 
largely based on the profit motive, 
which is a direct appeal to selfish 
ness.” 

The American Federation @ 
Teachers believes in the ideal of 
service rather than of individual 
gain with its devil-take-the-hiné 
most psychology. It seeks to sub 
stitute for our mechanistic, stati 
mass education a system of creative 


Why is corrup- | 





a et = -— «oes a oe ee 


cov he 


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ig 
ut 





DECEMBER, 1932 


13 


Education for Democracy 


education based upon co-operative 
activity for the social good. It 
seeks ta develop intelligent, critical, 
tolerant, socially-minded, thinking 
citizens who believe that our go- 
getting psychology, our false patri- 
otism, our narrow nationalism, our 
crass materialism, our worship of 
individualism must go and social 
idealism be substituted. When edu- 
cation and educators are dominated 
and actuated by the service ideal so 
they dare educate for a saner social 
order, then will public corruption be 
looked upon as the greatest of 
crimes and our racketeering ethics 
and conduct become a dim remem- 
brance of a nightmare past. 


ABRAHAM LEFKOWITz. 


A Lesson 


On July 27 in the Brooklyn Daily 
Eagle appeared a letter signed Mar- 
gie I. Snieder with this offer to the 
city of New York: 

There are plenty of nice, fine American 
girls on the eligible list, over 5,000 of 
them, waiting for the position of school 
teacher who would be glad to take the 
position at half the salary the present 
school teachers get. Why not let some of 
us graduates who have graduated with 
honors have a chance? 

On August 1 a letter signed *’l'ax- 
payer” appeared in the same paper 
under the caption NEW, HALF-PRICE 
TEACHERS WOULD SOLVE THE PROBLEM, 
which read as follows: 

Margie I. Snieder has solved the teach- 
ers’ problem. Why not give the 5,000 nice, 
fine American gfaduates a chance to take 
positions as teachers at half the salary 
present school teachers get? 

Last year in South Dakota teach- 
ers bid for positions and the places 
went to the lowest bidders, in this 
case $60 a month. The same pro- 
cedure in North Dakota this fall 
brought teachers for $45 per month. 
We have it on reliable information 
that there are teachers in Idaho, 
Montana and Minnesota working 
for room and board. 

In the province of British Colum- 
bia, Canada, four years ago the 
Board of Education informed the 
teachers at the close of school that 
they could not have the salary in- 
crease they were asking for. Upon 
the refusal of the teachers to ac- 
cept this decision, they were in- 
formed that they were dismissed. 
They pointed out to the Board that 
it would not be able to fill their 
Places. During the summer adver- 
tisements were inserted in all the 


leading Canadian papers, but NOT 
ONE TEACHER APPLIED for the places 
made vacant in this manner. When 
the school term began, the Board was 
compelled to take back all of the 
teachers of the previous year on the 
requested increased salary schedule. 

Is this a lesson to the teachers 
of the United States? 

Is it possible to build up a teacher 
morale that will make undercutting 
even unthinkable? 


Class Size 


With shame we are obliged to 
take notice of the position of an 
association of teachers approving 
as an economy measure increase in 
the size of classes. The stand ap- 
pears to us unprofessional and the 
arguments advanced specious and 
fallacious. That the “valuable ex- 
periences in the school of life” will 
offset the hardships to be en- 
countered by pupils as a result of 
the increase in the size of classes, 
is clearly unsound. We repeat 
what we have so often said, that 
mass education, on one hand and 
gangsterdom, crime and _ corrupt 
political life on the other, are not 
merely coincident, but rather cause 
and effect. We hold that for char- 
acter development our schools need 
teachers of character and initiative, 
and plenty of them so that we may 
have classes of such size as to give 
opportunity for intimate contact be- 
tween teachers and pupils. We hold 
that the large class is a direct in- 
vitation to the pupil to evade his 
responsibilities and to learn the art 
of getting by, two crowning sins 
of the modern world. 

Saving money at the sacrifice of 
school facilities is unwarranted, and 
there is no greater sacrifice of school 
facilities than in the overloading of 
classes. In the long run no money 
is saved. The falsest of false econo- 
mies is that which encourages the 
waste of the nation’s human re- 
sources. Saving money on school 
budgets to add to the budget for 
the control of crime! 

Contrary to the principles of pro- 
gressive education, this aforemen- 
tioned association advances the ar- 
gument that the increase of class 
size with its attendant decrease in 
individual attention will compel the 
pupil to spend more time on home 
work. We have not advanced in 
professionalizing teaching as far as 
we had hoped. 


In striking contrast to this posi- 
tion is the stand taken five years ago 
in Chicago, where the teachers pre- 
ferred reduction in the size of 
classes to increases in salaries. 

This comparison shows markedly 
the difference between company 
unions and true unions of teachers. 


American Education Week 


American Education Week was 
observed the week of November 7- 
13. The theme of the week’s pro- 
gram was The Schools and the Na- 
tion’s Founders. 

The purpose of American Educa- 
tion Week is to increase public ap- 
preciation for the public schools. 
To stress the value of public educa- 
tion was never more important than 
right now, when its value seems 
to be less appreciated than saving 
a few dollars of the taxpayers’ 
money. 

The practice of false economy has 
made school classes too large for 
effective teaching, has made schools 
too large for effective supervision, 
has cut teachers’ salaries from 10 
to 50%, has eliminated kindergar- 
tens and night schools, has removed 
vocational and fine arts courses, has 
curtailed the schools to such a de- 
gree that they are less able to meet 
the demands of an_ increasingly 
complex social and economic sys- 
tem. 

In this crisis every week must be 
Education Week. The value of 
free and general education, the prin- 
ciple of educational opportunity for 
the children of all the people, the 
knowledge that the welfare of so- 
ciety is inextricably bound up with 
the welfare of the schools, the un- 
derstanding of the function of the 
schools in the building of citizens 
in a free government, the conviction 
that the schools are in truth the bul- 
wark of sound democracy, must be 
emphasized again and again until 
sound standards become so fixed 
that all the “economy” propaganda 
of tax associations, industrialists 
and financiers cannot disturb them. 





“All eyes are open or are opening 
to the rights of man, the general 
spread of the light of science has 
already laid open to every view of 
palpable truth that the mass of man- 
kind has not been born with saddles 
on their backs for a favored few, 
booted and spurred, ready to ride 
them legitimately, by the grace of 
God.”—Thomas Jefferson. 











14 


Our Labor Press 


“Great is journalism. Is not every 
able editor a ruler of the world, be- 
ing the persuader of it?” 

—Twuomas CARLYLE. 


In season and out the faithful edi- 
tors and publishers of the bona fide 
Labor Press are bringing to the la- 
borers and the public the uncolored, 
undoctored Labor News. 

It is up to the Labor Press to 
educate the masses in trade union 
philosophy; to give the true and 
unbiased news about Labor; to 
comment on various subjects of in- 
terest to those who toil; to lend a 
word of encouragement to those 
who are carrying on organization 
work; to expose the grafting poli- 
tician and exploiting employer; and 
in fact take up the cudgel for the 
entire membership of our. trade 
union movement. 

While it is true there are a few 
big daily newspapers that occasion- 
ally print Labor News—and we say 
with due credit to such papers that 
they try to do so without prejudice 
-—a newspaper must be published 
with profit in view and far too many 
daily papers are prone to make that 
profit through subservience to an 
interest and to the submergence of 
principle and the bald truth. Nor 
can we expect the Labor Press to 
subsist without profit. It is re- 
grettable that individual members 
of Organized Labor are so negligent 
in regard to subscribing for and 
supporting the labor papers. Let 
the circulation of any newspaper 
increase, and the advertisers will 
respond. No one is going to ad- 
vertise in a paper that is considered 
as without influence and is not even 
read by those whose cause it vindi- 
cates. 

Despite a lack of financial re- 
muneration and profit, our Labor 
editors are valiantly existing on the 
proverbial crust and going along 
year in and year out giving the 
best they have in them to the in- 
terests of the Organized Labor 
Movement. Surely they could get 
better financial reward by following 
some trade or profession, but they 
hang grimly on, steadfast in their 
purpose of serving the workers. 
They have the consciousness of 
knowing they are doing their bit for 

humanity and their fellow-workers. 

We have a great admiration for 
the Labor Press of America. It has 
done much for the movement as a 
whole; and it has done much for our 
organization and for our members 

individually. Let your tribute to 
the quenchless zeal of the Labor 





Press and the editors thereof be a 
subscription to your local labor 
paper. 

The Labor Press of America de- 
serves your support. 

(An excerpt from the page of General 
President James C. Shanessy, in the Oc 
tober issue of The Journeyman Barber.) 


Depression Result of Underpay 


Labor’s contentions that wages have 
not increased in proportion to pro- 
ductiveness and that the present de- 
pression is the result of this is backed 
up by the head of a big enterprise, 
quoted by a writer in the conserv- 
ative Magazine of Wall Street. The 
executive, said to be the head of a 
“very large company,” is quoted as 
follows: 

“American 
in the world, 


labor is the cheapest labor 

It is cheaper than Chinese 
coolie labor. I did a little curious fig- 
uring the other day, for example, and 
found that it would cost more to build 
a skyscraper with Chinese labor at 12 
cents an hour than with American labor 
at $15 a day. Actually, I think we have 
been under-paying labor. Wages have not 
increased in proportion to productiveness. 
And there we come to the heart of the 
trouble. 

“This over-production we have talked 
about so much is really the result of 
under-pay. We increased production with- 
out proportionately expanding the payroll. 
That is the same as saying that we did 
not increase buying power in proportion 
to production. The worker is the con- 
sumer; tf he produces more than he can 
buy you get what we call over-production. 

“This understanding of the situation is 
now pretty widespread. If wages are kept 
down as business revives, the revival will 
be shortlived. The maximum possible pro- 
portion must go to labor if new prosperity 
is to be sustained. I am convinced that 
wages will rise rapidly as times get bet- 
ter, that rates of pay will increase even 
while there are still large numbers of un- 
employed. 

“In fact, wages as high as the traffic 
will bear for those employed is the surest 
way to provide jobs for the workless. This 
is no altruistic theory of mine. The his- 
toric tendency supports it. Wages from 
decade to decade have steadily increased 
faster than the price of commodities. 

“It couldn’t be otherwise with per capita 
production increasing. If men _ increase 
their productive capacity their buying 
power must increase if the enlarged pro- 
duction is to be consumed. That means 
that wages must increase faster than com- 
modity prices. So, I will make a predic- 
tion: in the next three years wages will 
go up faster than prices. Jf they don’t 
we shall have no real and general pros- 
perity.” 





“The hope of America is educa- 
tion. There is no price too high for 
education and no penalty too great 
to pay for ignorance.”—Morns E. 
Siegel, director of evening and con- 
tinuation schools, New York. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


From Our Friends 


Epiror, THE AMERICAN TEACHER. 

Please accept our sincere appreciation 
of the good-will indicated by the resolu- 
tions reported in your October issue, on 
the American Radio Audience League 

We appreciate such expressions the more 
because we know your organization has 
major problems “of its own” just now. 
In fact, one of your members the other 
day expressed a decided doubt as to the 
wisdom of the Federation of Teachers 
taking any stand whatever on a problem 
so far removed from its special field of 
work as that of the business structure 
of radio. Since others no doubt harbor 
similar misgivings, may I here attempt to 


allay them? 

The chief reason, after all, is that “every- 
body’s business is nobody’s business.” 
Every radio listener, whether his tastes 


run to torch songs or to disquisitions, suf- 
fers more or less from the prevailing sur- 
render of the air channels to the service 
of transmitter owners, rather than of re- 
ceiver owners. Not many outside the radio 
business realize that such a condition ex- 
ists, and those on the inside are apt not 
to see anything wrong in it. Moreover 
nearly all of the important organizations 
that look out for the public interest in 
other fields have some connection or ar- 
rangement with commercial transmissionist- 
licensees which they might well _hesi- 
tate to jeopardize by openly criticizing the 
special privileges now enjoyed by the trans- 
mission trade. (The station people them- 
selves have of course taken excellent care 
to multiply these arrangements, and to see 
that they complicate as deeply as possible 
the problem of duty for the officers of 
many a hard-pressed educational or cul- 
ture-promoting organization.) 

Without blaming anybody for this—and 
we are not among those who care to ap- 
ply ugly names to radio station owners 
merely because they seek (as perhaps al- 
most any of us would in their place) to 
perpetuate a “good thing” when they find 
they have one—we must nevertheless look 
for cooperation rather to the more mili- 
tant of the organizations having any sense 
of public responsibility. We ask your 
members to try to think of the radio prob- 
lem, not as one having to do with some 
sort of electrical enterprises—that is its 
least portentous aspect—but as one of who 
shall be selected, and why, to control the 
spoken messages which are listened to, 
night after night, in a majority of the 
homes in America, and which form an in- 
creasingly powerful influence in moulding 
the sentiment of the voting as well as 
the buying public. 

For example, I have noticed on the air 
recently a growing clamor of propaganda 
for the reduction of taxes. While much 
of it seems to me to be well-founded, I 
realize that this is a decidedly two-sided 
question, and I cannot but wonder how 
anyone can expect the other side to get 
an equally fair hearing as long as the 
government of traffic on the public air 
channels is so completely delegated to own- 
ers of great electrical (and other) prop- 
erties, who naturally have a much more 
direct concern for the reduction of taxes 
than for, say, the schools’ need for ade- 
quate numbers of competent teachers. For 
this if for no other reason, the problem 
of who shall be appointed by federal license 
to conduct all this broadcast message traf- 
fic is, we submit, one which teachers can- 
not afford to leave to the tender mercies 
of anybody else whatever. 





















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DECEMBER, 1932 


The Audience League has ventured to 
afirm that in selecting parties to conduct 
the message traffic on the broadcast chan- 
nels—at least on those channels where the 
privilege of controlling it is so clearly a 
source of profit as to command a high 
market price—that privilege should be 
given to persons deliberately selected for 
their competence to exercise it in the gen- 
uine public interest, and not in the interest 
of the stockholders in any radio transmitter 
or other commercial property. And in this 
stand we need, desperately, the active sup- 
port of every thinking school teacher. 

Harris K. RANDALI 
September 27, 1932. 


A. F. of L. Convention to Open 
November 21 


The call for the Fifty-second An- 
nual Convention of the American Fed- 
eration of Labor to meet at the 
Netherland Plaza Hotel, Cincinnati, 
Ohio, beginning Monday morning, 
November 21, has been issued by the 
Executive Council. 

“The hopes and aspirations of mil- 
lions of workers will be centered upon 
the convention and widespread inter- 
est will be manifested in its actions 
and in its deliberations,” the call says. 
“The economic emergency which ex- 
isted one year ago has become more 
intensified and acute. The problem 
of unemployment overshadows every 
other social, economic and _ political 
problem which the American people 
are called upon to consider. 

