THE 
AMERICAN 
T EA C H E R February, 1940 


PUBLISHED BY THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF TEACHERS 


——————— ail 


A PROGRAM FOR 1940 
The Executive Council of the AFT 





WHAT SHOULD OUR CHILDREN INHERIT? 
| J. Abner Peddiwell 


| TEACHERS IN THE CRISIS 


Goodwin Watson 


EDUCATING THE ADMINISTRATOR 
Ralph Tyler 


DEMOCRACY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 


George Axtelle Hugh Wing Margaret Schlauch 
Alban Winspear Joseph Cohen Dorothy Douglas 
Bernhard Stern John DeBoer Abraham Edel 






















The Teachers Union in Action 








KENOSHA, WIS. (No. 557)—By a 
vote of 5 to 2, the Kenosha School 
Board has cut the salaries of school em- 
ployees, beginning at 3 per cent on sala- 
ries of $1,400 to $1,700 and ranging up 
to a top of 12 per cent. The cuts are 
part of a campaign to reduce the salaries 
of all city employees, which was reported 
by Kenosha Labor, local labor organ, as 
follows: 

“With lines tightly drawn between the 
pro-labor and the anti-labor forces on 
the various city governing boards, the 
conservative bloc pushed forward during 
the past week with its wage-cutting pro- 
gram for city employees—a program 
which union leaders described as a prob- 
able prelude toward similar wage-cutting 
attempts in the factories.” 

Howland H. Paddock, president of the 
Kenosha Teachers, reports that all the 
unionized city workers—teachers, school 
janitors, policemen, firemen, _truck- 
drivers, and City Hall employees—have 
set up a Joint Board of City Workers, 


which has the support of CIO and AFL 
unions, Kenosha Labor, and the Min- 
isterial Association. The fight waged 
by the group forestalled the cuts for 
nine months. 

“Unquestioned is the fact that the 
original cuts contemplated have been 
very materially reduced,” Mr. Paddock 
declared. “Also, the fight has been so 
bitter that if the wage-cutters had in 
mind creating new permanent lower 
levels of pay, they must realize how hard 
this will be to accomplish, if it can be 
done at all.” 


* 


COLUMBUS, OHIO (No. 438)—Rec- 
ognizing the importance of the war 
danger, the Ohio-Michigan College Con- 
ference of the AFT urged that teachers 
remain objective and aware of all propa- 
ganda. Need for a campaign to defend 
civil liberties and academic freedom was 
also cited as an immediate objective. 
The conference decided that teachers 
should work with the community and 

not for it and 





should take the 





THE CONTRIBUTORS 

“A Program for 1940” was adopted at the December 
meeting of the National Executive Council of the AFT 
.. . It is rumored that J. ABNER PEDDIWELL is a 
member of the AFT, but these are poor times for 
“rumoring” anything. .. . GOODWIN WATSON is on 
the staff of Teachers College at Columbia University 
and is a member of Local 537... . RALPH TYLER 
is Chairman of the Department of Education at the 
University of Chicago and a member of Local 259... . 
GEORGE AXTELLE, Northwestern University, is a 
member of Local 635 and co-editor of the recent 
Teachers for Democracy. . . . JOSEPH COHEN is a 
member of the Department of Philosophy at the Uni- 
versity of Colorado and a member of Local 562... . 
ALBAN WINSPEAR is the author of Who Was 
Socrates?, Professor of Greek and Latin at the Univer- 
sity of Wisconsin and a member of Local 223... . 
BERNHARD STERN is at Columbia University and 
is a member of Local 537 . . . as is MARGARET 
SCHLAUCH who teaches linguistics at New York 
University. . . . DOROTHY DOUGLAS whose field is 
labor economics is at Smith College and a member of 
Local 230... . HUGH WING is a teacher of literature 
at the University of Pittsburgh and a member of Local 
646. ... ABRAHAM EDEL is a member of the Depart- 
ment of Philosophy and Psychology at the City College 
of New York and a member of Local 537... . JOHN 
DEBOER is on the staff of Chicago Teachers College 
and is a member of Local 1... . GERTRUDE LUEHN- 
ING, National Vice-President of the AFT, is a teacher 
in the Palo Alto public schools. . .. EDUARD LINDE- 
MAN is Professor of Social Philosophy at the New York 
School of Social Work. 















emphasis from war 
and armaments by 
stressing “more 
important things” 
such as legislation 
for adequate relief, 
old age pensions 
and federal aid to 
education. 
Chairman of the 
meeting was D. C. 
Williams, presi- 
dent of the Ohio 
State University 
Federation of 
Teachers. Speak- 
ers were Profes- 
sors Edgar Dale, 
Norman Wolfel, 
J. H. Coleman, 
J. M. Peterson and 
C. C. North. 
Other moves the 
conference urged 
were: a tax study 
commission in co- 
operation with the 
Ohio Federation of 
Labor, considera- 
tion by other state 
university Locals 
to provide a more 
adequate retire- 
ment program, fac- 
ulty participation 





in financial problems of colleges, closer 
contact with farm and labor groups in 
order to point out the need and service 
of state universities. 
* 

TRENTON, N. J. (No. 437)—Label- 
ing the procedure that led to his dis- 
missal “a gross abuse,” Herbert H. 
Cole, president of the Local and a 
teacher at Junior School No. 4, has 
filed an appeal with Dr. Charles H. 
Elliott, state education commissioner. 
Cole, dismissed last June on charges 
that he had struck one of his students 
with a ruler and slapped him across the 
face, charged that the school board, in 
imposing the penalty of dismissal 
; . abused the discretion vested in 
it by law.” Several character witnesses 
for Cole were barred from the hearing 
which led to his dismissal. 

Salaries again occupied the attention 
of the Union members, who are taking 
action on two fronts. A militant cam- 
paign to defend salary rights against 
pressure from city hall has been started 
by the Union, which, in a letter to the 
Board of Education, has demanded that 
the Board live up to the salary schedule 
and raise teachers’ salaries to compen- 
sate for the lack of increment during 
depression years. 

* 
CAMDEN, N. J. (No. 449)—Restora- 
tion of pay cuts, withheld from teachers 
since 1937, has been made by the Court 
of Errors and Appeals in the cases of 
221 teachers. Cancellation of the pay 
cut is retroactive. Mayor Brunner, di- 
rector of Revenue and Finance, who 
just a short time ago planned to use a 
“surplus” of $50,000 for the installation 
of radios in the schools, has warned that 
he will have to dismiss teachers and 
other employees as the city is unable 
to comply with the court order. 
* 
SAVANNAH, GA. (No. 267)—Extend- 
ing its influence in the community, the 
Union now sponsors a radio program 
Thursday evenings over station WOTC 
and is planning the organization of a 
public forum. The radio feature, “Edu- 
cation and Discussion,” has become an 
important source of information about 
the schools. Under the leadership of 
John Varnedoe, chairman of the Union’s 
radio committee, pupils take part in 
musical presentations and panel dis- 
cussions. 
(Continued on page 30) 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














FEBRUARY, 1940 Vol. XXIV, No. 6 


National Executive Council of the AFT 6 
J. Abner Peddiwell 10 
Goodwin Watson 12 
Ralph Tyler 14 
George Axtelle 21 
Abraham Edel 22 
Hugh Wing 22 
Margaret Schlauch 23 
Alban Winspear 24 
Joseph Cohen 25 
Bernhard Stern 26 
Dorothy Douglas 27 
John DeBoer 28 


A PROGRAM FOR 1940 
WHAT SHOULD OUR CHILDREN INHERIT? 
TEACHERS IN THE CRISIS 

EDUCATING THE ADMINISTRATOR 
DEMOCRACY AND HIGHER EDUCATION 


DEPARTMENTS 
THE TEACHERS UNION IN ACTION 
THE CONTRIBUTORS 
EDITORIAL PARAGRAPHS 
THE PRESIDENT’S PAGE: A SUSTAINING FUND FOR ACADEMIC FREE- 
DOM CASES George S. Counts 5 
AMONG THE NEW BOOKS: 
NEXT STEPS IN CONSUMER EDUCATION 
EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY 


wd tv 


Gertrude Luehning 20 
Eduard Lindeman 20 





In order that the AMERICAN TEACHER may serve as a 
medium for the discussion of the educational problems of 
today, the contributors are not necessarily expressing the 
policies of the American Federation of Teachers. 