“Labor in our country is expecting 
that the Fifty-second Annual Conven- 
tion of the American Federation of 
Labor will give consideration to the 
thoughts which occupy the minds and 
attention of the masses of the peopie. 
We must speak for labor and act for 
labor in a way which will inspire them 
to renewed efforts and to strengthen 
them in their determination to resist 
all attempts to lower the wage stand- 
ard and to impose unbearable condi- 
tions of employment. 

“For these special reasons the of- 
ficers of the American Federation of 
Labor appeal to all national and in- 
ternational unions, state federations 
of labor, city central bodies and local 
unions to send delegates to this im- 
portant convention.” 





The driving force that makes 
either war or peace is engendered 
where the young are taught. The 
teacher, whether mother, priest or 
schoolmaster, is the real maker of 
history; rulers, statesmen and sol- 
diers do but work out the possibili- 
ties of co-operation or conflict the 
teacher creates. The poli- 
ticians and the masses of our time 
dance on the wires of their early 
education. — “Salvaging of Civiliza- 
tion.” 














Another Reason for Hard 


Times 
WHILE, IN TWO 
YEARS, TH E 


COST OF LIVING 
HAS COME DOWN 
ONLY 18% 


FACTORY WORK- 
ERS’ JOBS HAVE 
COME DOWN 33% 


—AND WAGES 
HAVE DROPPED 
OFF 54%! 
































Listen In! 


Radio programs are given by a 
number of locals of the American 
Federation of Teachers daily or 
weekly. ; 

Chicago Men Local 2 broadcasts 
every day but Sunday at 10 P. M. 
Central Time, over Station WCFL 
Chicago. Fifteen minute talks by 
civic and educational leaders are 
given, 

Local 2 also broadcasts every Mon 
day evening at 7 o’clock over KYW 
Chicago. 

Chicago Federation of Women 
High School Teachers Local 3 is on 
the air every Wednesday afternoon 
at four o'clock and every Saturday 
afternoon at one o’clock over Station 
WCFL Chicago. 

The programs on Wednesday are 
given by Junior and Senior High 
School students and on Saturday ad- 
dresses on school problems are given 
by educational and civic leaders. 
Copies of these addresses are obtain- 
able on request. 

New York Local 
WABC, New York. 

Memphis, Atlanta, Portland, Ore- 
gon and Wilkes-Barre give programs 
from their local stations. 

Chicago Men Local 2 has submitted 
the following list of speakers over 
KYW for the past month and the 
next two months: 

Oct. 17. James McDade, Assistant Super- 


intendent of Schools, Chicago. 
Real Fundamentals of Education. 


5 is heard over 


Oct. 24. Harriet Vittum, Head Resident, 
Northwestern University Set- - 
tlement. 

A Real Educational Program 
Following the Depression. 

Oct. 31 William J. Bogan, Superintend- 

ent of Schools, Chicago. 
Looking Forward. 
Nov. 7 Dr. Chas. H. Judd, Dean of 


School of Education, Univer- 
sity of Chicago. 

Educational Institutions More 
Important to the Nation Than 
Penal Institutions. 


15 
Nov. 14. Rev. Francis V. Corcoran, Pres- 
ident of De Paul University 
In Defense of Liberal Educa- 
tion. 
Nov. 21. Mrs. Holland Flagler, President 
of the Illinois Congress of 
Mothers and Parent-Teachers 
Associations, 
The Responsibility of the Par 
ent in the Present Crisis. 
Nov. 28. Dr. Charles Merriam, Chairman, 
Department of Political Sci- 
ence, University of Chicago. 
Reducing Government Expendi 
tures. 
Dec. 5. Dr. John A. Lapp, Marquette 
University. 
Dec. 12. Wm. T. McCoy, Principal of 
Bowen High School, Chicago 
Dec. 19. William J. Bogan. 
Dec. 26. Aaron Kline, President of Chi 
cago Principals’ Club. 
Jan. 2. Ira Turley, Secretary of Men 
Teachers Union, Chicago. 
Jan 9 Mrs. Helen Heffernan, Mem- 
ber of Chicago Board of Edu- 
cation 


Mimeographed copies of any of 
the above addresses which have been 
given or the others after they have 
been given, will be mailed to any 
teacher upon request. Any of the 
WCEFL addresses will be mailed by 
addressing WCFL, 666 Lake Shore 
Drive, Chicago. 

Mimeographed copies of these ad 
dresses have been sent to many edu- 
cators including superintendents of 
schools throughout the country. Let- 
ters have been received from many 
superintendents and others who ask 
to have the service continued as they 
realize, quoting from one of many of 
similar content, “the country over is 
going to have such conditions as they 
are experiencing in Chicago.” 

One of these letters follows: 

Atlanta, Georgia, 
Oct. 17, 1932. 
Grover C. Ramsey, 
Men Teachers Union of Chicago, 
231 N. Pine Ave., 
Chicago, II. 
Dear Mr. Ramsey: 

Thank you very much for the mimeo- 
graphed copies and the information regard- 
ing the series of radio talks being made 
under the auspices of the Men Teachers 
Union of Chicago. This will be passed 
on to our teachers and principals practi- 
cally all of whom are organized in Local 
89 of the American Federation of Teachers. 

These talks should serve to give a better 
understanding of the situation in Chicago 


and offer suggestions of value in our own 
school program. 


Please keep us on your mailing list for 
further mimeographed copies. 
Sincerely yours, 
Wiis A. Sutton, 
Superintendent of Schools. 
Any teacher desiring to be placed 
on the mailing list for copies of radio 
addresses and other information may 
communicate with Mr. Ramsey at ad- 
dress mentioned in above letter, 





People do not lack strength; they 
lack will. Victor Hugo 





16 


The Standing Committee on Education... 
Purpose of the Committee on Education 


As quoted by Miss Allen in her first report, the pur- 
pose of the committee was set forth in these words: 

“It was agreed that the Committee on Education should study 
and make recommendations to each convention concerning edu- 
cation experiments, practices and tendencies in the field of 
education, whether of a constructive character or otherwise. 
Not only should this committee concern itself with such ex- 
periments as the Junior High School, intelligence tests, the 
work-study-play plan, creative activity, etc., but it should ex- 
armaine the results of current educational practices in whatever 
way they may be observable.” 


Committee Organization 
In the first report to the Eleventh Convention Miss 


Allen’s committee had this to say: 


“The plan devised for the standing committees was that each 
chairman should have as the nucleus of his committee a local 
group and in addition should have one member in each of the 
districts or sections where we have locals. The plan is good. 
Some chairmen have been able to follow it. The nature of 
the work of the education committee is such that it will always 
be difficult to keep the outlying members in touch with the work 
the main body is doing. But the value of the information that 
can be secured as to the status of educational thought and con- 
ditions in different parts of the country will be so great that 
another year a more persistent attempt should be made to 
make use of this plan. 

“This year we have been pioneering and have been able to 
accomplish far less than we hope may be possible another year. 
On account of heavy local organization work it seemed impos- 
sible to carry on the necessary correspondence to organize the 
country wide committee, hence the report as submitted is en- 
tirely the work of Locals 2 and 3.” 


In her report to the Fourteenth Convention Mrs. 
Schacht recommended “that each local undertake a sci- 
entific study of some phase of the immensely broad 
field of education—a study or series of studies which 
may possibly take several years to complete.” The re- 
port also implied emphasis on the value to the local 
groups themselves in making such studies. 

It seems advisable that all thrée elements mentioned 
by former chairmen should enter into the composition 
of the committee. Working with the chairman should 
be (1) a local group whose business it would be to 
initiate work, make investigations, get out questionnaires 
or carry On correspondence and compile data and re- 
ports; (2) in each region where there are locals there 
should be a member of the committee whose business 
it would be to submit suggestions for work, report on 
conditions in his or her community, receive and act 
upon reports and other correspondence, and in all re- 
spects exercise the function of a member of the com- 
mittee; (3) locals should be encouraged to make studies 
as indicated in Mrs. Schacht’s report, making full re- 
ports of their studies to the national committee, whose 
duty it would be to make the results available to all. 


Publicity in Connection With the Work of the 
Committee on Education 


The Fourteenth Convention suggested that the func- 
tion of publicity for certain material might be added 
to the work of the Committee on Education. The re- 
port of the Resolutions Committee, page 129 of the 


Proceedings : 

“Time does not permit adequate study of and comment upon 
the very interesting and valuable material provided in this 
report 

“The question is raised in this connection which your com- 
mittee brings up for your consideration: Through our stand- 
ing committees, as well as through other means, we are getting 
a large amount of exceedingly valuable material ; many studies 
are under way under local or international auspices; many more 
studies have been suggested. We are concerned that, first, such 
studies shall be made as are most useful, and second, that 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


the material so obtained shall be placed effectively at the dis- 
posal of our officers of locals and the annual convention; jn 
other words, that the material should have the maximum use. 

“We do not believe that in the time at the dispasal of this 
convention plans can be worked out for meeting this problem, 
We feel, however, that it is an increasingly urgent one. We 
recommend, therefore, that the incoming Executive Council de- 
vise means for dealing with the problem of the development 
and coordinz ition of our research and experimental activities and 
the effective utilization of the product of these activities, and 
suggest that the Executive Council might find that this would 
be an appropriate task for the Standing Committee on Educa. 
tion itself.” 

Your acting chairman wishes to cite one example of 
what might be done in this field. Included in the Edu- 
cation Committee reports to the Eleventh, Twelfth and 
Fourteenth Conventions is a discussion of the meaning 
and use of propaganda, in which the position of the 
American Federation of Teachers is clearly set forth, 
This material is rich in educational value and should be 
brought together in form for reprint, either in the 
AMERICAN TEACHER or in leaflet for the widest pos- 
sible distribution, including re-distribution to our own 
membership. 





Subjects Already Considered by the Committee 


kT ~ . . . ° . ; 
[The Committee on Education in its several report 


has already considered some twenty-five or thirty sub- 
jects, in many cases indicating the desirability for 
further study. A number of recommendations have 
been made concerning further work. Our experience 
seems to show that this committee is a necessary ser- 
vice agency in the program of the American Federation 





of Teachers. 
Your acting chairman recommends that a definite 
committee set-up be arranged before the close of this 
convention so that plans for a full year’s work may 
begin at once, in order that the high standard established 
for this committee by those who first started its work 
may be maintained ; that if possible we have a permanent 
committee organized on a basis of continuity that will 
enhance the effectiveness of the work undertaken, with 
the suggestion that committee centers be distribued 

among locals as originally intended. 
Mary C. BarKER, Chairman. 


Credit Unions 


The Credit Union Committee was continued from 
last year with Mr. H. S. Bechtolt, Chicago Mes 
Local 2, as chairman. 

The Committee reports the Credit Union movement 
generally and among teachers specifically to be defir 
itely growing. In the United States at the present 
time there are twenty-six teacher credit unions 
Twenty-three of these credit unions have a total 
membership of 4,736. They save a total of $2,522,00 
and now have outstanding loans to 2,207 of their teachet 
members, a total of $481,000, showing that 47 per cefl 
of the members have also loans from the credit unions 

A credit union operating in Indianapolis did not ff 
port, and since these figures were compiled credit 
unions have started at Huntington, West Virginia 
and Salt Lake City, Utah. Other teachers than pub 
lic school teachers have established Credit Unions 
For instance, the University of Wisconsin has one # 
operation, organized by the University Local of th 
American Federation of Teachers. Berea College, i 





Berea, Kentucky, has a unique credit union of teach 
ers which may be used by both students and facul 
a cooperative arrangement which appears to be ve 
successful. 





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de- 
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DECEMBER, 1932 


The largest of these credit unions is the one oper- 
ating in Detroit. It has grown considerably the last 
year, having assets of $347,000, over 1800 members 
and 1100 borrowers. 

Says Mr. Bergengren, Executive Secretary of the 
National Credit Union Extension Bureau: 

“The credit union is a sane, sensible, convenient thrift plan. 
If it accomplished nothing else, it would be doing a great ser- 
vice for its members. Of these twenty-three credit unions in- 
cluded in this report, eleven were organized within eighteen 
months of the present date, yet the teachers who belong to them 
have already saved over a half million dollars. Money paid 
into credit unions on credit shares is like money paid into a 
savings bank. It may be withdrawn at any time, and although 
the purpose of the credit union is to facilitate in every way 
habits of sustained saving, I suppose some of the teachers’ 
unions have asked themselves this question, ‘Can we find within 
the average group of teachers persons who can successfully 
manage a financial business?’ Every credit union of school- 
teachers thus far organized has generated sufficient local power 
to operate successfully. The result has been achieved only by 
finding within each group the right teachers to manage it. Let 
us also remember that these credit unions are operating in thirty- 
five states which are subject to state banking laws and are 
annually examined.” 

It is interesting to know that not a single one of 
the credit unions that was organized by the National 
Credit Union has suspended operations during the de- 
pression, while we have had 3,000 banks closing. It 
is safe to trust them to the management of teachers 
no matter how incapable they may ofttimes be in 
regard to other things. 

Here is what a few of the Credit Union officials 
have said when asked their value: 

“Our credit union pays the teachers that compose it 6 per cent 
and grants loans at 6 per cent discount. 

“It serves them much better than the small-loan companies do 

“Some of our teachers borrow to attend summer school. 

“Short-term loans are made at rates even lower than the banks 
charge, and our credit union also offers a sound source of 
investment. 

“Our credit union serves as an excellent investment and en- 
ables those who wish to borrow to do so at reasonable rates. 

“We have paid a 6 per cent dividend for four years and find 
the credit union a good thrift bank for teachers. 

“We take care of sickness, travel, notes on houses, and all 
sorts of necessities. . 

“We perform a savings service-loan service for which teachers 
formerly paid dearly. ; 

“In the thirty-one months of our operation we have saved 
teachers of this city over $12,000 in interest and paid nearly 
$5,000 to them in dividends.” 

Finally Mr. Bergengren sums up: 

“I have also heard the argument, not once but many times, 
that teachers are too proud to take their credit business to their 
own credit unions. The answer, of course, is the fact that 
they do else they would not have successful ones in operation. 
All the teacher managers testify that however slowly the teach- 
ers may come to the credit union at first, they overcome this 
timidity and eventually treat their credit unions just as the 
wise business man treats his bank. 

“The credit union of teachers is no longer an experiment. | 
venture the prophecy that within five years there will be more 
credit unions of school-teachers than the present total of all 
credit unions in the United States. I base that conclusion on 
the high intelligence of the teaching profession.” 

If that is true, then it will be necessary for the 
teachers td organize and conduct successfully over 
1,300 credit unions within the next five years. I 
sincerely hope that Mr. Bergengren’s estimate is not 
Over-optimistic. 

Replying to questions from the floor and by Pres. 
Linville from the chair, it was shown that participa- 
tion in credit union activities does not divert atten- 
tion from A. F. of T. concerns; that new members 
come into the teacher unions because they desire to 
participate in the credit unions either as investor or 
borrower; that success of a credit union depends on 








17 


having such an enthusiastic treasurer in charge as we 
have in Chicago in the person of A. B. Churchill; that 
credit unions operate under strict supervision of state 
banking authorities ; that defaults do not occur in 
credit unions because members take pride in keeping 
up their obligations so that fellow workers will not be 


injured; that loans are closely regulated by a credit 
committee which sees to it that borrowers are prop- 
erly guided as to amount and object; that credit 
unions serve as agencies to advise members in finan- 
cial matters and also to promote thrift. 

Since the convention, word was received from the 


Credit Union National Extension Bureau, 5 Park 
Square, Boston, that reprints of the article in THE 
NATION’S SCHOOLS had been prepared and were 


available for distribution. Also a very valuable leaf- 
let, “School Teachers and Credit Unions,” may be had 
in quantities sufficient for general distribution among 
teacher union groups. 

All A. F. of T. locals owe it to themselves to write 
the above address and make full use of their gener- 
ously offered assistance in organizing credit unions. 
Why not 100 A. F. T. credit unions by the time of 
the next national convention! 


Committee on Exchange of Teachers 


The work of the Committee on Exchange of Teachers 
so far has been confined to research on studies previously 
made, 

A recent report of the English-Speaking Union of 
the U. S. shows that during the period 1925-32 that 
organization arranged eighteen exchanges of teachers 
between British and American schools. In only two 
cases were the exchange teachers men. The number of 


exchanges increased from one in 1925-26 to five in 
1931-32. 
Mr. C. H. Williams, Secretary of the World Fed- 


eration of Education Associations, sent out a question- 
naire in October, 1928, asking for information on pro- 
vision for teacher exchange with other cities and for 
international exchange of teachers. Replies were re- 
ceived from 905 city school systems, From these re- 
plies it was learned that provision has been made in 
the following fifteen school systems for exchange of 
teachers with other cities in the United States: 

Montclair, N. J., Boise, Idaho, W. Allis, Wisconsin, 
Bellingham, Washington, Johnstown, Pa., Colorado 
Springs, Colo., Frederick, Md., Amsterdam, N. Y., At- 
lantic City, N. J., New Rochelle, N. Y., Oakland, Cal., 
Richmond, Va., Perth Amboy, N. J., Pasadena, Cal. 
Newton, Mass. indicated that they did not have formal 
arrangements provided for such exchange but that they 
actually did make such exchanges. In some cases the 
extreme eastern states such as New Jersey and New 
York have exchanged with extreme western ones. In 
all except one case the exchange was automatically ef- 
fective without examination. 

The replies showed that there are provisions in the 
school law of some states which definitely prohibit ex- 
change with foreign nations—American citizenship is 
required for teachers in eleven states and some cities 
in other states also require American ewig One 
state requires an oath of allegiance to the U. S. 

Only five cities which replied have exchange with 
foreign countries at the present time. They are West 
Hartford, Conn., Amherst, Mass., Pasadena, Cal., Mont- 
clair, N. ia and Cleveland, Ohio. England is the most 
popular country for exchange, while France ranks sec- 
ond and Germany third. 














18 


From other material studied it appears that exchange 
of teachers between different localities of this country 
is fairly common but usually such exchanges are made 
without benefit of fixed plans of procedure incorporated 
in the school laws of the specific cities. 

In Portland, Oregon, in 1916, a plan was inaugurated 
and in that year three Portland teachers were exchanged 
with teachers from Attleboro, Mass., Cincinnati, Ohio, 
and Melrose, Mass. Details are not available as to 
whether the plan was continued. In the same year ex- 
change of teachers between Oakland, Cal., and Brook- 
line, Mass., is recorded but no details are available as 
to whether a definite system of exchange existed in these 
cities. 

On May 31, 1916, a bill was introduced in Congress 
providing that the District of Columbia school system 
pay the salary of its own teachers in foreign service, 
but the bill was never passed. In the school year 1925- 
1926 Washington had two teachers in exchange with 
California, but because of the lack of a satisfactory 
system of exchange and because of the practical diffi- 
culties in the way of salary adjustment and certification, 
a decision was made to discontinue the exchange of 
teachers after that year. 

As far back as 1908 an elaborate plan for an ex- 
change of teachers between Prussia and the United 
States was worked out by the Carnegie Foundation for 
the Advancement of Teaching. 

At present it might be said that exchange of teachers 
is not extensively employed beyond the University field. 

In order to further facilitate exchange of teachers 
it is recommended that the American Federation of 
Teachers work out some definite plan for the exchange 
and establish a system for evaluating the salary of 
teachers so that no material loss in purchasing power 
be sustained by teachers exchanging with teachers of 
foreign countries. (Recommendation adopted.) 

Mary C. Dent, Chairman. 
Committee on Positive Health 

The promotion of health (using health in its broad- 
est sense as including physical, mental and emotional 
adjustment) in the public schools of America has for 
some years been of interest to the American Federation 
of Teachers. In the national conventions of 1929, 1930, 
strong resolutions were introduced. These again re- 
ceived attention in the 1931 convéntion and a committee 
was appointed to carry out as much of the program in- 
dicated in the resolutions as was possible to workers 

already having full-time employment. 

The plans for 1932 included (1) explorations in al- 
lied fields of work to help define the possibilities in our 
own field, (2) the publication of articles in the American 
Teacher and (3) the compiling of a list of suggestions 
for the use of locals. 

In regard to the first mentioned project, we submit 
the following brief summaries of the American Asso- 
ciation of Visiting Teachers and of the Child Guidance 
clinics, their work being of profound significance to pub- 
lic education. 

From the 1929 Social Work Yearbook are taken the 
following facts in regard to the work of visiting 
teachers : 


87 centers were carrying on visiting teacher work in con- 
nection with the public schools. Rochester had 23 visiting 
teachers; New York 21; Cincinnati 11; Minneapolis 14 (now 
20); Chicago 11 (now 17); Newark 11; White Williams 
Foundation in Philadelphia 14. Visiting teachers in 1929 
worked in 35 different states and in all type of communities, 
with 250 workers employed. 

Aiding the school in the adjustment of problem children 





THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


is now generally recognized as the distinctive field of the 
visiting teacher wherever this service is organized and de 
veloped. The visiting teacher has opportunities to know the 
whole child—his physical, emotional and intellectual life as 
she finds it in his home, his neighborhood, his work and play 
groups as well as in his school setting. 

The knowledge which the visiting teacher gains by reason 
of her close connection with the home, the school and the 
community becomes the possession of the school and is 
used for the benefit of children as individuals and children 
in groups. This information aids in the treatment of those 
serious and urgent cases which demand immediate attention 
because they interfere with school plans and purposes. It 
aids also in the early recognition and interpretation of those 
deviations from good health, both physical and mental, which 
if neglected, often result in delinquency, dependence, or fail 
ure in social relationships. 

The growth of child guidance clinics has been rapid 
since 1920. In that year the Commonwealth Fund of 
New York City set aside a sum for the establishment 
of demonstration child guidance clinics, the object being 
the study of problem children for the purpose of pre 
venting delinquency. These clinics were to be taken 
over by the community at the end of the demonstration 
period. States in which child guidance clinics are 
now functioning are: New York, California, Massa- 
chusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Illinois, Penn- 
sylvania, Texas and Virginia. 

Wherever child guidance clinics have been established 
they have made an inestimable contribution to a modern, 
scientific understanding of human behavior, adult as well 
as juvenile, the so-called normal as well as the abnormal. 
Perhaps their main contribution to the public school 
is that they have shown the necessity for studying the 
whole child, the necessity for attempting to understand 
those influences within the individual and within his en 
vironment which have played a part in producing the 
particular kind of behavior presented. 

As a part of a study of the general fields of educa- 
tion, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene is at 
present making a study of mental health programs in 
schools and colleges. This study is designed, first of 
all, to bring together information. and opinion about 
programs especially influencing or safeguarding the 
mental health of the child. If opportunity permits, 
higher education will be similarly studied. 

The contributions of these three agencies toward posi- 
tive health in the public schools will continue to be of 
the utmost significance and no additional work in the 
health field or in the field of so-called character educa 
tion should be undertaken without a thorough evalua- 
tion of these agencies, their point of view, their methods 
and their techniques. 

For the second and third parts of the 1932 projects 
which your committee undertook, namely, supplying 
material in the positive health field to the American 
Teacher, we list the following: 

“Fifty-five Bad Boys”—Book Review in December, 1931 

“The Child Guidance Clinic”—February, 1931, by Miss 
Hardy 

“These Are Not Fads and Frills’”—May, 1931, by Miss 
Florence Clark 

“Positive Health” (Oct., 1931) and 

“Mental Health in the Public Schools’—April, 1931, by 

Miss Bertha Ferguson. 

The list of suggestions to locals has not been com- 
pleted and not having the approval of the entire com- 
mittee will not be submitted during 1932. The chair- 
man of the committee is convinced that a list of sug- 
gestions would be helpful in guiding the work. 


Recommendations—( Adopted) 
Feeling that in addition to the usual health hazards 











—— 2 





_— —-— —=_ met Be Ae 


R 








——= —— eee 








DECEMBER, 1932 


incident to the teaching profession, there have been 
added those which result from a prolonged depression, 
the committee makes the following recommendations: 

(1) That the standing committee on positive health 
be continued. 

(2) That the standing health committee stimulate 
and guide the local health committees to cooperate in 
an advisory capacity with the proper local committees in 
handling cases of individual teachers in any matters of 
personal adjustment which may arise, emphasizing the 
need for healthy adjustments for teachers as well as 
for pupils. 

(3) That the standing health committee make further 
contacts with the American Association of Visiting 
Teachers, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene 
and the American Child Health Association; 

(4) That reports of work done and of developments 
in the field of health be prepared for the American 
Teacher ; 

(5) That bibliographies, especially upon the health 
of teachers upon which subject there is a valuable and 
rapidly growing amount of available material based up- 
on recent research. be suggested; 

(6) That the standing health committee discover to 
what extent modern health points of view are finding 
expression in teacher training schools. 

FLORENCE CLARK, Chicago Women 3, 

Rutu GiLtvetre Harpy, New York 5, 
KATHRYN Tscuipa, St. Paul Women 28. 
BerTHA Fercuson, Minneapolis 59, Chairman. 


Health of Teachers 
Resolution No. 47—Introduced by Minneapolis Local No. 59 


WHEREAS, A healthy teacher is necessary to create and 
encourage in pupils healthy attitudes and habits—mental, 
emotional and physical, and 

WHEREAS, There is a wide-spread interest in the matter 
of the health of teachers and a valuable and rapidly growing 
amount of available material based upon recent research in 
this field, and 

WHEREAS, In addition to the usual health hazards inci- 
dent to the teaching profession, there have been added those 
which result from a prolonged depression, therefore be it 

RESOLVED, That the American Federation of Teachers 
encourage locals to study the health of teachers and suggest 
the following as possible projects to be undertaken: 

(1) The use of a reading list upon the health of teachers 

prepared by the committee on positive health. 

(2) A study of the living conditions of teachers in the 
community, and of the teaching load. 

(3) Investigation of the facilities for medical aid and for 
recreational outlets already existing within the school 
system. 

(4) Increased efforts to secure and safeguard those meas- 
ures which contribute to the security of teachers, such 
as adequate retirement allowances, group insurance 
and tenure of office laws. 


Character Education 


The Sixteenth A. F. T. Convention adopted the fol- 
lowing resolution on 


Teacher Load in Relation to Character Education 


WHEREAS, An attempt is being made to increase teacher 
load as one means of economizing during this depression, e. g., 
in Minneapolis the teacher load in the junior high school al- 
ready has increased 90% and in the senior high 13% in the last 
ten years; and 

WHEREAS, Any attempt to fix teacher load at approximately 
30 students results in the organizing of many classes of 45; and 

WHEREAS, This increase in teacher load defeats the pur- 
pose of education: first, because no teacher can train students 
either to learn or to think in high school classes of more than 
5 per hour period and 30 per 45-minute period; and secondly, 
se the school given over to mass education cannot ade- 











19 





quately perform this task which requires an opportunity for in 
timate contact between teachers and pupils, and third, because 
the large class is a direct invitation to the pupil to evade 
his responsibilities and to learn the art of getting by; there 
fore be it 

RESOLVED, That the American Federation of Teachers 
intensify its campaign to regulate the size of classes to a 
maximum of 35, and to limit the size of schools to a maxi- 
mum enrollment of 2000, as necessary conditions for char 
acter education. 

Committee Report on President’s Address 


The character education course set up in New York certainly 
demands again the reiteration of thé stand taken by this or 
ganization that effective education can only be accomplished 
when schools and classes are kept within the bounds which 
will allow personal contact between teacher and pupil. The 
growing feeling that the schools must take over to a large ex- 
tent the formation of the character of the youth of today chal- 
lenges us to renew our campaign by every means we know to 
reduce the size of schools and classes so that the influenc« 
of the teacher may play the part it should in the formation 
of character. 


The Inquiring Mind 

(Continued from page 10) 
derstanding.” This is what a social duty drives us to 
each these students. Instruct them to detach them 
selves from their own fears, hates and lusts, to examine 
them, identify them, understand their origin. To do this 
is somehow to engender a catharsis which leaves the 
subject cleansed and able to understand in true perspec- 
tive, at once disinterested and mature. Such objective 
information would help to eradicate in his mind a sense 
of guilt and produce a full-souled, full-bodied individual. 


Robinson Jeffers has said: 
“A few centuries gone by 
Was none dared not to people 
The Darkness beyond the stars with harps and habitations 

But now, dear is the Truth, Life is grown sweeter and lovelier, 
And Death is no evil.” 

Yet such a course would be essentially religious, nor 
in the least atheistic. Indeed the need of our gifted 
youth is religious, insistently so. For God is the su- 
preme symbol in which man expresses his destiny and 
if that symbol is confused, his life is confused. Re- 
ligion should be, however, not a tyranny, a system of 
rewards and punishments, but a release for the ideals 
of man, 

This entire attitude of detachment is no fancy fiction, 
no idle play with words, It is a historical necessity that 
events have thrown up to. the surface during modern 
times, and it is our duty as teachers to make such an 
attitude incarnate in our exceptional students. Once 
there is formulated this new morality of disinterested 
ness and maturity toward which history is driving us, 
as soon as the necessary symbols have been prepared, 
it is to be hoped that it may thrust downward into the 
masses, provoking to liberation. 