Member of Educational Press Association 
Drawings by Chandler Montgomery 
THE EDITORS of the American TEACHER request that no mate- 
rial be reprinted from this magazine without an accompanying credit 
line stating the source and the issue in which such material appeared. 
GEORGE T. GUERNSEY, Editer 


ENTERED as second class matter January 3, 1939, at the post 
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1103, Act of February 28, 1925, authorized November 3, 1926. 


SUBSCRIPTION: $2.50 for the year—Foreign $2.60—Single copies, 
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notice of changes of address. Remittances should be made in postal 
or express money orders, draft, stamps, or check. Bo 43 





Wheeler, Marshall Rehired 


The dispute between West Suburban Teachers Union 
(AFT Local 571 just west of Chicago) and the Board 
of Education of Proviso Township High School concern- 
ing the re-employment of Mary R. Wheeler and Ralph 
W. Marshall, officers of the Union, has been settled in 
conference between representatives of the Union and 
members of the board. 

The board agreed to re-employ Mary R. Wheeler, 
beginning January 29, 1940, and Ralph W. Marshall, 
beginning September 3, 1940. Contracts to both of the 
teachers will be issued by the board for the school year 
of 1940-41, and will provide for compensation at not 
less than the salary they received during their last period 
of employment at Proviso. 

The contract provides that no members of the faculty 
of Proviso Township High School shall be discriminated 
against because of membership in the American Federa- 
tion of Teachers. 


FEBRUARY, 1940 











THE 
AMERICAN 
TEACHER 


Published by 
The American Federation of Teachers 


AFFILIATED WITH THE 
AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR 











Further disputes between members of the Union and 
the Board of Education are to be handled in conference 
by a committee selected by the board and the Union. 
Any teacher having a dispute with the board will immedi- 
ately report the matter to the committee appointed by 
the Union and selected to confer with the board for the 
purpose of adjusting such disputes. 

Representatives of the Chicago Federation of Labor, 
the AFT locals in the Chicago area, the officers of Local 
571, representatives of the national office and Attorney 
Leo J. Hassenauer participated in the negotiations. Presi- 
dent William Green wrote a letter to the President of 
the Board urging that the teachers whose contracts were 
not renewed last spring be re-employed. 


Labor’s Program for Education 


The permanent Committee on Education of the 
American Federation of Labor has issued a five-point 
statement on education which has been sent to the secre- 
taries of State Federations of Labor and City Central 
Labor Unions urging the following program: 


I. Adequate and proper enforcement of compulsory 

school attendance laws: 
A. The compulsory school attendance laws should be 
closely correlated with the child labor laws, so that 
conflicting standards do not permit interference with 
continuous schooling. 
B. There should be no exceptions or loopholes which 
would make possible a child’s being kept from school 
“because he is too poor to attend” (our last survey 
showed 17 states have laws with some sort of poverty 
exemption); because “he lives too far from school” 
(our survey showed 22 states had this exemption) ; 
or for any other reason which is not in the interest 
of the child himself. 


II. Adequate appropriations for the maintenance of 
schools to be administered for the social wellbeing of the 
students to be taught in classes not to exceed twenty- 


3 





five, in well constructed buildings, by teachers paid 
salaries commensurate with the great value of their 
service to the community. 

We recognize that within certain states, under their 
existing laws through which taxable resources are lim- 
ited, that truly adequate funds (sufficient to prevent 
gross inequalities of opportunities for education among 
the persons of all states) may not immediately be had. 
We therefore urge for all states the raising of educa- 
tional budgets in keeping with the human and national 
investment involved; the amendment of state laws, 
particularly tax laws, wherever necessary, to make pos- 
sible more adequate school appropriations. The Ameri- 
can Federation of Labor has urged before the Federal 
Congress a program of federal aid for education to be 
allocated among the states on a basis of relative need 
and to be administered by the state as necessary to 
afford equal educational opportunities for all. 


III. Professional and 
through: 
A. State-wide teacher tenure laws which can not be 
circumvented by subterfuge in the guise of so-called 
efficiency ratings or personality ratings. 
B. State-wide teacher pension laws assuring the 
maintenance of efficiency in the system and the social 
security of the teacher upon retirement. 
C. Provision for leave of absence for teachers for 
the protection and maintenance of their health and 
for their professional growth and betterment, with 
adequate compensation for such leave which would 
enable the teacher to avail himself of the privilege. 


social security for teachers, 


IV. Provision for the training for civic responsibility 
for all persons in the community. 

The old concept of education as limited to formal 
academic subjects must be enlarged, and opportunities 
provided by law for civic training for youths and 
adults to help them meet the complex social and 
political problems of the day. The curriculum must be 
revised so as to make training for life in a community 
and citizenship in a democracy the heart of education. 
V. Negatively, there must be no substantive legisla- 
tion on curriculum making, and no limitations enacted 
into law which would prevent the teaching of social and 
physical sciences in our school, a principle in absolute 
keeping with the great tradition of free government 
upon which our schools are founded. 

The committee points out that “at the moment drives 
for so-called economy threaten the proper functioning of 
our schools. Self-constituted “Citizens Protective Com- 
mittees” join with “Tax Associations” to attack our public 
schools. They fight not only the giving of funds to our 
schools but the development through the schools of our 
democratic ideals. 

“Labor,” says the committee, “must protect our schools, 
its pupils and its teachers.” 


Free Pamphlets for Policies Work 


“Schools for Tomorrow’s Citizens,” a Public Affairs 
Pamphlet, which was reviewed by Wanda Taeschner, 
chairman of the NEPC, in the November, 1939, issue of 
the AMERICAN TEACHER, may now be obtained through 
this office or through the office of Silver Burdett, 
221 E. 20th St., Chicago, at a cost of 8c per copy. They 
will be sent free to the educational policies committee 











chairmen of all AFT Locals. Any member of the educa- 
tional policies committee of a Local who would like to 
receive a copy of this pamphlet can get it, without cost, 
by writing in to the AMERICAN TEACHER. Copies to 
committee members will be sent out as long as the supply 
lasts. 


Challenge Accepted 


We are happy to announce that our challenge to ad- 
ministrators’ magazines to reprint the article, ‘“Super- 
vision—Theory and Practice,” by Samuel Tenenbaum 
has been accepted by the School Executive; the article 
will appear in a forthcoming issue using some of the illus- 
trations by Chandler Montgomery. We have also re- 
ceived a notice from the American Education Press that 
their journal, Our Times, will deal with race relations 
the week of February 26 to March 1. Some of the illus- 
trations from the January issue of the AMERICAN 
TEACHER will be used in Our Times. Frank Murphy’s 
article on civil liberties was reprinted in the Epworth 
Herald of February 17. 


American Teacher Problems 


One of the problems facing the AMERICAN TEACHER 
and the AFT generally is the budgetary problem. At a 
recent meeting of the Editorial Board of the AMERICAN 
TEACHER, it was clear that we might not be able to pub- 
lish the May issue and stay within the budget allotted 
us by the Executive Council. While our mail seems to 
indicate that the January issue was probably the most 
successful issue of the AMERICAN TEACHER published 
within the last year and one-half, it is important that 
our members realize that it contained eight extra pages 
and a good deal of extra illustrative material; the cost 
of producing that issue was increased by about 25 per cent. 

However, we have been forced to make an extra run 
of about 7,500 copies and have about 4,000 of these on 
hand. Three thousand copies were ordered by the Anti- 
Defamation League of the B’Nai B’Rith which is going 
to distribute these throughout the country. 