Meanwhile normal students may well be utilized for 
that awakening by being made amenable to new ideas. 
In them we must quicken a spirit of tolerance. We 
must gently and insistently compel them toward re- 
evaluations of their experience. We must equip them to 
resist all forms of glorified bulldozing and social hyp- 
nosis, and so prod them that they are exploded into 
alertness and saved as long as possible from that too 
willing weariness and weakness of the flesh and spirit 
that is a great cause of our general dejection today. 
In them we must strive to make the unfamiliar, the 
unknown, the strange, a little more attractive. Having 
done this, we may hope that they will welcome changes, 
and perhaps tolerate in others what is alien to them- 
selves. 








Economy Programs 





Only a people that had no conception of the 
place of education in its national life could 
contemplate the ruin of the next generation as 
the best remedy for governmental insolvency. 
Robert M. Hutchins, president, University of 
Chicago. 











New Haven, Conn.—School dental clinics closed; 
school dentists dismissed. 

Granite City, IIl—School year shortened by one 
month ; 25 teachers put on half time; size of classes 
increased 20%. 

Decatur, Ill—Fourth year of senior high school 
discontinued. 

South Bend, Ind.—40 teachers dropped; size of 
classes increased. 

Buffalo, N. Y.—Teachers’ salaries cut $200 and $300. 
All teachers receiving more than the maximum rate 
fixed by state law take reduction. Superintendent re- 
ceiving $16,000 gets no cut; deputy superintendents 
receive substantial advances in salary $5000 to $7000 
and $6000 to $7000. 

Hoboken, N. J.—-Two schools. closed; 41 teachers 
lose jobs; 1,500 pupils transferred; $170,000 a year 
saved. By whom? For what? 

Lawrence, Mass.—School year shortened one 
month; salaries cut 20% 

Ft. Wayne, Ind.—31 teachers dropped; size of 
classes increased 6%. 

Glencoe, Ill—18 teachers dropped; all “special” 
subjects except physical education (music, art, dra- 
matics, domestic science, manual arts, vocational 
training) eliminated; physical education curtailed ; 
school year shortened. 

Cicero, Ill—School year shortened ; class size great- 
ly increased. 

Lander, Wyo.—Teachers salaries cut 10%; married 


women dismissed. 
Chicago, Ill—Jobs of 49 bath attendants abolished 


to save $50,000. 

New York, N. Y.—Schools closed ; classes increased 
in size; classes consolidated; 350 permanent substi- 
tutes removed; regular appointments deferred. 

San Diego, Calif—A cooperative arrangement be- 
tween the State Teachers College and the city of San 
Diego enables college students to teach one-half day 
throughout the semester in a public school, while the 
regular teacher goes on half-time. 

New York, N. Y.—A proposal that the New York 
city school system hold no further teachers’ and su- 
pervisors’ examinations until after 1933 unless an ac- 
tual need for teachers of a particular license develops, 
is being considered by the school heads as an economy 


measure. 
Newark, N. J.—Teachers’ salaries reduced 1% to 


15%. 


La Grange, Ill—Kindergarten classes will be dis- 
continued. 

Downers Grove, Ill—Undecided about opening 
high school; kindergarten conducted for half-day 
periods; manual training and physical education 
eliminated. 

Brookfield, Ill—School year shortened one month. 
Teaching staff reduced 40%. 

West Aurora, Ill—Pay of teachers cut a second 
10% and school year shortened by a month. 

Bakersfield, Calif—Teacher load increased, number 
of teachers decreased, salaries reduced. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


Aurora, Ill. Teachers volunteer to teach two months 
without pay. They accepted a 10% cut at the open- 
ing of the school term and later the board cut their 
salaries another 25%. 

Jackson, Mich.—Evening classes curtailed. No 
gymnasium, swimming or wood working classes, but 
a new course in economics is offered in which invest- 
ments, budgeting, taxation, indebtedness, real estate 
transfers, contracts and credit will be taught. The 
teaching staff also has been greatly reduced. 

Cleveland, Ohio.-—Radical slashing of welfare ex- 
penditures, and cutting of appropriations for educa- 
tion were two methods by which real estate property 
owners could relieve themselves in the panic, which 
L. G. Collister, county treasurer, suggested to mem- 
bers of the Building Owners’ and Managers’ Assn, 
of Cleveland. “We have been spending too much on 
our public schools,” he said, and implied that workers 
should get less in the way of welfare services, so that 
real estate owners could have their taxes reduced. 


A Little Sunshine 
An occasional gleam in the black cloud of economy! 
Laramie County, Wyoming, Does Not Cut Salaries 


While other school districts in Wyoming are reduc- 
ing salaries and employes, School District No. 1 of 
Laramie County today announced it probably will de- 
crease school taxes next year without cutting salaries 
or staffs. 

The board said the district’s school will end the fis- 
cal year with a balance of about $50,000 and that 1 
mill may be cut from the tax levy, making it 7 mills. 


Teachers’ Pay Cuts Scored by Club Women 


Public officials who cut the salaries of teachers and 
reduce school equipment at the cost of education were 
criticized by business women from Western States, 
gathered in conference at Berkeley. The gathering 
was a regional meeting of the National Federation of 
Business and Professional Women’s Clubs and was 
one of several being held throughout the country. 

The attack on teachers’ salary cuts developed dur- 
ing a discussion by Miss Emily R. Kneubuhl of New 
York city, national executive secretary, with Miss 
Martha Gasch of Portland, presiding. 

Mrs. Estelle C. Close of Santa Rosa led the attack 
on the decreasing wage scale for teachers, the over- 
crowding of schools and the omission of such subjects 
as art and music from the primary school curriculum. 
These conditions she listed as evils of the present 
financial crisis. 

“Of course,” she said, “social well being depends 
on economic well being. But such bargains in educa- 
tion are little short of criminal. They place a handt 
cap on children which only the stronger ones can 
overcome. Education needs a larger unit of adminis- 
tration so it can go forward instead of backward. 
It must not be slowed up at this time of unrest. 
We spend a million on highways, one thousand on the 
school it passes and one hundred on the teacher's salary.” 


Harvard Won’t Cut Pay Despite Drop in Revenue 


Despite a decreased income from its investments, 
Harvard university will discharge none of its officers 
of instruction or administration and will not reduce 
salaries. 

The university, however, has made plans for every 
economy that does not seriously affect academic work. 











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DECEMBER, 1932 


Budgets of the various departments have been re- 
viewed in detail and savings are being made in all 
possible non-essential matters. 


Children’s Welfare Placed Above Money 


Working people must not be forced to sacrifice their 
children “in order to save the wealthy a few dollars,” 
declares a ringing statement issued by the Chat- 
tanooga Trade and Labor Council protesting against 
the plan of city officials to ‘economize’ by shortening 
school terms. 

“The education of our youth is one of the very first 
duties of the taxpayers, and any sort of endeavor to 
injure or hamper the process of producing an edu- 
cated future generation has been and always will be 
the target of the most vigorous attack by organized 
labor,” the statement emphasizes. 

Pointing out that organized labor made the first 
efforts to create the public school system, the Council 
declares that it should not be tampered with “no 
matter if the present tax rate is never reduced.” 


Academic Freedom 
John C. Granbery 


Professor John C. Granbery, head of the depart- 
ment of History at Texas Technological College since 
its founding seven years ago and recognized as the 
college’s foremost scholar, was summarily dismissed 
by notice from the board of directors at the close of 
the term last spring, without warning to Professor 
Granbery and without the knowledge of the acting 
president. No charges were brought against Dr. 
Granbery. To Dr. Granbery’s demand for a reason 
for this treatment, the Board refused to make any 
statement except that its action was a non-renewal 
of contract for the sake of economy. 

A petition of protest, signed by a large number of 
students, alleges that the real reason for the dismissal 
was that Dr. Granbery is a religious and economic 
liberal and a pacifist. Dr. Granbery had been active 
in criticism of the Power Trust, but not more so than 
the Democratic candidate for president. 

The American Association of University Professors 
is interesting itself in the case. Dr. Granbery is now 
in Brazil. 

Leo Gallagher 


Under conditions which amounted practically to 
dismissal, Leo Gallagher, well known California law- 
yer, lately resigned from the faculty of Southwestern 
University Law School in Los Angeles, of which he 
had been a member nine years. Dean MecNitt of that 
institution is quoted as saying: “Lawyers who de- 
fend political minorities have no place on the teach- 
ing staff of Southwestern University.” 

Mr. Gallagher has long been an attorney for the 
American Civil Liberties Union, and as such has de- 
fended many free speech cases in the courts. It is 
reliably stated that he was forced out of the law school 
through pressure put upon the university heads by 
the Better America Federation, the Merchants and 
Manufacturers’ Association, the D. A. R., and the Los 
Angeles Chamber of Commerce. 

Academic Freedom, it would appear, is utterly for- 
eign to American education and needs to be fought 
for by every social agency. 

America has too much of everything. No American 
has enough of anything —Dunbar’s Weekly. 





21 





Society Must Not Let the Schools Retreat 
Geo. D. Strayer, Columbia University 


There is need in the United States today for an 
aroused public opinion in support of education. Those 
who believe that the battle for free public schools was 
won by the middle of the last century are living in a 
fool’s paradise. 

Everywhere there is an attack upon public educa- 
tion expressed primarily in terms of retrenchment in 
the support of the schools. It is seriously proposed 
that we cannot afford the program of education al- 
ready established. 

There seems to be little appreciation of the fact 
that the need of the hour is for a richer education 
to be provided for an increasing percentage of the 
total population. 

The better we know the work that is done in our 
schools, the more certainly we are willing to acknowl- 
edge the necessity for the future development of our 
school system. 

It is in this situation that in cities and in rural 
areas schools have been closed, terms have been 
shortened, teachers’ salaries have been reduced, classes 
have been increased in size, some of the more signifi- 
cant offerings have been eliminated from the curricu- 
lum, adequate educational supplies and books have 
been denied, health service and physical education 
have been dropped, the attendance service has been 
crippled, proposals have been made for the lowering 
of the standards for entrance into the profession, 
building programs which were to provide adequate 
housing have been abandoned, night and continuation 
schools have been closed—in short, the whole pro- 
gram of education is being curtailed, if not indeed 
placed in jeopardy. 

We must have schools that do much more than 
provide opportunities for individual initiative and 
achievement. 

We must develop a curriculum which, while it ad- 
justs educational opportunities to the needs and ca- 
pacities of individuals, has for its objective the de- 
velopment of men and women who love liberty, who 
seek justice, who are willing to sacrifice personal ad- 
vantage to the well-being of the whole group. 

We may not think less of the importance of guar- 
anteeing to the individual the right of security of his 
person and property, but we must seek to develop as 
well his devotion to social justice. 

Never before has there been such need as there is 
today for men and women of high intelligence, of 
broad training and of deep social sympathy and un- 
derstanding to staff our schools. The situation de- 
mands teachers who are more than drill masters. 

The work of the teacher in our society must be 
measured by the degree of leadership which he is 
able to offer to young people in their attempt to un- 
derstand our modern complex social life. 

He must be a student of society as well as a student 
of human nature. He must seek to lead boys and girls 
in their attempt to think straight with respect to the 
most difficult problems with which men have ever 
had to struggle. 

He must seek to develop those ideals which will 
make possible the regeneration of our society. 

Our plan is not for the maintenance of salaries but 
rather for the maintenance and development of our 
civilization and for the perpetuity of our institutions. 











THE 


AMERICAN TEACHER 


The Weathervane Points 


More Teachers, Fewer Jobs.—With twice as many 
teachers enrolled, the teachers’ employment bureau 
of the University of Missouri has been able to place 
only about half as many as in normal times, accord- 
ing to a statement by its director. Salary reductions 
of 20 to 30 per cent are not uncommon, and a few 
school boards are not signing contracts for all posi- 
tions which they normally offer because of the un- 
certainty of tax income. 

Fees for Teachers’ Examinations.—Teachers’ Council 
at New York City Board of Education meeting 
adopts report recommending that fee be charged 
to applicants registering for examinations for all 
teaching positions, except those in elementary 
schools. Estimated fee might reduce cost of giving 
examinations by $175,000 annually. 

Modern Trends in Education—In Newark, New 
Jersey, Etiquette Clubs in public schools aid in the 
teaching of good manners. 

New York Relief Association Aids Substitutes.— 
Destitute teachers who have served the New York 
city school system as substitutes and who because 
they lack the regular license are not eligible for 
pensions, will receive assistance from the New York 
Teachers Relief Association. 

Board to Fire Teachers if They Attend Dances.— 
Marianna, Fia., Sept. 24.—(AP)—Any teacher who 
takes part in a dance in this county during the 
school term is out of a job by order of the county 
school board. 

New Ruling for Certification of Teachers in Penn- 
sylvania.—The Pennsylvania State Council of Edu- 
cation adopted a ruling advancing from two to four 
years of post-high school training the minimum re- 
quirement for teachers in elementary grades, the 
rule to become effective September 1, 1936. Dr. 
James N. Rule, superintendent of public instruction, 
said there were two main reasons back of the coun- 
cil’s action, one to bring about a better balance 
between the number of teachers who need to be 
trained each year and the number of positions that 
annually are available, the other to be a step toward 
equalization of teaching ability for elementary 
schools with that in high schools. 

Cause and Effect in Duluth—Last June Duluth 
elected three Labor members of the school board. 
In October Duluth teachers won a signal victory 
in their protests against contracts impairing their 
tenure rights. New contracts which did not waive 
the provisions of the teachers’ tenure act were 
accepted. 

An “Undercover” Movement in Utah to Intimidate 
Teachers into underbidding each other on gratis 
services in districts where the budgets have been 
exhausted is intimated. 

Child Labor Not Declining —The decline in the num- 

ber of children gainfully occupied, reported in pre- 

liminary returns from the 1930 census, is mislead- 
ing, says Courtenay Dinwiddie, secretary of the 

National Child Labor Committee. When jobs are 

extremely scarce for adults, children are less likely 

to find jobs, he points out. 

“The task before us,” Dinwiddie adds, “is to con- 
solidate the situation shown by the census, with 
800,000 children between seven and 14 still gainfully 
occupied, and by legislation to make permanent the 
elimination of young children from industry.” 


Cleveland Teachers Face More Trouble.—According 


to accounts in the last issue of the Cleveland Teach- 
ers’ Bulletin, the president of their board of educa- 
tion has asked the teachers to accept a large cut 
for next year in such a way as to suspend and 
modify their salary schedule. This the Cleveland 
teachers have almost unanimously refused to do. 
They are willing to face part of the sacrifice due 
to the depression, but want to do so in a way fair 
to all. Above all, they want such reductions dis- 
tinctly recognized as temporary. There is a tend- 
ency for boards of education like other employers 
to take advantage of the depression to break salary 
or wage scales which are the result of years of 
faithful service and organized effort. Organized 
labor has this same struggle even more acutely and 
sympathizes with this viewpoint. 


Utah Teachers’ Salaries Lower Than in Neighbor 


States.—According to the tabulation of teachers’ 
salaries in 11 western states prepared by the Utah 
Education Association, the Utah teachers receive 
the lowest pay. Not a teachers union in the state! 


A Professor Resigns.—Professor Sarolea has resigned 


from the Chair of French in the University of Edin- 
burg, and has set forth his reason for doing so in 
a letter which will bring a rueful smile to the face 
of many a teacher. Briefly, Professor Sarolea’s 
complaint is that he has too many pupils. He says 
that he cannot deal adequately with 1,000 students, 
of whom about 80 per cent—mostly women—are 
unfitted to receive the instruction which a Univer- 
sity ought to give. 





Teachers Paid Less Than Average Wage Earners.—A 


majority of teachers in city school systems in the 
United States are paid salaries lower than the aver- 
age annual income of all gainfully employed per- 
sons, according to a survey conducted by the Na- 
tional Education Association before the drastic re- 
ductions of the last year. Out of 301,000 teachers 
more than 164,000 received less than $2,000 annu- 
ally, which is the approximate average income of 
all gainfully occupied persons in the United States. 


More Than Million Teachers.—More than 3.5 per cent 


of those gainfully employed in the United States 
are in the teaching profession, E. M. Foster, chief 
of the Division of Statistics, Federal Office of Edu- 
cation, recently said. From kindergarten to the 
graduate university a total of 1,037,605 persons 
comprise the ranks, he said. In the secondary and 
elementary schools, women teachers dominate by 
a ratio of five to one, he reported. 


Unpaid Teachers in the Argentine Turn Communist. 


—The chronic poverty of school teachers, most of 
whom are creditors of the nation for many months’ 
salary, has made them particularly susceptible to 
communistic preachings, according to press dis- 
patches. 


Low Salaries Received by Women Teachers.—W omen 


entering the profession of college teaching were 
found to receive lower salaries than men, in a sur- 
vey made in 1928 by the Office of Education of the 
Department of the Interior of 50 selected institu- 
tions known as land grant universities and colleges. 
Comparisons were made in five academic ranks: 
dean, professor, associate professor, assistant pro- 
fessor, and instructor; and women were found to 
receive lower median salaries than men in each of 
these. 








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DECEMBER, 193 


Quotation from the Wall Street Journal and the 
Metropolitan Press of date June 28, 1932.—Public 
school teachers of United States should voluntarily 
remit percentage of salaries to public treasury in 
cases where their communities are seriously em- 
barrassed financially, says Miss Florence Hale, 
president of National Education Association. 

Denver Teachers voted a 10% contribution. 


New York City Teachers refused to make the “volun- 
tary” contribution requested by the Board of Edu- 
cation. 

Half of Teachers in Maine Get Salary Reductions.— 
Municipal appropriations of Maine towns and cities, 
made in most cases at annual meetings in March, 
indicate that approximately half of the public school 
teachers in the state will have to submit to reduc- 
tions in salaries, according to Bertram E. Packard, 
commissioner of education. About 7,000 teachers 
are employed, he said, and the average rate of re- 
duction will be 6 or 7 per cent. And they haven't 
a teachers union. 

Safety Education in Schools.—The progress of safety 
education in the schools of the United States was 
traced by William J. Cooper, U. S. Commissioner 
of Education, at the sessions of the Child Education 
Section of the National Safety Council Congress in 
Washington, D. C., October 3-7. The reduction 
of auto accidents to children was shown to be the 
result of teaching habits of play and work to 
children in the school. 

California Printed 550,000 Arithmetics for School.— 
The California State Board of Education authorized 
the State printing office to print 550,000 new arith- 
metic textbooks used in the public schools. 

The publishers rent the plates to the State print- 
ing office for a nominal sum. State Printer Harry 
Hammond said the textbook job will enable him 
to keep from 75 to 100 men at work until the legis- 
lature meets next January. 

The Tennessee State Federation of Labor Protests 
Slashing of Teachers’ Pay.—Arbitrary cut of 7% 
per cent in the wages of school teachers, after 
contracts for the year had already been made, is 
the subject of a resolution, and demand is made 
for increases rather than cuts in the pay of these 
sorely-tried public servants. Suggestion is also 
made that the teachers take steps to help them- 
selves, and every assistance is offered in such a 
commendable effort if and when made. 

Economic Cost to Cincinnati of Salary Cuts.—Some 
business men of Cincinnati right now are waking up 
to the bad effect on their sales of the 14 per cent 
lowering of income the last five months for over 
2,000 school workers. It will mean a decrease of 
over $250,000 at best in money expended in that 
city which wili react as such slashes always do. 
Labor leaders have been stressing this point for 
many months. 

Injunction Against Introduction of a New Grade 
School Course of Study in South Dakota.—The 
school book trust is blamed by E. C. Griffin, state 
superintendent of public instruction of South Da- 
kota, for the temporary injunction recently granted 
against the introduction of a new grade school 
course of study throughout the state. The new 
course would require fewer textbooks, includes 
study of the co-operative movement, and encourages 
individual initiative on the part of the student. It 

is backed by the Farmers’ Union. 





23 





Children Work While Men Are Unemployed.—Ap- 


proximately 700,000 children from 10 to 15 years of 
age, inclusive, were at work in the United States in 
1930. About 230,000 of these, or more than one- 
third, were 13 years of age or under. The number 
of children out of school is even more staggering. 
More than 1,330,000 children 7 to 15 years of age, 
inclusive, were not attending any school in 1930, ac- 
cording to census figures, in spite of the wide ex- 
tension of compulsory school attendance. 


A Teaching Record.—For 104 years, from 1821 to 


1925, a teaching position at Souhesmes (Meuse), 
France, was held successively by Nicholas Grand 
jean (1821 to 1867), his son, Prosper (1867 to 1899), 
and his grandson, Charles (1899 to 1925) according 
to L’Ecole et la Vie, a weekly review of education 
published in Paris. LE’cole et la Vie asks, “Est-ce 
un record?” As far as we know, it is. 


For Unemployed Teachers.—The Western Australia 


Teachers Union has established a fund for the relief 
of unemployed teachers. The Union has thus been 
enabled to assist certain teachers who have been 
disadvantageously placed. Every penny received 
into the fund is earmarked for the purposes of the 
fund and any costs concerned with the working of 
it are defrayed by the Union. 


Equal Salaries for Same Work.—Equal salaries for 


men and women doing the same work were advo- 
cated by Dr. A. A. Heist, social service secretary 
of the Columbia Conserve Company, Indianapolis, 
Ind., in a talk before a business girls’ meeting at 
Evansville, Ind. “You girls ought never to work 
for one cent less than a man at the same job because 
it is your right,” he said. He urged the girls to 
fight for themselves and not expect anyone else to 
do it for them. 


Militarism in Schools Scored.—The Kern County Cal 


fornia Labor Council called on the trustees of the 
Kern county high school not to put military train- 
ing in the schools either on a voluntary or a com- 
pulsory basis. The resolution specifically con- 
demned a proposed voluntary cadet corps as es- 
sentially militaristic. 


How Employers Fight Depression.—The husband was 


laid off. His wife, forced to look for a job, heard 
women were being hired at the factory where he 
had worked. She applied and was given a job- 
the same one her husband had been holding—but 
at 50 per cent less an hour than he had been get- 
ting. That was one of the conditions discovered 
in South Bend, Ind., industries by investigators 
for the Women’s Bureau of the United States De- 
partment of Labor during a survey they made there 


in 1930. 


The Newly-Elected President of Amherst College a 


Business Man.—Mr. Stanley King, formerly a busi- 
ness leader of Boston and for many years a promi- 
nent figure in state and national public affairs, has 
been elected president of Amherst College. Mr. 
King, who becomes, at forty-nine years of age, the 
eleventh head of the college, succeeds Dr. Arthur 
Stanley Pease, who resigned recently to accept a 
professorship at Harvard University. 

Mr. King has never been a teacher. He was 
for fifteen years an attorney in Boston and for 
several years eastern manager of the International 
Shoe Company. 


What shall it profit a nation to balance its budget and let its 





children go hungry? 











24 








BOOKS 


“There is no frigate like a book 
To bear us lands away.” 
—Emily Dickinson. 














THE MANAGEMENT OF THE SCHOOL 
Money 
By Professor Henry C. Morrison 
University of Chicago Press 

If schools are to be kept out of 
bankruptcy, non-essential and access- 
ory enterprises such as public enter- 
tainment, poor relief, preschool ex- 
perimentations, professional and trade 
training, police functions, and cur- 
riculum overexpansion must be kept 
out of the school budget, according 
to Professor Henry C. Morrison of 
the University of Chicago in his new 
book, “The Management of _ the 
School Money,’ published by the 
University of Chicago Press, 

Professor Morrison is one of the 
seventeen finance specialists, ap- 
pointed by the Secretary of the In- 
terior, to conduct a four-year National 
Survey of School Finance. 

Professor Morrison makes it clear 
that while all activities to promote 
public welfare are eminently desir- 
able they are not a proper charge 
upon the school budget, and such 
overexpansion of the school program 
is responsible for the widespread 
financial difficulties of public schools 
at this time. While the general busi- 
ness depression added a strain to 
school finances, most of them would 
have failed sooner or later, according 
to Professor Morrison, since their 
financial structures are essentially un- 
sound. “The causes,” he says, “are 
to be found, in part, in a revenue 
system which is incapable of utilizing 
the fiscal capacity of the community ; 
in larger part, in overexpansion—in 
spending money on expansion which 
in effect had already been obligated 
to operating and capital commitments 
—and in the schoolman’s ignorance of 
finance and economics. 

“A school system is overexpanded 
not only when its enterprises or pro- 
gram of study, or both, have become 
broader in scope than the tax base 
will warrant, but also when under- 
takings are present which are not re- 
quired by the purpose of the school 
as a civil and social institution,” says 
Professor Morrison. 

Citing the playground as an in- 
stance of an instructional feature cor- 
rupted into public entertainment, Pro- 
fessor Morrison says, “With elaborate 
playing fields and costly stadiums, the 
playground is no longer a laboratory 
of physical education, but it becomes 


essentially a park for public enter- 
tainment. Public entertainment is no 
part of the business of the school sys- 
tem. It is the business of the depart- 
ment of public parks. If there is no 
park, and the community insists on 
being entertained in that way, it 
should provide a park.” 

Regular medical inspection of 
school children is a public health 
measure, and its costs belongs to the 
public health budget, and not the 
school budget, Professor Morrison 
believes. 

“Penny lunches and other nutri- 
tional undertakings, dental clinics, and 
free dispensary service are humani- 
tarian and eminently desirable under- 
takings—but not out of the school 
budget,” says Professor Morrison. 

When the school establishes day 
nurseries it is assuming the burdens 
of parenthood, in the opinion of Pro- 
fessor Morrison, and the cost of pre 
schooling is a family burden and in no 
sense a legitimate item in the school 
budget. 

On the other hand, Professor Mor 
rison believes that the care of juven- 
ile delinquents is an instructional and 
not a penal undertaking. “Juvenile 
delinquency,” he says, “must be 
looked upon as a failure in the proc- 
ess of education, no different in prin 
ciple from failure to learn to read. 
The financing of parental schools is 
therefore in principle a school respon- 
sibility, but the detention home be- 
longs on the budget of the department 
of charities and corrections.” 

It is because of this confusion as 
to the purposes of the school, and be- 
cause the average schoolman knows 
less about cost accounting than the 
average business man—whether “big 
business” man or proprietor of the 
village garage—that overexpansion in 
curricula, entailing overexpansion in 
buildings and personnel, results, ac 
cording to Professor Morrison. 


“American schools, as compared 
with other American enterprises, are 
ridiculously understaffed in compe 
tent managerial and administrative 
service,” Professor Morrison says. 
“While there has been a great deal 
of improvement in this respect in the 
modern period, it is still true that 
perhaps the most important officer in 
our whole public service, excepting 
only the great officers of State, name- 
ly, the superintendent of schools, is 
in most cases utterly without adequate 
training, even when he is something 
more than a mere political hanger-on. 
The function for which he is respons- 
ible requires a training equal to that 
given in our best law, medical, and 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


engineering schools. In addition, the 
schools require executive capacity at 
least equal to that of the best business 
executives in the community in which 
the superintendent serves.” We do not 
often get such men, primarily because 
we cannot afford to pay for them, 
We cannot afford to pay for them be. 
cause of the fact that we do not man- 
age our school money well, either on 
the revenue side or on the expendi- 
tures side.” 

Professor Morrison’s earlier book. 
“School Revenue,’ discussed _ the 
sources of school money. His new 
book, “The Management of the 
School Money,” tells where the school 
money goes, and where it should go, 
in order to make the school econom- 
ically sound. He is also the author 
of “The Practice of Teaching in the 
Secondary School,” which introduced 
striking innovations in instructional 
technique, and marked its author as 
one of the outstanding progressive 
thinkers in the educational world. 


TEACHING MODERN PROBLEMS 


A new method of teaching modem 
problems has just been made avail 
able to the high schools of this coun 
try. The American Education Press 
Inc., of Columbus, Ohio, is issuing a 
series Of Modern Problem Booklets 
The titles of the first six booklets are: 
No. 1—The Depression, What Caused 
It?, No. 2—The Depression, What 
Can We Do About It?, No. 3—Eco 
nomic Planning, No. 4—Unemploy 
ment Insurance, No. 5—Crime, No 
6—The Services and Costs of Gov 
ernment. Fourteen other titles are in 
preparation. 

The editorial board includes among 
others: Dr. W. C. Bagley and Dr 
H. F. Clark of Columbia University; 
President George B. Cutten of Cob 
gate University ; Professor H. Gordos 
Hayes, of Ohio State University; Dr 
FE, D. Lewis, of Evander Childs High 
School, New York; and Raymond L 
Buell and Maxwell S. Stewart of th 
Research Department, Foreign Poli¢ 
Association. 

Each booklet deals with one majo 
problem. Outlines, questions, stuf 
suggestions, reading references af 
provided. Through the use of thes 
booklets the busy teacher, with a minh 
mum of time and effort, can bring 
to his students some measure of uh 
derstanding of the great and impor 
tant problems facing the nation 
the world today. 

The booklets are punched for filing 
in notebooks and are sold at a lo 
price, 





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n 














DECEMBER, 1932 


EconoMic GEOGRAPHY FOR 
SECONDARY SCHOOLS 


Charles C. Colby and Alice Foster 
Ginn & Co., Boston, $1.92 

The fact that this book, although 
recently issued, has already attained 
wide use is encouraging. Its scheme 
of contrasting pictures presents the 
background in a vivid fashion and il- 
luminates the sources from which 
come bananas, coffee and the other 
varied products and foodstuffs which 
figure in even the modest menu of 
teachers and their pupils. The authors 
should, however, beware of accepting 
such pictures as “‘a well planned mod- 
ern town” from the Consolidation 
Coal Company (p. 308). Coal may 
be “present in such abundance” in 
eastern Kentucky but a picture of 
the hovels and shacks of the usual 
company mining town would be more 
representative of the workers’ con- 
ditions. Even so, the book is gen- 
erally free from employers’ propa- 
ganda. There is also much _ vivid 
description which helps to make the 
world alive. 