For the last year and a half we have used 32 pages 
as the basic issue. This year we have been unable to 
run the “Labor Notes” in three out of five issues, the 
“Letters to the Editor” in three out of five issues, and in 
this number we were unable to run “Inside the Cover.” 
This suggests that in the future we must think in terms 
of at least a 40-page magazine, if we want all the features 
which have heretofore been included. 

Two ads appear on the back cover of this issue and we 
would appreciate your support of these advertisers. We 
especially urge the editorial committees of our various 
locals which order pamphlet material to mention the 
AMERICAN TEACHER in their orders. We would also like 
to call to your attention the combination offer on page 18 
of the AMERICAN TEACHER and J. Abner Peddiwell’s 
Saber-Tooth Curriculum for $2.25. This offer will not be 
good after March 10. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 























The President's Page 











A Sustaining Fund 


For Academic Freedom Cases 


A central purpose of the American Federation of Teach- 
ers is the improvement of the economic, social, civic, and 
cultural status of the ordinary teacher. Since the only 
true measure of a democracy is to be found in the quality 
of its members, this is an entirely legitimate and praise- 
worthy purpose of any organization of working people. 
But in the case of a union of teachers such a purpose as- 
sumes a yet broader social significance. The educative 
process, if its object is the development of free men and 
women, can only be carried on effectively by teachers who 
are secure, enlightened, and free. The defense and ad- 
vancement of the rights and privileges of the teacher, 
therefore, are essential to the defense and advancement of 
the cause of public education in a democracy. 

The task which the Federation faces in this area is a 
colossal one. Even in the best of times teachers suffer 
from many and severe disabilities. Nurtured on a quasi- 
servile tradition that can be traced back to antiquity and 
committed to a conception of “respectability” that is 
essentially false and undemocratic, they have been re- 
luctant to band together and assert themselves in com- 
munity, state, and nation. As Howard Beale has shown, 
the ordinary American teacher, in both his professional 
and private life, is spied upon and harassed by gossips, 
busy-bodies, heresy-hunters, self-constituted guardians of 
public morals, paid agents of power and privilege, and 
by anyone who desires to conceal piratical designs on so- 
ciety under the cloak of patriotism or gain a reputation 
for civic courage and public spirit without danger to 
himself. These “normal” disabilities are an insult to the 
profession and a menace to democratic education. They 
must all be removed. 

The present, moreover, is not the “best of times.” 
Rather is it a period of severe tension—a period marked 
by a deepening of both the world and the domestic crisis 
and the consequent growth and spread of a spirit of anx- 
iety, hysteria, and intolerance. In such times the “nor- 
mal” disabilities of teachers will in all probability be 
considerably, if not greatly, aggravated. Already evidence 
is accumulating from many quarters that reactionary 
groups and organizations working in concert are increas- 
ing their pressure on the entire educational system for 
the purpose of destroying freedom of teaching and learn- 
ing and of eliminating from the schools all who would 
strive earnestly to liberate the minds of the young. The 
excellent mid-year report of our national academic free- 
dom committee, prepared by Professor Arnold Shukotoff, 
thoroughly documents this tendency. 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


In this situation we must multiply our efforts to improve 
in every way the status of teachers. This means first of all 
the continuation without abatement of our historic strug- 
gle for tenure, economic security, better working condi- 
tions, professional responsibility, and full civic rights and 
privileges. It means also carrying on an increasingly 
vigorous and effective fight against arbitrary and unjust 
dismissals. Not only must we endeavor to achieve the 
complete reinstatement of teachers who are dismissed, 
but we must also strive to foresee and forestall dismissals. 
This last will require, among other things, the elaboration 
of a thoroughly mature philosophy of the total role of 
the teacher in our democracy—a philosophy which we 
must carry to the community as well as to the members 
of the profession. 

But all of this, indispensable as it is, is not enough. 
In spite of everything we can do, the struggle for im- 
proved status will exact its toll of individual victims. 
Teachers, dismissed because of the honesty of their in- 
struction, the boldness of their activities in the com- 
munity, or the intensity of their devotion to the defense 
of their fellows or to the cause of public education, will 
find themselves, at least for a period, in the ranks of the 
unemployed. And we know that those who bear the brunt 
of the struggle for the effective organization of teachers 
will be the most likely objects of administrative displeas- 
ure. This is all in the record. 

The growth and integrity of the American Federation 
of Teachers will depend in large measure on our ability to 
deal with this situation. The individual teacher must not 
be asked to bear the entire cost of the struggle for better 
conditions for the profession. As an organization we must 
master, in so far as we are able, the art of securing re- 
employment of those of our number who go down in the 
common fight. And in the interval, when their normal 
source of income is cut off, we must find some way of tak- 
ing care of them. Our demonstrated determination and 
ability to do this, even on a wholly inadequate scale, would 
strengthen the Federation more than thousands and tens of 
thousands spent directly on membership campaigns. It 
requires no gift of prophecy to see that the future belongs 
to the first organization of teachers that meets this chal- 
lenge boldly and effectively. 

The most promising proposal for meeting the chal- 
lenge is that of establishing a sustaining fund for the vic- 
tims of unjust dismissal. In a somewhat informal and un- 
systematic way a beginning in the right direction has 
already been made. Local and state bodies, sensitive to 
the needs in the situation, have provided financial assist- 
ance for teachers dismissed in the line of duty. Many 
are beginning to think that this function can be dis- 





5 








charged only by the national organization. Just how a 
sustaining fund should be created, whether through a fixed 
levy on the entire membership or through some system of 
voluntary contributions, is a question that requires the 
fullest discussion by our membership. Also what princi- 
ples and considerations should govern the administration 





of a national sustaining fund is a matter that merits thor- 
ough illumination. Both the national office and the aca- 
demic freedom committee urge upon the locals that this 
entire subject be discussed in the remaining months of the 
present academic year. 

GrorGE S. Counts 


A Program for 1940 


Adopted by the National Executive Council of the AFT 


THE PRIMARY function of the American Federation of 
Teachers as of any other union is to promote the economic 
welfare of its members and to improve the conditions 
under which they work. We recognize that as teachers 
we have larger responsibilities to the children whom 
we teach and to their parents, the greater number of 
whom are working men and women. We believe that 
the security of all the people is our concern if for no 
other reason than that such security is essential to the 
welfare of American children. Thus we have affiliated 
with organized labor because we are sensitive to our 
obligation to help obtain fair pay and just conditions for 
all who work. We cannot sincerely teach for democracy 
unless we fight valiantly to preserve democracy and guar- 
antee its economic and social benefits to all. 

We recognize that as teachers we must defend the 
right of every child to have his health protected, his body 
and mind nurtured, and his individuality and personality 
respected. He must be assured equality of opportunity 
in every field of endeavor, regardless of his race, his 
religion, his nationality, his economic or family status 
or the region of his residence. 

That teachers may be free and able to assist communi- 
ties in advancing the rights of children, we believe that 
they must be secure in their person and in their think- 
ing. The American Federation of Teachers has from its 
founding fought for single and adequate salary schedules. 
In striving to establish standards it has fought against 
discrimination because of sex, race, religion or political 
opinion. In all of our efforts we recognize our ever-grow- 
ing indebtedness to organized labor for its wholehearted 
and active support of our program for both children and 
teachers. 

Educational opportunity must be expanded. It is not 
sufficient merely to protect the securities already achieved 
for teachers nor to maintain only that level of educa- 
tion already reached. Says the American Youth Com- 
mission: “Half of the young people who have left school 
have not finished the ninth grade, and many of them 
have had far less than nine years of schooling. There 
are more than three million adults in this country who 


6 





cannot read or write. In America today there are nearly 
one million children of elementary school age who are 
not enrolled in any school.” Such facts require every 
American to demand an expansion of educational services. 