No conclusions are drawn but they 
are implicit and can easily be de- 
veloped by the intelligent student. 
The inescapable fact, of course, is 
that the world is interdependent and 
that the economic geographer, like 
other scientists, can only deplore the 
current folly of building up exclusive 
tariff walls around certain areas of 
the earth and trying to shut out cer- 
tain sections of the world’s popula- 
tion from beneficial reciprocal inter- 
course with their fellow human beings 
throughout the world. Truly, we live 
ina Mad Hatter’s world where every 
nation is determined to be a seller and 
not a buyer when a full page of the 
rotogravure section of the New York 
Times is devoted to pictures of ship- 
loads of coffee being dumped into the 
sea. (This textbook in treating of 
coffee does not suggest madness of 
this sort.) 

But men are not yet grown up to 
their opportunities. Ideas lag behind 
technical development. If the facts 
of economic geography so clearly 
outlined in this textbook are fully 
digested, they will hasten the end of 
our economic adolescence. 

Mark STARR. 
THE FiGure 
By Helen F. Morton 
White Eagle Studio, 13 Merlin St., 
Dorchester, Mass. 
Price $2.50 per folio 

The most difficult subject in the 
co-ed classroom of art has been made 
a simple and interesting problem. 





Without a model, the general propor- 
tions of the human body are fully 
conquered, and an artistic point of 
view established. 

The art teacher or the grade teacher 
will find the First Lessons Charts of 
great assistance. Those who are not 
in school should welcome the lesson 
charts as valuable opportunity in 
which to learn to record truthfully 
the human figure in repose and in 
action, 

In the hands of teachers of art, 
the charts may be used as early as 
the sixth grade. 

From these lessons children will 
be inspired to develop sculpture and 
to compose illustrative sketches. The 
practical art of dressmaking and 
clothing the figure are given special 
consideration. 

When these fifteen lessons have 
been performed, the student is then 
ready to observe intelligently the liv- 
ing model, and to draw the more 
subtle muscular contours of the hu- 
man form and express himself with 
greater freedom. 

Miss Helen F. Morton, the author 
of this folio, is an art teacher of 
twenty-one years of experience. She 
places these lessons and charts be- 
fore you as a result of an intensive, 
professional study of art teaching. 
She has taught costume design in a 
Trade School for girls, she has super- 
vised the drawing of all the grades 
in a large city, and is now teaching 
art in one of the largest high schools 
in Massachusetts. 

First Lessons Charts are the 
product of an experienced mind and 
meet a direct need of the teacher of 
art or the student who wishes to help 
himself. 

LEADERS IN EDUCATION 
A Biographical Directory Edited by 
J. McKeen Cattell 
The Science Press, Grand Central 

Terminal, New York, N. Y., 
and Lancaster, Pa. 
3IOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY OF 
LEADERS IN EpucaTIon will take a 
place among the most important 
works of reference. Material for the 
book has been in course of collection 
for a number of years along the lines 
of the Biographical Directory of 
American Men of Science, which in 
successive editions has been a stand- 
ard work for twenty-five years. The 
two directories are under the same 
editorship, as are also Science and 
School and Society, weekly journals, 
the former of which since 1895, the 
latter since 1915, have maintained the 
highest position in the fields of sci- 
ence and of education. 


The 


2 


uw 


The BroGRaPHICAL DIRECTORY OF 
LEADERS IN EDUCATION contains 
biographies of about 11,000 of those 
in America who have done the most 
to advance education, whether by 
teaching, writing, research or admin- 
istration; a.careful selection from 
the million educational workers of 
the United States and Canada. They 
are those to whom daily reference is 
made in the press, from whom all 
positions of importance are filled. It 
will be a work essential to all who 
have relations with those engaged in 
educational work, necessary to every 
reference library. 

LEADERS IN EpucaTion, like School 
and Society, aims to bring unity and 
common interest into educational 
work, covering the field from the 
nursery school and before to the uni- 
versity and after, including libraries, 
museums and social agencies as im- 
portant factors in education. Like 
American Men of Science it is more 
than a compilation; it is a contribu- 
tion to the advancement of education, 

Not only on the editorial side but 
also in mechanical production, the 
book maintains the standards of 
American Men of Science, being well 
printed and well bound, a_ book 
satisfactory for any student or any 
library to own, to show and to use. 


There are 1,037 pages and over 
11,000 biographies. 
A New MaGazINE ON SCHOOL 


MANAGEMENT 

A new magazine, School Manage- 
ment, has just begun publication. 
The magazine deals with the admin- 
istration, equipment and construction 
of schools. It is edited by Clyde R. 
Miller, Director of the Bureau of 
Educational Service, Teachers Col- 
lege, Columbia University. George 
J. Hecht is the President and Pub- 
lisher. The offices of the magazine 
are at 114 East 32nd Street, New 
York. 

In the first issue there is an article 
by John Dewey, “America Needs an 
Entirely New Educational System.” 
The editor writes on, “What Is to Be 
Done About School Budget Cuts.” 
Dr. Grant Rowell contributed an 
article on “Equipping School Health 
Rooms.” Mrs, Clara Savage Little- 
dale, Editor of The Parents’ Maga- 
zine, conducts a regular department, 
“Projects and Programs for Parent- 
Teacher Associations.” “How Other 
Schools Do It,” “The School Lunch 
Room” and “A Check List of New 
Text Books” are other regular fea- 
tures of the publication. 

On the Advisory Board of the 
magazine are Florence E, Bamberger, 


26 


Ph. D., Director, Dept. of Education, 
Johns Hopkins University ; Edwin C. 
Broome, Ph. D., Pres., Dept. of 
Superintendence, National Education 
Association and Supt. of Philadelphia 
Public Schools; Walter Cocking, 
Ph, D., Prof. of School Administra- 
tion, George Peabody College for 
Teachers; Ellwood P. Cubberley, 
Ph. D., Dean, School of Education, 
Stanford University, California; W. 
J. Donald, Ph. D., Managing Di- 
rector, American Management Asso- 
ciation; Burton P. Fowler, Pres., 
Progressive Education Association 
and Headmaster, Tower Hill School, 
Wilmington, Delaware; George W. 
Frasier, Ph. D., Pres., Colorado State 
Teachers College; Lillian M. Gil- 
breth, Ph. D., Management Engineer, 
Author of “Living with Your Chil- 
dren”; Sally Lucas Jean, Consultant 
in School Health Education; Edgar 
W. Knight, Ph. D., School of Edu- 
cation, University of North Caro- 
lina; Harlow S. Person, Ph. D., Man- 
aging Director, Taylor Society; 
Frank G. Pickell, Supt. of Schools, 
Montclair, N. J.; W. Carson Ryan, 
Jr., Ph. D., Director of Education, 
U. S. Bureau of Indian Affairs; and 
Zenos Scott, Supt. of Schools, Spring- 
field, Mass. 








Oe ettin Let Us ieee. 


Do You Receive 


“WORD STUDY”? 


Throughout the school year we issue 
periodically, for the benefit of English 
teachers, a publication entitled WORD 
STUDY in which are presented many 
interesting and helpful ideas relating to 
the teaching of the subject. It will “+ 
us to know whetheryou receive WOR 

STUDY; if you do, what your opinion 
of it is; and if you do not, whether you 
would like to receive it free of expense. 


We will appreciate a word from you. In writing 
please mention 















The Merriam- 
Webster is the 
“Supreme 
Authority” 


One hundred years of 
experience insure its 
accuracy and scholar- 
ship and have estab- 
lished it as the authori- 
tyin American schools. 












INTERNATIONAL 
DICTIONARY 


The Presidents and Department Heads of lead- 
ing Universities and Coll give their in- 
dorsement. Write for Free illustrated pamphlet 
with sample pages. 


G. & C. MERRIAM CO. 
Springfield, Mass. 4 




















A Timely Publication 


Two hundred and fifty years ago 
on November 6, 1682, William Penn 
landed at New Castle, Delaware. 
Many schools and_ organizations 
throughout the country will hold cele- 
brations during the school year 1932- 
33 in honor of this great founder and 
pioneer who gave to all Americans 
the heritage of a peaceful settlement 
in the New World. The courageous 
experiment in establishing friendli- 
ness and goodwill between Indians 
and white men, people of different 
races and different stages of civiliza- 
tion, is a particularly appropriate 
study for children today. when cur- 
rent journals are constantly present- 
ing peace news. The Great Treaty of 
Peace established by William Penn is 
known as “the only treaty never 
sworn to and never broken.” 

The story of the beginning of Wil- 
liam Penn’s settlement has been writ- 
ten in vivid style for children of 8 
to 12, by S. Lucia Keim, M.A., who 
is herself a teacher and has collected 
and tried out this material for the past 
three years in her own school room. 
She has used it very successfully both 
in story form for children’s reading, 
and for dramatization as a pageant. 
It is adaptable also as the basis for 
a project in history or social science. 
It has now been printed for the use 
of teachers everywhere for the 250th 
Anniversary year. Marjorie Hardy, 
national authority on Primary Read- 
ing, says, “It meets the needs of the 
curriculum in a literary and historical 
way and because of its style, full of 
action, makes the dramatization of it 
simple and meaningful.” The title 
of the booklet is /ndians and Quakers, 
a Story of William Penn, for Boys 
and Girls to Read and Play. It con- 
tains fifteen illustrations, a _bibliog- 
raphy, and an appendix of pantomime 
pageant directions together with dia- 
grams of authentic costumes and the 
setting, It will be distributed at cost 
by The Women’s International Lea- 
gue for Peace and Freedom, 1924 
Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, at 35 
cents a copy (30 cents in lots of ten), 
postage prepaid. 


“Perhaps the best way we can help 
the world today is simply by think- 
ing. It is vastly easier to fight than 
to think, yet all fighting without 
thinking is sure to end in defeat. It 
is much easier to work than to think, 
but the harder a man works without 
thought the more damage he does.” 

—W. H. P. Faunce. 





THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


A Dozen New Words and 
Phrases* 

acid test. A severe or final test, as 
of value, authenticity, genuineness, or 
the like;—perhaps referring to the 
testing of gold by means of acid. 

acrobatics. The art, profession, or 
performances of an acrobat; acrobat- 
ism; as aérial acrobatics, the “stunt- 
ing” of aviators, looping, spinning, 
rolling, etc. 

addict. One who is addicted to a 
habit, especially the habit of taking 
some drug, as opium, cocaine, etc. 

air base. A base of operations for 
aircraft and for the housing, repair- 
ing, etc., of the craft. 

aircraft. Any form of craft de 
signed for the navigation of the air, 
as an airplane, balloon, helicopter, 
kite, kite balloon, orthopter, glider, 
or the like. 

air mail, The system of transport- 
ing mail by aircraft; also, the equip- 
ment so used; also, the mail so trans- 
ported. 

air-minded. Interested in or favor- 
ably disposed toward aérial activities. 

alpha test. A psychological test 
originally given in the U. S. Army 
during the World War to determine 
roughly the mental capacities of of- 
ficers and soldiers able to speak and 
read English. 

Americanese. English containing 
words, locutions, and usages, es- 
pecially slangy and colloquial, which 
are peculiar to the United States; 
also, all the terms and usages, col- 


lectively, peculiar to the United 
States. 
ampoule. A small glass capsule for 


holding a hypodermic solution, usu- 
ally one dose. 

animal husbandry. The branch of 
agriculture which is concerned with 
farm animals. 





autobus. An automobile omnibus. 
*Taken from the addendum of “New 


Words” in recent editions of Wenster’s 
New INTERNATIONAL DICTIONARY 


We are sorry that Sir Michael 
should be advising the use of mech 
anism plus unskilled juvenile labor 
as a substitute for the teacher. Edw 
cation is not a mechanical process, 
nor is a school a factory; and the 
principles animating the two spheres 
of culture and industry are not 
identical. Industry aims at elimr 
nating the human factor—education 
at intensifying and strengthening 
it. Every school could make real 
use of mechanical aids but no school 
can dispense with the influence of 
the teacher.—The Schoolmaster and 
Woman Teacher's Chronicle. 





Cy 


~—+f 

















ing 


vith 
bus. 


New 
TER’S 


hael 
ech- 
abor 
‘du- 
€SS, 
the 
eres 
not 
|imi- 
tion 
ning 
real 
hool 
e of 


and 





DECEMBER, 1932 


An Adventure in Adult 
Education 


A new plan for bringing the bene- 
fits of a liberal education to business 
and professional men and women who 
have not had time for such study or 
who wish to review has been in- 
augurated in the establishment of The 
Institute for Liberal Education. 

The founders believe there are 
many thousands of men and women 
who will welcome an opportunity to 
study the basic subjects of cultural 
life under competent leadership and 
untrammeled by rigid courses of 
study. Acting on that belief, they 
have drawn upon some of the best 
talent in the country to plan a course 
of study for adults in liberal culture 
and to prepare suitable introductory 
texts. This work has been completed 
for forty subjects in twelve fields of 
learning and the work will be pub- 
lished in 40 assignments of approxi- 
mately 25,000 words each. The 
method to be followed by The Insti- 
tute for Liberal Education will be 
primarily the organization of classes 
to be conducted for two academic 
years with resident leaders. Wherever 
the community ts not of sufficient size 
to warrant such procedure, the course 
and service will be offered by the cor- 
respondence method. 

The new course and service is 
launched in full confidence that it will 
receive the cordial support of believ- 
ers in adult education and that it will 
make for a fuller cultural life for 
those who pursue it. The Institute 
for Liberal Education cordially in- 
vites interest and correspondence. 

Dr. John A. Lapp is Educational 
Counsel. The address is 1221 Balti- 
more Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri. 

















LEADERS IN EDUCATION 
A BIOGRAPHICAL DIRECTORY 


Edited by J. McKEEN CATTELL 
Editor of School and Society 


Contains biographies of those in America 
who have done the most to advance educa- 
tion, whether by teaching, writing, research, 
or administration. They are those to whom 
daily reference is made in the press, from 
whom all positions of importance are filled. 
It is a work essential to all who have rela- 
tions with those engaged in educational 
Work, necessary to every reference library. 


Over 1,000 pages — Over 11,000 biographies 
Price $10 


THE SCIENCE PRESS 


GRAND CENTRAL TERMINAL, 
NEW YORK, N. Y. 



































News of Our 
Members 




















Lillian Herstein, Chicago Wom- 
en Local 3, made a splendid cam- 
paign for Congress in the 2nd Illinois 
District on the Farmer - Labor 
ticket. She ran up a large number 
of votes, more than ever before in 
that district by a Labor candidate. 