The American Federation of Teachers is today stronger 
than ever before, not only in numbers but also in expe- 
rience. We have reason, therefore, to hope that, with 
the cooperation of all our locals, we will go forward to 
new achievements, and progress to new levels of under- 
standing and cooperation for the security of the Ameri- 
can people and their schools. 

Today we face a new decade in a world torn by old 
greeds and new dissensions. We believe it necessary to 
call to the attention of all our members the problems 
facing us in 1940. 

I. EDUCATIONAL RETRENCHMENT AND 
UNEMPLOY MENT 

Today we are confronted by a strong, organized drive 
to effect retrenchments by slashing education budgets. 
In the richest states of the Union, New York, Pennsyl- 
vania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and elsewhere those 
who control corporate wealth and powerful realty interests 
have forced dangerous reductions in school funds. Their 
demands have been coupled with adverse criticisms of 
the public school program. The Chamber of Commerce 
of the State of New York seriously questions whether 
free public education should be provided beyond the ele- 
mentary grades of instruction. From many sources, there 
comes opposition to the enrichment of curricula and the 
extension of educational services. At the same time, wild 
charges of radicalism are being made against teachers 
who dare to organize and to oppose the drives for retrench- 
ments. 

Notwithstanding this drive for educational retrench- 
ment, the trend in modern society is to increase the tasks 
placed upon the public schools. Ages for compulsory 
attendance have been raised, unemployment among youths 
has forced more of them to continue in school, the short- 
ening of the normal work day and enforced idleness 
have increased demands for educational services, and the 
decline in standards of living of millions of families has 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














thrown upon the schools greater responsibilities for child 
welfare. As a result of retrenchment and the increased 
responsibilities of the schools we find a serious educa- 
tional crisis. In spite of the fact that the number of un- 
employed teachers is growing steadily larger and that 
unemployment among clerical, maintenance and build- 
ing trade workers is increasing, we find the following evi- 
dences of retrenchment widespread. 

(1) Increase in Class Size and Teaching Load. Ex- 
cessively large classes are common, and full-rostered days 
for teachers with added extra-curricular activities are 
found with alarming frequency everywhere. 

(2) Reduction of School Term. Not only has the 
summer vacation been extended but in some cities the 
Christmas vacation has been lengthened; in Toledo, 
during the inclement winter, children were shut out of 
school for six long weeks. 

(3) Reduction of Salaries. To “balance budgets” sal- 
aries have actually been cut or threats been made to re- 
duce them. In some cases a wholly unjustifiable rating 
plan has demoted teachers to lower salary schedules. The 
American Federation of Teachers believes that no ineffi- 
cient teacher should be retained and therefore recog- 
nizes such “demotions” as a poor disguise for retrench- 
ment. 

(4) Curtailment of Curricula. Subjects have been 
dropped without any regard for community needs or peda- 
gogical philosophy, but merely to reduce school costs. 

(5) Improper Use of Substitute Teachers. The use of 
the terms “temporary employee,” “permanent substitute,” 
attempts to hide the use of fully qualified teachers at 
lower salaries in regular teaching posts. This wide mis- 
use of substitutes has reached its climax in New York 
City where such teachers have been employed for many 
years in permanent positions while regular appointment 
lists are ignored. 

(6) Increase of Clerical Duties of Teachers. Standard 
tests, multiple forms and reports which should properly 
be prepared by special assistants and clerks have been 
added to the burden of already overworked teachers. 

(7) Reduction in Maintenance of Physical Equipment 
and Buildings. Repairs have been neglected causing de- 
preciation of property value as well as the denial of em- 
ployment to large groups of workers. 

(8) Decrease of Appropriations for Teaching Materials 
and Books. Supplies have been cut to the minimum and 
below a decent level of efficiency. Text books and library 
appropriations, cut practically everywhere, have in some 
instances been entirely eliminated for the current year. 
The efficiency of any workman depends to some extent 
upon the adequacy of his tools. It is reasonable to assume 
that the educator’s effectiveness is diminished when visual 
aids, books and other materials are denied him. 

(9) Elimination of Special Services. Speech and reme- 
dial reading classes have been reduced in number or elim- 
inated. Health services, properly a part of a school pro- 
gram, have been cut. 

(10) Failure to Use Federal Funds to Supplement Lo- 


FEBRUARY, 1940 















































cal Funds for Child Health and Educational Programs. 
In spite of the fact that W.P.A. funds to be matched are 
available to Boards of Education for evening classes and 
for lunches for children, few have availed themselves of 
these resources. 

(11) Curtailment of Nursery, Kindergarten and Adult 
Education. The crisis has greatly increased the need for 
adult education, nursery schools and kindergartens, yet 
we find these services threatened as “‘rills.” 

(12) Lack of Provision for the Older Adolescent Group. 
This is particularly true in the field of vocational edu- 
cation. Opportunities for higher education are limited, 
fees having increased enormously in colleges and universi- 
ties. “One-third of the unemployed workers in the United 
States are young people fifteen to twenty-four years of 
age. There are about four million youth out of work. 
The rate of unemployment is higher for youth of fifteen 
to twenty-four than for any other age group. Even in 
fairly prosperous times, young people of the United States 
are having increasing difficulty in getting started at use- 
ful employment.”—-American Youth Commission. 

(13) Restrictions on Teacher Participation in Adminis- 
tration of Schools. Teachers who must meet too many 
and too large classes are unable to participate effectively. 
Lack of such participation makes for less realistic pro- 
grams and endangers teaching for democracy. 

(14) Curtailment of Voluntary Experimentation in 
New Methods of Teaching, etc. With less and less time 
to discharge regular duties, teachers are not able volun- 
tarily to experiment in new fields. 

(15) Increased Discrimination against Underprivileged 
Groups and Racial Minorities. If there is a general trend 
toward retrenchment in education, curtailment of educa- 
tional rights for minority groups and the underprivileged 
is even greater. In so called “normal” times the child 
“on the other side of the track,” the Negro child and 
the child of foreign parents get the poorest equipment, 
the most dilapidated buildings, the most crowded class- 
rooms. In this period of retrenchment educational serv- 
ices to these groups are much below the safety line. 


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The American Federation of Teachers is not only op- 
posed to all forms of retrenchment but demands an ex- 
pansion of education programs, commensurate with the 
needs and resources of the richest country in the world. 
We pledge ourselves to expose unremittingly the forces 
hostile to public education and welfare services in the 
local, state and federal governments. We note and shall 
increasingly point out those places where “economy” 
directed against the schools and social services though 
other functions of government are untouched. 

We propose the following methods of stopping the 
retrenchment drive and organizing public education: 















(1) Taxation. Upon those who have the wealth shall 
be placed the necessary taxes to support an educational 
and social welfare system worthy of America. Present 
tax systems bearing unjustly on low incomes and with 
loopholes through which rich tax-dodgers may escape must 
be revised. A brief on taxation is being presented to Con- 
gress by our organization. The tax systems of county, 
city and state must be coordinated. We urge all our locals 
to study the tax units in their local communities and 
present programs for their reorganization.’ 

In our tax program we should make clear that money 
must come from those best able to pay. We are unequiv- 
ocally opposed to sales taxes, occupational taxes and all 
other means of shifting the burdens of taxation to people 
in the lower income group. 

(2) Federal Aid to Education. The widespread drive 
for retrenchment plus the increased need for equaliza- 
tion of educational opportunities makes it more im- 
portant than ever to carry on the fight for Federal Aid. 
The American Federation of Teachers proposes to con- 
tinue its campaign for the Thomas-Harrison Bill with re- 
newed vigor during the second session of the Seventy- 
Sixth Congress. 

All locals are urged to send resolutions to their Con- 
gressmen in support of the Thomas-Harrison Bill. Where 
legislatures are in session during 1940, resolutions should 
be introduced memorializing Congress to pass the Thomas- 
Harrison Bill.* 

(3) State Aid. The National Legislative Committee will 
shortly send to all locals a proposed program on state aid 
to be adapted to the needs of particular states and pressed 
for in their legislatures by the various locals. 

(4) Local Support of Education. Along with our pro- 
gram for revision of tax laws, reorganization of tax units, 


1Write the chairman of the Committee on Taxation (Mr. Max 
Diamond, New York Teachers’ Union, 114 E. 16th Street, New 
York City) for help. 

“Sample resolutions were sent to all locals by the Legislative Com- 
mittee last year. 





ples - 
























LAY 


Federal aid and increased state aid, each local must see 
that there is no diminution of local support. In some 
cases on record increased state aid has been a signal for 
local communities to decrease their support of schools. 
The purpose of Federal and State aid is to expand edu- 
cational services; they are not to be used as a substitute 
for local funds. 

(5) W.P.A. There must be no curtailment of W.P.A., 
particularly in the educational and art fields. The Wood- 
rum Act must be repealed, wages increased, and more 
unemployed teachers, artists, actors and musicians put 
to work on a program of cultural development for the 
United States. It is a duty not only for W.P.A. locals 
to press for W.P.A. services; all teachers should be con- 
cerned to increase cultural opportunities and employ- 
ment of fellow professionals. /ndividuals and locals should 
write their Congressmen for increased funds for W.P.A. 
and for repeal of the Woodrum Act. 

II. THE NATIONAL CRISIS 

The American Federation of Teachers believes that we 
in America should have no part in the present war. Mind- 
ful of the last World War and of the propaganda then 
used to involve us, we urge all our members not only 
to avoid hysteria themselves, but, as teachers, to give wise 
leadership to our children, to keep them calm and clear 
—TO KEEP AMERICA OUT OF WAR. We believe 
that we have sufficient to occupy us at home in pro- 
viding a solution to our economic and social problems 
here. In the face of the world-wide challenge to democ- 
racy, we re-affirm our faith in democratic principles as 
set forth in the American Declaration of Independence 
and the Constitution, which specifically or implicitly pro- 





































vide for: 

(a) Universal suffrage regardless of race, sex, religion 
or economic and social status. 

(b) Civil rights for all including not*only security in 
person and home, but the rights to opinion and the free 
expression of opinion by speech in assemblage, in the 
press and by radio and the cinema. 

(c) Freedom to work and to enjoy the fruits of one’s 
own labor. 

(d) The right to participate in economic organization 
to secure better working conditions, fairer distribution of 
work and higher standards of living. 

(e) Freedom from all forms of oppression and dis- 
racial or social in- 







crimination based on the theory of 





feriority. 
(f) Freedom of religion including separation of church 
and state in all fields of public life including education. 
At this time we recognize clearly: 









THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














(1) Our responsibility to the child who suffers most in 
war. We realize that upon the children of the nation 
depends its future. We pledge ourselves to protect those 
children from the danger of war. 

(2) The necessity of maintaining and extending teach- 
ers’ security. Our salaries are fixed by law. In the event 
of a war a rising cost of living would pauperize the 
teachers of the nation. 

Especially in times of crisis, it is important to pro- 
tect freedom for teaching. Already there has been an 
increasing number of violations of the freedom of teach- 
ers and students. We take as a major responsibility the 
protection of existing tenure laws and the extension of 
benefits of tenure security to all competent teachers. We 
shall defend actively, through our National Academic 
Freedom Committee, all violations of tenure laws and of 
personal freedom. We shall fight for the citizen rights of 
all teachers, regardless of sex, race, religion or political 


opinion. We urge all of our locals to be most vigilant 


with respect to violations of academic freedom and to 
report all cases in detail to the National Academic Free- 
dom Committee. We also urge them to resist the efforts 
of local boards to regiment teacher thought and expression 
under pretext of a national “emergency.” 





ee eee 


DEFEAT 
RETRENCHMENT 


PRESERVE 
CIVIL LIBERTIES 


P AMERICA 






































(3) The danger of sacrificing educational and social 
services to the demand for war expenditures. We insist 
that funds for programs of social welfare and federal 
aid to education shall not be halted for war purposes. 
We insist on the continuance and extension of social legis- 
lation initiated in the last ten years. We urge the passage 
of the Wagner Health Bill, the Wagner-Steagall Hous- 
ing Act and the Thomas-Harrison Bill. We ask for the 
repeal of the Woodrum Bill and for the continuance and 
extension of the P.W.A., through which agency thou- 
sands of school buildings have been repaired and re- 
placed in the past decade. We urge that there be an 
increase in the old age assistance program and that new 
groups such as farm, domestic and government employees, 
not otherwise covered by retirement funds, be included 
under the unemployment insurance provisions in the Social 
Security Act. We urge all our locals to press their state 
legislatures for sound retirement systems.‘ 

We urge that no amendments be made to the National 
Labor Relations Act that would increase the prerogatives 
of the employer or invalidate any of the rights of work- 
ers. We urge that no amendments be made to the Wages 
and Hours Act, but that more funds be appropriated for 
its successful operation. 

(4) We recognize further the impending threats to or- 
ganized labor and civil liberties. In advance of a possible 
‘“M” Day, already there are attacks upon the rights of 
labor and minority groups. We oppose all anti-alien leg- 
islation designed to persecute aliens and to abridge the 
civil rights of Americans. We endorse the Gavagan Anti- 
Lynching Bill now pending in Congress. We favor legis- 
lation to implement the Bill of Rights and to grant asylum 
to political refugees; and we favor the valuable work of 
the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee and urge in- 
creased appropriations for it. 

We demand the discontinuance of the Dies Committee 
because it has violated all the fundamental principles 
of the Bill of Rights which was designed to protect the 
individual from such inquisitions and because it has failed 
to accomplish the end for which it was created.° 


III. CONCLUSION 


In 1940 we face many problems testing the soundness 
of democracy and the ability of the American Federa- 
tion of Teachers as a functioning part of our American 
democracy to support and extend it. We have faith in 
our purpose and in our members to meet the situation— 
to defeat retrenchment, to preserve civil liberties and to 
keep America out of war. 

Affiliated with Labor, staunch in our support of democ- 
racy and the public school as a significant implement of 
democracy, we face a new year and a new decade con- 
fident of success. 


*For description of bills see Legislative Report, 1939 Con- 
vention. 

*The Model Bill Bureau of the American Federation of Teachers 
will send to all locals this year a model retirement bill. 

"See “Executive Council Resolution on Dies Committee” in the 
January AMERICAN TEACHER, page 35 














What Should Our Children Inherit? 


J. Abner Peddiwell, Ph. D. 


HE FUMBLED with his Phi Beta Kappa key and 
peered anxiously through his thick-lensed spectacles. 
“TI was looking for an answer,” he said humbly. 

“Uh-huh,” said the Devil, “and then you were hit by 
a truck. That’s why you're here.” 

“But I didn’t see any truck.” 

“Of course not. That’s how you got hit.” 

“Well—ah—I still need an answer.” 

“What do you want to know?” 

“T want to know what our children should inherit.” 

“Humph! Funny question. What were you, a lawyer?” 

“Lawyer? Were? No, I am a professor.” 

“You were a professor. Professor of what?” 

“Professor of education. But why do you say were? 
I’m still a professor, I hope.” 

The Devil smiled grimly. “Not here, you aren’t. Since 
you crossed the river back there you’re not a professor. 
You're just a soul, a soul stripped bare of the flummery 
and doo-dads which men commonly use to cover up 
their ignorance—and their sins.” 

“‘What—why—” stammered the professor. ‘““You mean 
I—I’m...” 

“Sure,” said the Devil, “you were dead before you hit 
the ground.” 

“But in that case I must be in...” The professor 
hesitated modestly. “You’re here—at the gate. You 
aren’t—are you—-ah—St. Peter?” 