The great battle of Labor is to 
elect members of Congress who will 
protect the people from objection- 
able legislation and who will vote 
for remedial legislation. 


Florence Hall Kirkpatrick, char- 
ter member and first secretary of 


Chicago Women Local 3, has re- 
signed from the Medill High 
School, Chicago, where she had 


taught art for twenty-five years. 
Mrs. Kirkpatrick has opened a 

studio at San Gabriel, California, 

and will devote her time to painting. 


Maynard C. Krueger, Philadel- 
phia Local 192, has joined the fac- 
ulty of the University of Chicago 
as professor of economics. Dr. 
Krueger was formerly a member of 
the economics department of the 
University of Pennsylvania. 

Lillian Herstein, Chicago Women 
Local 3, addressed the Conference 
for Progressive Political Action at 
its annual meeting in Cleveland in 
July on the Chicago situation. 


E. E. Schwarztrauber, University 
of Wisconsin Local 223, represented 
the American Federation of Teachers 
at the annual convention of the 
Wisconsin State Federation of La- 
bor. He spoke at the banquet meet- 
ing on the need of teachers unions. 


Mary C. Barker, Atlanta Local 89, 
spent a few days in North Carolina 
aut the Southern Summer School for 
Women Workers. Miss Barker is 
chairman of the Board of Directors 
cf this institution. 


Barbara C. McGlynn, Wilkes- 
Barre Local 211, explained by in- 
vitation the program and policy of 
the American Federation of Teach- 
ers to a Penn State College class in 
Political Science. 


Professor Paul Douglass, Univer- 
sity of Chicago, has published a 
best seller, “The Making of a New 
Party.” 

Helen F. Morton, Cambridge Local 
195, has recently published a series 
of First Lessons Charts on The Fg- 
ure, reviewed elsewhere in this issue. 


27 


Dr. William E. Zeuch, formerly 
director of Commonwealth College, 
has returned from Europe where he 
spent a year as Guggenheim travel- 
ling research fellow in the study of 
workers’ education, and with some 
of his early associates at Common- 
wealth has established Skyline, a 
Camp School for Adults, at Rich 
Mountain, Arkansas. The new 
school aims to prepare adults for 
realistic, intelligent citizenship. 


George A. Coe, professor emeri- 
tus Columbia University, New York 
Local 5, has a new book out entitle 
“Educating for Citizenship.” 


Dr. John A. Lapp, Milwaukee 
Local 79, is Educational Counsel of 
the recently established Institute 
for Liberal Education in Kansas 
City, Missouri. 


President Linville participated by 
invitation in the annual conference 
of the New York Library Associa- 
tion at Lake Placid, New York, 
September 21. The topic of the 
meeting was “Common Objectives 
and Effective Cooperation in Edu- 
cational Work.” 

By request Dr. Linville presented 
the policies of the American Fed- 
eration of Teachers. 


‘In September, Secretary Hanson 
gave the Labor Day address at Elk- 
hart, Indiana, attended the Indiana 
State Federation of Labor Conven- 
tion at Fort Wayne, and visited 
Granite City, Local 38. 

In October, she was the guest of 
Grand Forks Local 205, St. Paul 
Locals 28 and 43, and Minneapolis 
Locals 59 and 238. 

On November 4, the Wisconsin 
Locals held a breakfast meeting in 
Milwaukee at which the speakers 
were Henry Ohl, Jr., president of 
the Wisconsin State Federation of 
Labor, and Secretary Hanson. 








Who's Who in this Issue 














James E. McDade, assistant superin- 
tendent of schools, Chicago; pro- 
gressive educator and author. 

Eleanor G, Coit, educational secretary, 
Affiliated Schools for Workers. 

Harry L. Tate, Chicago Men Local 2, 
principal Whitney School, Chicago. 

Herman Partnow, New York Local 5, 
instructor in biology. 

George D. Strayer, director division 
of field studies, Institute of Educa- 
tional Research, Teachers College, 
Columbia University; lecturer and 
author. 





Pe. Foe 


—— 











ews from the 


28 
Field 


Chicago Men Local 2 


The Prospect Before Us 


Inaugural Address of the President 
June 10, 1932 


A few months ago this Union celebrated 
its twentieth birthday. We had reason to 
rejoice because of the great difference be- 
tween the standing of the Union in its 
early days and its standing now. Then 
it was treated with something resembling 
contempt. Now it has only to ask it to 
be granted a hearing before almost any 
influential body in the city. The Chicago 
Board of Education would not now think 
of initiating a major policy affecting the 
schools without inviting the teacher unions 
to a hearing upon it. That state of affairs 
was largely brought about by the pioncer- 
ing efforts of this Union—and that not by 
good fortune, but by the constructive and 
determined leadership which we have al- 
ways had. 

So much for the past. What is before 
us? Educational problems in plenty, prob- 
lems which we would like to help to solve 
—and will do so as far as circumstances 
will permit. We should like to give our 
working energies entirely to the practice 
and improvement of our craft, education. 
We know that the field of real education 
has been barely scratched, that great prob- 
lems await in that field, problems in whose 
solution we should cooperate. We know 
that the adjustments of our curricula and 
of our methods to social needs is still only 
rudimentary. We know that the technique 
of teaching is still far from perfect, that 
we are yet discouragingly traditional. Most 
of all do we know that our really gigantic 
task is to sell real education to the public. 

Why, then, do we not devote our organ- 
izational strength, supplemented by the ex- 
ceedingly valuable aid of organized labor, 
to these important educational questions? 
For the simple reason that the pig-pen eco- 
nomic system under which we live will not 
allow us to do so. Bitter experience has 
taught us that only those who have the 
power to take and hold it get their share 
of the values which they help to produce. 
That knowledge is biting deep and its an- 
swer is being sought in protective organ- 
ization allied with labor. 

Of course there are those who tell us 
that such organization is unprofessional— 
by which they mean, of course, that it is 
against the pedagogic tradition of mission- 
ary meekness. They say that we should 
devote ourselves wholly to education. 
Fine! But we don’t dare to neglect our 
economic protection. Teachers, no _ less 
than others, have to live in the world as 
it is—and it is not fairyland. We do not 
find ourselves fed with manna from Heaven 
just because we are teachers. If we our- 
selves do not take thought for our tomor- 
rows, who will? Brothers, I lay this down 
as a fundamental tenet of teacher union- 
ism: our economic security and our stand- 
ards of living are the foundations of our 
service. we are to advance the cause 
of education we must have these to stand 
on. That is what we mean by saying that 
our primary organizational purpose is pro- 
tection. Like the foundation of a house, 
it is not the most beautiful part, or the 

















most enjoyable, but it is indispensable, and 
must come before the rest of the structure. 
If and when society so organizes itself as 
automatically to assure us of just salaries 
and working conditions, we shall cease to 
make these things prifmary, but until that 
millenium arrives, we can do no other than 
be prepared at all times to defend what we 
have so hardly won. 

There are indications that that defense 
will soon be sorely needed. A new form 
of revolution is abroad in the land. To 
cover their own glaring failure in causing 
or permitting a virtual breakdown of the 
nation’s economic machine and their lack 
of any apparent will to repair it soundly, 
the great financial interests have mustered 
their cohorts for an attack on government 
in general and on the public schools in 
particular. Incidentally, their cry against 
government looks like a case of the dog 
biting the hand that fed him, because these 
interests owe much of their present power 
to government-granted and government- 
operated privileges. Because of their 
power the efforts of these interests are 
highly dangerous, especially to education. 
They are spreading abroad the theory that 
public employes are parasites, “tax eaters,” 
and they are teaching the public that fail- 
ure to pay taxes is a trivial matter. This 
attack upon publicly supported institutions 
is not only destructively revolutionary in a 
social sense, but is an attack upon us, be- 
cause we and the schools are at all times 
in the same boat. 

Let us be more specific. The Chicago 
contingent of these forces attacking gov- 
ernment has maintained a constant pres- 
sure on the Chicago Board of Education 
to force it to reduce school expenditures 
so drastically as to mutilate the services 
of the schools to the public. It has re- 
peatedly made efforts to force a cut in 
our salary schedule, notwithstanding the 
fact that our salaries have already been 
cut approximately ten per cent. So in- 
sistent has been this latter effort as to 
give the impression that a salary cut has 
become to our enemies a symbol of victory. 
The defeat of the teachers is evidently a 
part of the supergovernment plan. There 
is evidence that the Citizens’ Committee on 
Public Expenditures intends to continue 
this crippling policy more determinedly 
than ever. 

3rothers, I submit that in the face of 
these threats unswerving loyalty to the 
Union becomes of paramount importance. 
This is no time to quibble over our rights 
as individuals to belong to any other or- 
ganization which we choose. The plain 
fact of the matter is that any union mem- 
ber who belongs to a non-union organiza- 
tion which is a rival of his union in the field 
peculiarly the union’s owu, that of protec- 
tion, is disloyal to his union, no matter 
how innocent, or even positively good, his 
intentions may be, because he is thereby 
helping to obstruct its growth and prosper- 
ity. There cannot be such a thing as a 
truly non-union organization in the union 
field. If its members belong to it because 
they do not believe in teacher unionism, 
they are by that fact anti-union, and no 
amount of sophistry and friendly declara- 
tion can alter it. If they believe in pro- 
tective organization and are not anti-union 
they will belong to the Union alone. So 
let us not be led away from the main trail 
by the red herring of individual rights. 
It is each man’s right to belong to the 
Union or not as he chooses, but it is not 
his right to belong to the Union and at 
the same time give aid and comfort to a 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


non-union rival organization. Brothers, be 
not led astray. In the twenty years of its 
history our Union has seen several meteoric 
organizations cross the economico-educa- 
tional sky and fade out, but that Union 
is still here stronger than ever before. If 
you stand by it, it will stand by you, 
Standing together we shall not fall. 
C. L. VEsTAL. 


San Francisco Locals 61, 215 
and 241 


August 30, 1932. 
To the Teachers of the San Francisco 
Public Schools: 
Ladies and Gentlemen: 

At the meeting of the Board of Edu- 
cation, July 20, 1932, the following reso- 
lution was unanimously adopted, which ex- 
plains this inquiry. The resolution is as 
follows: 

RESOLVED: That at the opening 
of the Fall Term 1932 a census be 
made by the Secretary of all the mem- 
bers of the School Department, with 
the instructions that they report, with- 
in one week after school opens, in 
writing, over their signatures, attested 
to by them, their actual place of resi- 
dence; and if they habitually spend 
a considerable time elsewhere than the 
actual place of residence, that they 
state where, the reasons therefor, and 
how much time they spend outside of 
San Francisco; and that the Secre- 
tary report to this Board any cases 
where there is doubt or any residence 
outside the City. 

You are, therefore, requested to reply 
to the questions herein below listed, and 
return to your principal or supervising 
officer, by whom they will be forwarded 
to the writer. Your cooperation and im- 
mediate reply will be most appreciated. 

H. M. MoNROE, 
Secretary Board of Education. 
FORM OF RESIDENCE INQUIRY 
FOR TEACHERS 

re oki a wa sie dk age elaine 
School 
Residence 
Are you a registered voter of S. 
If so, from what address are you regis 
tered ? 
Date of entering school department....... 
Do you leave the city over the week 
ends? Habitually?.......sa 
PE © nn ach vincecvnsones ose tieee 
Do you habitually spend the nights out 


If so, why?.... 


I hereby attach my signature that the fore 
going answers are in my own handwrit- 
ing and that they are true statements 
i ae. eee 
A letter from San Francisco says: “The 

teachers are not particularly worried over 

the resolution. They treated the whole 
situation as a joke.” 


Voorhis Local 210 


Our Local still goes forward. We have 
met opposition to any organizing efforts 
among teachers in our immediate vicinity. 
They are afraid of their jobs. But we still 
have all the teachers in our own sch 
in the local and are spreading the “gospel” 
and point of view to faculties of near 
schools. We invite them here for a sup 
per meeting and then discuss various 
teaching problems, always including the 
American Federation of Teachers. 

H. J. Vooruis. 








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1932 


DECEMBER, 


Chicago Women Local 3 


The Chicago Federation of Women 
High School Teachers is inviting mem- 
bership with the following call to par- 
ticipation and action. 


Teachers must be united! 
Join the Organization that best 
represents you and that best 
meets your needs. 


The Federation of Women High School 
Teachers offers you 


Protection: 

One of the best 
United States. 

Public appearances of your officers in all 
crucial discussions concerning the schools. 

Representation at all public and _ semi- 
public conferences, including all Board 
of Education meetings. 

Successful defense of the salary schedule 
against repeated attacks begun in April, 
1931. 

The support of labor. 

Group insurance. 


Information: 

Honest, reliable, up-to-the-minute facts ob- 
tained directly from the public officials 
concerned and the bankers who hold the 
purse strings. 

Weekly mimeographed and monthly printed 
bulletins sent to all the high schools. 
Open discussion at all regular monthly 

meetings. 


labor attorneys in the 


Publicity: 

Six years of publicity over WCFL. 

Daily interviews with persons of promi- 
nence and importance in the City’s life. 

Pay the Teacher on banners carried in 
the Labor Day Parade before thou- 
sands of spectators. 

Conferences with newspaper editors which 
have resulted in thousands of lines of 
priceless publicity, editorials as well as 
news items. 


Stability: 

19 years of wise and constructive leader- 
ship. 

A reputation in school and civic groups 
for a progressive and sane approach to 
school problems. 

Committees constantly at work on educa- 
tional, legislative, financial, legal pen- 
sion and tenure problems, and working 
conditions of teachers. 

The chairmanship of the Illinois Federa- 
tion of Labor Committee on Education. 


Cooperation: 


With school groups locally through the 
Joint Board of Teacher Unions, the Joint 
Legislative Conference of Teachers and 
Principals, the Superintendent’s Advisory 
Council, and the Lawyers’ Conference. 

With school groups nationally through the 
American Federation of Teachers. 

With labor groups through the Chicago 
Federation of Labor, the Illinois State 
Federation of Labor and the American 
Federation of Labor. The only woman 
member of the Executive Board of the 
Chicago Federation of Labor is one of 
our members. 