“Oh, no,” the Devil laughed. ‘Much obliged for the 
compliment. I’m the head man here—really only just 
a chairman, however. Thank badness this is one place 
where we still have true democracy. Of course we have 
to have an administrative head like any other organiza- 
tion, and I have been an administrator so long that I 
must take the lead in policy making and policy executing. 
You should see the committees we have working—com- 
mittee on methods, committee on tenure, committee on 
the activity program, and a very fine committee on evalua- 
tive criteria—temperatures, you know—latest stuff.” 

The professor was visibly shocked. “You mean—you 
can’t mean I’ve actually gone to... ” 

“Sure you have. Why not? It’s no disgrace. We have 
some of the worst people here. Our entrance require- 
ments are not so rigid as those of another place, but 
after all we do pride ourselves on our activities and 
on our democratic tradition and procedures.” 

The professor pulled a neatly folded handkerchief from 
his breast pocket and wiped his forehead. “I had noticed 
it was warm,” he said agitatedly, “but I had no idea it 
was because I had gone to .. . ” He paused, visibly 
embarrassed by his proximity in flesh and in language 


” 


10 










to a place which he never mentioned save under appro- 
priate stress of anger. 

“Why don’t you go ahead and say it?” the Devil asked 
impatiently. “There’s nothing profane about a mere place 
name, is there?” 

The professor jammed his handkerchief into a moist 


ball. “Well—er—I suppose not—at least when one is 
there. But isn’t there any way out? Do I have to stay 
here? I have a number of engagements—some studies I 
have promised to complete—and that question I men- 
tioned to you. I wanted that for a speech I have to make.” 

“Now, now,” said the Devil soothingly. “Don’t take it 
so hard. I know this place has a bad reputation. Many 
people think it is just a prison, but actually it is much 
more than that. It is a clinic, a guidance center, a testing 
bureau, a division of research and—well, I sometimes say, 
more or less jokingly, of course, that it is really a lot like 
an adult education center or even a university.” 

“That’s astonishing,” commented the professor. “I 
always thought this was a—a... ” 

“A hell of a place? I know. Go ahead and say it. You 
can’t hurt my feelings. And in a certain sense it is hell 
here. It should be. We have to provide that service too. 
You will see what I mean as you go through the grind. 
First of all we must examine some of your basic ideas. 
If you were a doctor, we’d diagnose your difficulties. 
If you were a lawyer, we’d try you. Since you're a 
professor of education, however, we'll put you in a panel 
discussion. We do that with all men in your field.” 

“Ah, do they all come here?” 

“Well, yes, practically all of them. Step this way, 
please. The panel is waiting.” 

“What do I have to do?” 

“Just act as a member of the group. You know what 
a panel discussion is.” 

“Yes. I have served on them. In fact I have organized 
them, even presided .. . ” 

“All right, then. You know what to do.” 

“But—er—for this purpose—a panel discussion—isn’t 
it liable to be—ah—vague and—maybe controversial and 
everyone exhibiting his pet prejudices—and no one hav- 
ing very many facts—and no real direction of the dis- 
cussion and... 

“Why, certainly,” admitted the Devil with a touch of 
asperity. “What do you expect? Remember where you 
are.” 

The Devil introduced his victim brusquely. “This man 
thinks he has an educational question,” he announced. 

The members of the panel rose from their seats around 
the conference table and, one by one, solemnly shook 


” 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 














AES * 


hands with the professor. 

“An educational question?” said the man with the 
mathematical nose. “You have come to the right place.” 

“Tf our answers will only fit your frame of reference,” 
modestly added the man with the social expression. 

“We don’t know a thing—and we don’t need to.. All 
we can and will do is to feel and express,” warned the 
man with the artistic gleam in his eye. 

The stubby-faced man said nothing. 

The Devil waved the professor into a vacant chair, and 
they all sat down. 

“Well, now,” said the Devil, “unless somebody else 
wants to do it, I'll just act as chairman to save time. 
What’s this question you have to propose?” 

The professor swallowed embarrassedly. “Why——-er— 
I want to know what our children should inherit.” 

“There you are, gentlemen,” explained the Devil. 
“That’s his question, and I don’t mind saying that it 
sounds funny to me. What should our children inherit? 
What should they inherit but what we have to leave them? 
That’s all there is to it. That’s a simple answer to a very 
simple question. I don’t see what there is to discuss.” 

“Nonsense,” snapped the man with the mathematical 
nose belligerently. “It is a very sound question and a 
profound one. It is not a simple question, but your 
answer, sir, is simple, so simple as to be ridiculous, if you 
don’t mind my saying so.” 

“Oh, not at all, not at all,” said the Devil beamingly. 
“Thank badness there is left one place where we can 
have free and untrammeled democratic discussion. Go 
right ahead and tell us what’s on your mind.” 

“Thank you,” said the man with the mathematical nose. 
“The question is an excellent one, and I am of course 
prepared to answer it. We do not want our children to 
inherit everything we have. We want them to inherit only 
our goods and not our ills. Even in the most primitive 
of cultures, moreover, men commonly recognize that the 
best and indeed the only important inheritance they can 
give their children is not one of material things but one 
of the mind and the spirit. When men become civilized 
they know that a trained mind, a disciplined spirit, is the 
best inheritance they can give. So they establish schools 
by which they transmit the distilled wisdom of the ages. 
That is the answer.” 

“Ah, yes,” said the man with the social expression, 
“but the question of what this inheritance shall be is not 
merely an academic, a pedagogical matter. It is society 
itself which has to answer the question; it is society 
which has to transmit the inheritance, and the way in 
which society answers the question determines in the 
long run whether its children are going to have good 
bread or ground-up twigs to eat, whether they are going 
to live and learn, warm and secure, or die in mangled 
heaps with the grip of fear on their hearts at the moment 
of their extinction.” 

“Bosh,” said the man with the mathematical nose. 
“Society! The next thing we know you will be talking 
about democracy. We must give our children the ability 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


to use symbols—language and mathematics. We must 
make them familiar with the words of the great men of 
the past. We must have them memorize poetry. Thus 
we shall discipline their minds, give them strong and 
keen instruments with which to order their lives. If they 
decide to have democracy, dictatorship, autocracy, com- 
munism, that is their look-out. We have done our part. 
Let them go where they will.” 

“But how do you know what will best train their 
minds?” asked the professor. 

“The tried experience of the schools,” answered the 
man with the mathematical nose. “That is why we should 
not teach them about current problems, the recent, the 
ephemeral things. To know what Plato said will help 
make them wise; to know the relief situation in their own 
city may help to make them only foolish agitators.” 

“It was the tried experience of the schools which per- 
petuated for men the worst forms of their ignorance,” 
said the man with the social expression. “No school 
system which has been committed to teaching only the 
tried wisdom of the schools has ever escaped dry rot. 
The finest example of such a system was the Chinese 
educational system under the old empire, but the systems 
of Western Europe have often come fairly close to that 
ideal. The German gymnasium went peacefully on its 
way training boys’ minds according to the tried experience 
of the schools, and along came an Austrian revolutionist 
and set up a new system of modifying German behavior, 
not in terms of the Amabasis but in terms of the treaty 
of Versailles, not in terms of what the Greeks did under 
Xenophon yesterday, but in terms of what the Germans 
were going to do under Adolph Hitler tomorrow.” 

“You are both wrong and both right,” said the man 
with the artistic gleam in his eye. “It is true that we 
must use the old experience of the race, but it is false 
that we must use it in a traditional school fashion. It is 
true that we must make our children familiar with the 
problems of contemporary society, but it is false that we 
can show them how to change that society. What we 
should give them for inheritance is something much 
greater and more useful than a mind trained to follow a 
traditional school pattern, however, or a purpose to reform 
society in this or that particular way. We must give them 
developed, integrated, many-sided personalities. We must 
allow and encourage them to grow freely, naturally, to 
express themselves in words, line, rhythm, tone, color and 
form not for the sake of the training in expressional skills 
but for the sake of the personalities which are expanded 
and enriched in the expressional process.” 

The stubby-faced man said nothing. 

The professor looked bewildered. 

‘Let me draw a few loose ends together,” said the Devil, 
smiling impartially as a democratic chairman should. 
“Can’t we agree on these three points: we should give 
our children trained minds, we should give them an 
understanding of current social problems, and we should 
give them well developed personalities?” 

(Continued on page 18) 








Teachers in the Crisis 


Goodwin Watson 


IN TIMES like these, we confront the basic question 
which has concerned earnest men in every critical period 
of history: ‘What is to be done?” It is impossible to 
prescribe in detail any program of action. Each of us 
will necessarily implement our general understanding in 
terms of our specific abilities and opportunities. What 
we do will depend in considerable measure upon what 
our situation permits us to do. We can, however, try 
to come to a common understanding of the nature of this 
crisis and the urgency of the claims that are made upon 
us. We live, as a colleague of mine suggested in the 
opening exercises of Columbia University, in an “Indian 
summer of tolerance.” Many of us feel that there is now 
a lull before a storm. We would suppress any impulse to 
panic, keep cool, use our heads and do the most needful 
things in the most intelligent way. 

To most readers of newspaper headlines, the term 
“crisis” would seem to refer to the great European war 
on the threshold of which nations are poised. We shall 
not discuss the war to any great extent, however, because 
it is not in itself the crisis but only a symptom of our 
deeper problems. The existence of the war challenges 
us but its outcome need not so greatly concern us. It is 
true that we are not neutral in thought or action. The 
recent press treatment of the struggle in Finland illustrates 
how completely our news service is at the disposal of 
one side. It is probable that we are now prepared 
to do all that the British and French High Command 
really want by way of support from America. When, 
however, we look ahead to the probable peace, it is hard 
to mobilize any high idealistic enthusiasm. Perhaps a 
compromise may soon be found in which, for example, 
Hitler would retire and a government such as Schacht 
would create might replace him. Or perhaps the war will 
go through its tragic course, exhausting the German peo- 
ple, breaking their morale, until again they have lost 
faith and hope. Then a government will be set up which 
is acceptable to the ruling class in Britain, of which Mr. 
Chamberlain is a perfect symbol. Perhaps a monarch 
will be restored, but the power behind the throne will be 
such as to prevent any threat to the economic interests 
of the capitalistic world. Whatever the form of treaty 
that follows peace, whether it come early or late, we 
can be sure that it will not lay the foundations for in- 
ternal stability in Germany or international peace in the 
world. It is obvious enough, I suppose, that the de- 
termination of the conditions of life after the peace will 
rest with those who control the great bulk of the world’s 
resources. Brooks Emeny tells us that we in the United 
States have half of them, the British Empire has another 


12 


25 per cent, and if we add to the Hitler opposition, as 1 

am inclined to believe we should, the vast resources of 

the Soviet Union, it is clear enough that the Germans 
have only the alternative of accepting a dictated peace 
now or later. 

In the background of the war there are other conflicts 
which represent a more fundamental cleavage in our cul- 
ture. They manifest themselves in the United States 
as truly as in Europe or Asia. It is with these more basic 
issues that teachers should be most concerned. 

We may approach them through a generalization from 
social psychology. In physics there is a law that every 
action creates an equal and opposite reaction. The reac- 
tion in the field of social forces may be greater or less, 
but every movement of social change includes a corre- 
sponding reactionary impulse. The usual pattern of so- 
cial reformation seems to be: 

(1) Inauguration of the movement by a little handful 
of people who have been stirred by a vision and 
who are regarded by their fellows as extremists, 
radicals and impractical idealists. 

(2) A period of slow and inconspicuous growth. 

(3) A period of popularization when the movement 
gathers great momentum. 

(4) At this time, the inertia of those who have been 
opposed to the change gives way to alarm and an 
organized opposition is set up. 

(5) A period of conflict ensues between the original 
movement and the now thoroughly aroused oppo- 
sition. Success at this point depends upon carry- 
ing the middle group who have not previously allied 
themselves with either faction. 

This social pattern probably sounds familiar enough, 
but liberals and progressives have often been taken una- 
wares when the counter-movement began to show strength 
and the conflict loomed ahead. Often it has seemed to us 
that we had overcome the difficulty in starting an en- 
terprise, had gone through the slow period of building 
the necessary organization, had swung into the period of 
rapid growth, and that at last the main problems had been 
solved, and that there would be clear sailing ahead. It 
is hard when everything is just beginning to go better 
than it ever has before to recognize that the opposition is 
being built up by this very success. It is dismaying to 
realize that what has looked like smooth-flowing evolu- 
tionary progress necessarily involves a transition to a 
period of struggle. So hard has it been for many to learn 
this social fact that they enter each new forward move- 
ment with the hope that at last they have mounted a 
social escalator which will bring steady and unimpeded 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 











progress. The lesson of history seems to be that whether 
the struggle is for Protestantism, the emergence of the 
business system from feudalism, the founding of the 
American republic, the abolition of slavery, the organi- 
zation of labor, or any other great social advance, the 
incoming tide always creates a powerful undertow. 

Let us examine the implications of this thesis within 
education itself. Progressives may well be delighted with 
the advance of the progressive education movement in the 
United States in recent years. What began as the effort 
of a few struggling experimental schools is permeating the 
philosophy of many great city public school systems. With 
substantial grants, many commissions are working out 
materials which will help young people face the vital prob- 
lems of their daily living. Many of us have been thrilled 


by the rapid growth in numbers and in power of the | 


American Federation of Teachers. Are we sufficiently 
aware that it is just because these movements do appear 
to be entering a stage of rapid popular acceptance that 
those who imagine themselves threatened must at this time 
cease to rely upon the conservative nature of this and 
every culture to check any such innovation? As influence 
rises, so will a movement to take us back to the good old 
days. 

Where do we see this today? We see it in the report 
of the Committee on Education from the New York 
State Chamber of Commerce which points out that too 
much culture is likely to lead to disintegration of our 
society and urges that the responsibility of the state for 
the education of the mass of its under-privileged ends with 
the liquidation of illiteracy. These men, like other lead- 
ers in business, finance and real estate, look back long 
ingly to the low per capita costs of the schools of the 
Nineteenth Century. Allied with them in influence, if not 
in intent, are those leaders like Hutchins, Adler, Barr, and 
Buchanan who are ready to abandon objectives of person- 
ality development in education, and who seem to escape 
from current controversies by retreat to a curriculum of 
classical books. There are textbook writers who advertise 
today their reaction against progressive trends and their 
return to safe and sane essentialism. Behind all such lead- 
ers will march a rank and file reactionary movement made 
up of administrators and teachers who find it easier to coast 
in the old ruts, of manufacturers of texts and school sup- 
plies who wish to continue to market their old products 
and of parents who have never been helped to understand 
what we mean by progressive education. The ranks of 
the opposition will be swelled too by those who have 
been antagonized by our inevitable mistakes as we pioneer 
in new adventures. 

Some battles have already been lost in this struggle. 
One of the more costly was the closing of the experi- 
mental program for the education of teachers which had 
been developed at New College. It is not at all unlikely 
that the movement of reaction will be joined in this 
country, as it was in Germany, by a political movement 
which is anti-intellectual. Any clean sweep of what 
many regard as the fantastic impractical ideals of the New 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


Deal will certainly include much of the “education for 
democracy” which we have fostered in our progressive 
schools. 

What, then, must be our program? First we must do 
our job well, but we must recognize that skillful classroom 
teaching is not enough. Some of the ablest teachers of our 
generation worked in the progressive experimental schools 
of Germany during the 1920’s. Their educational ideals 
were swept aside, not because of their personal incompe- 
tence, but because of the lack of an organization broad 
enough and strong enough to sustain their advance. Be- 
hind the program of educational advance in the United 
States, we would like to see an organization including all 
those who are concerned with the welfare of all the chil- 
dren of all the people. Unfortunately there is no such 
organization. Political parties, religious groups and edu- 
cational associations commonly represent only minorities. 
The nearest approach to an organization which may po- 
tentially include us all in effective cooperation is that which 
represents those who work. The organization of labor is 
potentially our most inclusive American pressure group. 