Date Paid 
July, 1931 


Month of Service 
May, 1931 


June, 1931 July, 1931 

July reg September, 1931 
Aug. School September, 1931 
Sept., 1931 October 30, 1931 
Oct., 1931 


Nov., 1931 
March 1, 1932 


Dec., 1931 
fist %, April 5, 1932 
Jan., 1932 ) 2nd 14, April 8 1932 


U2nd %, May 9, 1932 


March. 1932 {Ist %4, June 25, 1932 


12nd %, August 6, 1932 


Pay Days for Chicago Teachers 


Medium Used 


Scrip or Warrants, Aug. 6, 1932* 
Scrip or Warrants, Aug. 6, 1932 
Scrip or Warrants, Aug. 15, 1932 
Scrip or Warrants, Aug. 15, 1932 
Cash 


{ Ist %4, December 22, 1931 
12nd %, January 27, 1932 Cash 
{ lst “4, February 29, a 

1 2nd %4, March 25, 1932 ane 


Tax Warrants** 


; Cash 


} Cash 


Cash 


. st %, Octob 9 Cash 
April, 1932 6 — ll, | “ Nothing 
May, 1932 No Nothing 
June, 1932 No Nothing 
Sept., 1932 No Nothing 
Oct., 1932 No Nothing 


*Scrip was first offered by the Board of 
Education in July, 1931, and was accepted 
by those teachers who needed cash most 
desperately. Some of these teachers sold 
scrip for as low as 63—in other words, 
they were forced to take a 37% cut in 
salary. 

In September, 1931, the issuance of scrip 
was halted by injunction. On April 25, 
1932, “mutilated” checks were issued for 
the month of May, 1931, to those teachers 
who had received no payment of any kind. 
These checks were exchangeable for tax 
anticipation warrants. Teachers who had 
taken scrip for the entire month could also 
exchange it for tax warrants. Teachers 
who had taken a portion of their May 
salary in scrip received no “mutilated” 
checks until Aug. 6, 1932, when tax war- 


rants were made available for these 
months. 


**Tax warrants were not issued directly 
to teachers. “Mutilated” checks were dis- 
tributed when the pay-roll was signed— 


that is, the December, 1931, salary was 
paid on March 1, 1932, by means of a 
“mutilated” check. These “mutilated” 


checks were exchangeable only for 1931 
tax anticipation warrants in multiples of 
$50. Many teachers could not find an out- 
let for warrants and therefore did not ac- 
cept them. Market price for 1931 tax an- 
ticipation warrants was 81, but many 
teachers were forced to take lower prices 
in order to get cash. ; 
Summary 

In eighteen months—since May 1, 1931— 
six and one-half months have been paid 
in cash, and three regular months and two 
months’ summer school salaries have been 
paid in paper. For four and one-half 


months, the TEACHERS OF CHICAGO 
HAVE NOT BEEN PAID. 
Dororny Wet, President. 





29 





With women’s groups through the Cook 
County and Illinois Federation of Wom- 
en’s Clubs, the Woman's Trade Union 


League, and other prominent civic 
groups which seek our information and 
advice. 

Action: 


Presentation of the teacher’s point of view 
in all civic conferences on the financial 


situation. 
Direct appeal to State Legislature and 
Committee of National Congress for 


financial relief. 
Appearances in Springfield on school bills. 
Appeal to the Reconstruction Finance 
Corporation for financial relief. 
Effective information on the economic 
catastrophe in education presented in 
the face of almost insuperable obstacles 
of deliberate misrepresentation. 
Assistance in maintaining educational 
standards in other cities such as appeal 


to Decatur Schoolboard not to rop 
fourth year of high schools. 
Successful resistance for a year and a 


half against the concerted drive to cur- 
tail educational opportunity, cripple edu- 
cational services, starve out teachers, 
and beat down the spirit and morale of 
American education. 

Vigorous opposition to all attempts to 
make the schools pay for the mistakes 
in judgment and common sense of the 
financial wizards. 


Join now, and help restore public 
schools to Chicago! 
Chicago has not had tax-supported 
public schools since April, 1931! 





Grand Forks, N. D., Local 205 


Grand Forks Teachers’ Federation, Local 
205, on October 5 was fortunate in hav- 
ing Mrs. Florence Curtis Hanson as the 
guest speaker at the largest general din- 
ner meeting that has been sponsored by 
this group. Her thoughtful and carefully 
prepared address gave many of us not 
only much to think about but a renewal 
of our faith and an enthusiasm for the 
fundamental ideals of the Federation. 

The meeting and the address obtained 
first page attention in the local daily paper, 
“The Herald.” A few days later, how- 
ever, an editorial apology (?) appeared 
under the title “No Attack on Education,” 
in what appeared to be an unwarranted 
attack on Mrs. Hanson’s speech. We who 
have watched the activities of the North 
Dakota Taxpayers’ Association know there 
are members of this group who would 
not willingly cripple the schools of the 
state. The leadership of this group, made 
up as it is of large taxpayers both in and 
out of the state, have, however, ruthlessly 
disregarded the welfare of the schools and 
of the children of North Dakota in their 
drastic slashing of school revenues through 
the nefarious tax reduction measure of 
last June. Conspiracy or no conspiracy, the 
results have been the same. The tax bur- 
den is being shifted from the shoulders 
of those best able to pay, and at the 
expense of education in North Dakota. 
Schools are being closed, departments are 
being eliminated, classes are being crowded 
beyond the point where effective work is 
possible, teachers are being dismissed and 
wages reduced below the levels of decent 
living. 

Can any thinking person believe that this 
is “No Attack on Education”? 

Mrs. Hanson advocates not only oppo- 
sition to the activities of associations of 
large taxpayers but effective resistance to 
these activities through active alliance with 
labor. It is here the rub comes. Her talk 
was a clear call to save the schools for 
the children of the country by what ap- 
pears to be the only effective means. 








New York Local 5 


On Thursday, October 6, and Saturday, 
October 8, 5:45 p. m., Dr. Lefkowitz spoke 
over WABC, Columbia National Broad- 
cast, on the present threat to public edu- 


cation. 
The New York Times of Sunday, Oc- 
tober 9, reported the broadcast as follows: 


WARNS OF REDUCING 
TEACHERS’ SALARIES 


Lefkowitz in Radio Appeal Holds Pay 


Cuts Undermine Education Standards. 
DEMANDS ‘CULTURAL’ WAGE 


Profession Today Needs Persons of 
“Unusual Mental Calibre,” 
He Declares. 


The maintenance of educational stand- 
ards as represented by the type of teacher 
who can be attracted to the profession only 
by the assurance of a cultural wage was 
emphasized yesterday in the third radio ap- 
peal of the teachers to the public for sup- 
port in their efforts to protect their salaries 
against proposed reductions. 

Dr. Abraham Lefkowitz, legislative repre- 
sentative of the Teachers Union, sponsor of 
the broadcast over WABC with the Teach- 
ers Welfare League and the Kindergarten- 
6B Teachers Association, held that educa- 
tionally the proposal to decrease salaries 
was contrary to sound public policy. 

“For years,” he said, “educational leaders 
have striven to attract to the teaching pro- 
fession the highest type of men and women. 
With the increasing complexity of our in- 
dustrial civilization, with the increase in 
truancy, delinquency and child maladjust- 
ment, with the low moral tone of our pub- 
lic life, more and more our schools must 
secure and retain men and women of un- 
usual mental calibre, men and women cap- 
able of coping with the difficult problems 
facing our new urban civilization. 


The Educational “Trinity” 


“Today more than ever before, the schools 
need teachers of greater ability, wider cul- 
ture, greater sympathy and understanding 
and of broader tolerance. The type of 
teacher the times demand can only be at- 
tracted and retained by maintaining our 
present salaries, pensions and tenure rights. 
Any attempt to weaken this educational 
trinity means the undermining of our edu- 
cational standards.. 

“Yet this critical time is selected by short- 
sighted persons for the reduction of teach- 
ers’ salaries. 

“The depression has driven thousands of 
children and adults back to school. Edu- 
cational costs of necessity must increase but 
they should be regarded as a social invest- 
ment rather than as expenditures. In the 
last analysis people wil! secure just as good 
schools and teachers as they are willing to 


pay for.” 

r. Lefkowitz recounted the efforts of 
the teachers to establish an adequate in- 
come by legislation, and said, since 1929, 
“for the first time in history,” the teachers 
were enjoying what other workers and busi- 
ness men had for twenty-five years. 
He continued: 

“Before teachers could enjoy their re- 
stored purchasing power for any appreciable 
time, the depression hit the world. Who are 
the first to be attacked? Speculators, war 
profiteers or bankers? No. The attack is 
made upon the very group which suffered 
most when every other group was capitaliz- 
ing the period of prosperity. We teachers 
who train the men responsible for the na- 
tion’s wealth and increased output should 
enjoy it equally with others who create it. 


Examples Must Be Set 


“Unlike other workers, teachers are men 
and women of culture who are expected, by 
their employers and the community, to main- 
tain a certain standard of life, since they 
set examples for the pompece generation. 

“Tt is a well-recognized principle of taxa- 
tion that the tax burden should be borne 
by those who have the wealth; that is, it 
should be based upon ability to pay. Hence 
taxes should be graded, as they are in the 
income tax. According to the proposals sub- 


mitted to the teachers, an equal per cent 
is to be deducted from all teachers’ salaries. 

“This means that a teacher earning $1,608 
would pay the same rate as the Mayor, who 
could pay 25 per cent and still have more 
than he had received before the surreptitious 
increases were engineered. While the May- 
or’s act is praiseworthy, there is a differ- 
ence when the Mayor surrenders a standard 
of living he never enjoyed though legally 
entitled to, and in teachers surrendering 
standards enjoyed for years, because the 
latter necessitates not only a violation of 
legal contractual obligations but the break- 
ing of agreements with landlords, colleges, 
relief organizations and the like.” 


San Pienalene Local 215 


President’s Report 

At the close of the year’s activities, we 
can look back to the visits of Mrs. Flor- 
ence Curtis Hanson as having been the 
high lights of the year. I am sure that 
all members were inspired by her visits, 
and non-members who heard her were 
given a clearer vision of the mission of 
the teachers union. 

During the year we have had an en- 
couraging growth in membership, a goodly 
group of administrators and supervisors 
having joined our ranks. 

An encouraging movement in our midst 
is the formation of an elementary teach- 
ers union in San Francisco, Local 241. 
This local was organized during the past 
month and its small beginning augurs 
well for the future. 

The tangible achievements of our unions 
this year were: 

(1) The unanimous approval of the 
resolution by the Labor Council relative 
to the maintenance of the teachers salary 
schedule. 

(2) A recent resolution of the council 
opposing the lessening of State Board re- 
quirements for High School graduatior 

One of the most favorable signs con- 
nected with our cause is a new willingness 
to cooperate with Labor and other City 
employees shown in the Unemployment Re- 
lief Proposal adopted for the coming year. 
The usual smugly complacent individual- 
ism has given place to a realization of 
the absolute necessity of working and co- 
operating whole-heartedly with other 
groups of workmen. Our favorable situa- 
tion here in San Francisco is due to the 
breakdown of selfish individual action, 
and the growth of the idea that we need 
united action with our fellow workers in 
other fields. This statement is true 
whether the teachers will admit it or not. 

The importance and power of the 
Teachers Unions in San Francisco is far 
out of proportion to the number of mem- 
bers. 

The forceful backing of our labor allies 
has given us a standing which makes our 
group one to be reckoned with. Our mem- 
bers are influential in other teacher or- 
ganizations. The leaders in the Princi- 
pals Association, High School Teachers 
Association and other teacher organiza- 
tions are also members of one or another 
of the unions. 

Referring to ancient history, the ma- 
jority of the old Consolidated Salary Com- 
mittee which aided in securing our present 
status were and are members of the union. 
Of the five members elected to the Execu- 
tive Committee on Unemployment Relief 
two are members of Local 61 and one a 
member of Local 215. This is not said 
in the sense of boasting, but is merely a 
statement of the faith that is in us and 
a reason for our hope and confidence in 
the future. 

Another favorable sign is the new will- 





THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


ingness of all associations to form a coun. 
cil composed of the presidents and ap. 
pointed delegates from each association to 
consider needs of the entire department. 
Two meetings have already. been held 
The plan calls for continuance of these 
meetings each month to secure united sup. 
port in securing proper backing for the 
schools. 

The needs of our Local for the coming 
year: 

I. Continued 
the past year. 

II. Frequent executive 
Locals 61 and 241. 

(a) To consider 
mission to the Labor Council 
our six delegates. 

(b) To discuss matters to be pre. 
sented to the Board of Education or to 
be recommended to the State Legis. 
lature. 

III. A planned program for our years 
activities. 

Many of our problems this year have 
come to us unanticipated. We hope that 
we have solved some of these in a satis- 
factory way. 

The adoption of a well planned pro 
gram for the year will be for the benefit 
of our organization. A very serious situa- 
tion confronts the teachers of the United 
States. If we here in San Francisco can 
meet this condition in a wise and intelli- 
gent way our local school system will not 
take the backward steps that some com- 
munities are taking, but only by united 
activity of our group with other groups 
can we maintain our standing. 

I wish to express my appreciation t 
the members for their whole-hearted sup- 
port during the past two years and request 
for the newly elected officers the same 
cooperation 


professional study as of 


meetings with 


matters for sub- 
through 


C. A. Srmonps 


There is only one greater enemy 
of the country than the ignorance of 
the masses and that is the ignorance 
of their teachers. 


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DECEMBER, 1932 3] 


Questionnaire on Educational Retrenchments 


To all Teachers: 


We have numerous requests for information regarding salary cuts, attacks on working conditions, the identity 
of those who are attacking the schools and other pertinent matters. We have information concerning conditions in 
some cities but wish to obtain it for all that we may be better able to serve all the teachers in all parts of the country. 

We are asking you to fill out the following questionnaire: 


Salary schedules for 1930-1931 and 1932-1933: | 1930-1931 | 1932-1933 


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Junior High School Teachers, minimum 


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Senior High School Teachers, minimum 


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IN 6. 6 5:0 + ca beens oeecebesee aves ves te 2 gyda ee eee en eeaa a eee lcteccvaneeentescaseane 


Superintendent’s salary ........... 


What withdrawal of sick leave, pay for holidays, etc., has been made? 


Have there been consolidations of two or more schools under one principal or a marked increase in the size of 


ag i te 


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Realizing that it is not always possible to give complete information through a questionnaire we should 
appreciate a letter giving additional information. All communications will be regarded as confidential unless ex- 
plicit permission is given to quote from or print them. 


We shall be glad to give you any complete data which we receive from these questionnaires. 


AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 


506 S. WapasHy Ave., Cuicaco, Itt. 
































American Federation 


of Teachers 


506 South Wabash Avenue 
CHICAGO, ILL. 


The American Federation of Teachers 


desires to establish an intimate contact and an effective co-oper- 
ation between the teachers and the other workers of the com- 


munity. 





The American Federation of Teachers 


desires to co-operate with all civic organizations for improved 
civic life. 





Groups of seven or more public school teachers are invited 
to affiliate with this National Organization of Classroom 
Teachers, for mutual assistance, improved professional stand- 
ards and the democratization of the schools. 


Our Slogan Is: 
Democracy in Education: Education for Democracy 





THE AMERICAN TEACHER 
is published bimonthly by The American Federation of Teachers. 
Membership dues carry subscription to the magazine. To all others the 
subscription price is $1.00 per year, 25 cents per copy.