There are many other areas in which we might apply 
our fundamental thesis. The New Deal, for example, has 
brought many reforms with such amazing ease that those 
who approve them have perhaps failed to calculate the 
undertow. With every advance of labor has come the tend- 
ency that manifested itself in the Oregon laws to curb 
labor. With every advance in social security payments 
goes increasing apprehension over taxes and government 
debt. America’s melting pot tradition has made it possible 
for minority racial and national groups to advance, but 
whenever they advance into positions which arouse the 
envy of other groups in the population, some emotional 
reactions are set up which would seek to swing the pen- 
dulum in the other direction. Those who backed the 
movements of technocracy and other blueprint utopias 
of six years ago little realized in their enthusiasm that the 
backwash would lead to suspicion and discredit the whole 
idea of social planning. This brings us close to another 
and a deeper crisis which we must consider. 

Underlying the struggles in education, politics, race re- 
lations and the war programs of the world today is a 
crisis in our fundamental institution. One of the most 
eminent sociologists of our generation, Robert S. Lynd, 
remarked recently that the basic institution of American 
life is not the school, is not the church, and is not the 
family. Whenever there is a clear conflict between the 
welfare of any of these institutions and the demands of 
business, we recognize that making a living comes first. 
Ours is, as James Truslow Adams has well named it, a 
business civilization. We find that experimental and 
progressive schools and colleges can be established for 
girls much more easily than for boys. Why? Is it not 
because boys must be trained for the hard life of competi- 
tive business enterprise? There is a feeling that the 
newer educational programs might make them “soft,” 
give them dangerous ideas, or dissipate their energies in 
competing interests. One business man put it this way: 


13 











“We know that boys have got to be fitted to go after 
what they want and to get it in a hard daily struggle, 
but we*want them to act genteel in the evening.” 

There are other evidences of the primacy of our economic 
life. When we ask a child “What are you going to be?” 
he understands at once that we do not refer to his char- 
acter, his intellectual interests, his love life, or his religion. 
He thinks at once in terms of his job. Business pays most 
of the pipers and calls most of the tunes. 

Other aspects of our society may undergo change and 
have only a minor impact upon the structure of the whole. 
Not so with business. Our business civilization is im- 
mersed today in a long-term crisis and everything else in 
our culture from its food supply to its human life and 
spiritual values undergoes disturbances. I hope that the 
upsurge of production and profits in recent months will 
not obscure for teachers the fact that the basic problems 
of our economic life are still unsolved. Our total pro- 
ductive plant which might turn out 150 billion dollars 
worth of goods and services will not operate much above 
half of that level. Millions will remain unemployed or 
under-employed. The dividends paid from the present 
boom will add to the supply of idle funds which for ten 
long years have been waiting in vain for an opportunity 
to find profitable investment. The funds cannot be re- 
invested in new factories because our society is unable 
to use the output of the old ones. Even if we ship the 
products of our forests, farms, mines and labor abroad 
to be destroyed in warfare, we shall have in exchange 
scraps of paper or bags of gold in the hills of Kentucky, 
but a lower standard of living than we might have had. 
The basic problem is not solved until all our resources 
are being used continuously, in such a way as not to waste 
or exhaust them but to raise the standard of living. 

There are, as you know, many proposals and few 
panaceas. Some would raise wages, others would increase 
public spending, and still others hope to restore consuming 
power by greatly increasing the incomes of the aged. 
Others maintain that it would be wiser to increase our 


consuming power by lowering prices. Some point to 
the need to break up monopolies and other business forms 
which have maintained price levels in spite of falling 
demand. The real conflict is not between one of these 
remedies and another, but between those who recognize 
that the old ways will no longer work and those who want 
to go back and try to repeat the patterns of an economic 
era that is closed. In the nominating conventions of both 
major parties, the essential struggle will not be over which 
planks to put into the platform, but over the question as to 
whether the new rules shall be called off and we shall go 
back to the attempt to play the old game. On the one side 
are arranged all those forces which fear that any significant 
change will reduce their power to control economic devel- 
opments and therefore political destiny; on the other hand 
are arranged those who have directly or vicariously suffered 
enough to conclude that no man may any longer be free to 
manipulate any part of our vast economic machinery for 
personal advantage when that works against the general 
welfare. This takes us directly into the very citadel of 
control, into the powerhouse of our civilization. 

It is clear enough that in a struggle of these dimensions 
we shall have to think in terms of the contribution of the 
greatest social forces we know over a considerable period 
of time. We shall distrust the person who feels that he 
can work out a solution in his own head and console him- 
self with the stupidity of the rest of the world for not 
adopting it. We shall have to work in organizations or 
accept frustration and futility. Our own wisdom needs 
to be supplemented by the counsel of our colleagues and 
our strength by their supporting arms. When the forces 
of progress create their inevitable reactionary pull, the 
issue will be determined in considerable degree by our 
success in building organizations of those who are ready 
to move forward. Sharing our experiences and insights, 
counseling with one another, the members of the American 
Federation of Teachers stand shoulder to shoulder in a 
union which replaces the neurosis of individual lamentation 
by the creative strength of cooperation in a common cause. 


Educating the Administrator 


Ralph Tyler 


IT IS MY INTENTION in discussing administration to 
emphasize the educational function of the school as the 
central factor. The co-ordination of educational activi- 
ties has as its central purpose more effective educational 
achievement and not merely a smoother-running machin- 
ery. The provision of resources, finances, materials, and 
personnel has also as its guiding purpose the facilitation 
of the educational program. There is nothing inherently 


14 


desirable in spending more money or less money for the 
schools, or having budgets handled in one fashion rather 
than in another, or in planning the schedules in one way 
rather than in another, except in so far as each of these 
procedures improves the educational program of the school. 
Fundamentally, administration has no standards excepting 
educational standards. The organization and co-ordina- 
tion of activities, the obtaining of funds, of personnel, and 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 








the formation of schedules are necessary and important 
school functions. However, they are to be judged in terms 
of their effect upon the educational program rather than 
in terms of material efficiency or financial economy as ends 
in themselves. 

I find it helpful to review the mass of writing which has 
accumulated over the centuries relating to the ideal of 
democracy. In these statements, four characteristics ap- 
peal to me as the most significant aspects of a democratic 
process. The first of these is the emphasis that persons 
as individuals are the ends of human activity and are 
not to be conceived as means, as pawns to be moved 
about on the chess board of life. There is always tempta- 
tion to become engrossed in the system so that the smooth- 
ness of the action of the organization becomes in itself 
a satisfying goal. Democratic leadership re-emphasizes 
the importance of considering the effect of every activity 
upon each human being involved. In the case of school 
activities this means a primary interest in the effect upon 
individual teachers, individual pupils, individual parents, 
and individuals within the community who are involved 
in one way or another with the work of the school. 

A second essential characteristic of democratic procedure 
is the opportunity for wide participation of all the inter- 
ested persons in the formulation of purposes, in the plan- 
ning of activities, in the execution of the plans, and in the 
appraisal and replanning. Persons grow and live more 
satisfying and fuller lives as they have opportunity to par- 
ticipate more widely in various social groups and in all 
of the phases of the activities of these social groups. When 
one is assigned a particular job for which all of the duties 
have been specifically laid out, for which one bears no 
responsibility in planning and in appraising one’s efforts, 
the possibility of growth is greatly diminished. Further- 
more, one’s interest in the process is likely to diminish 
through the years rather than to increase. On the other 
hand, participation even in a small way in planning and 
appraisal gives one a continually broader vision of the 
significance of his work, of its complexity, and of the 
possibility of further improvement. It gives greater zest 
to the job and an increased satisfaction in carrying such 
work forward. Democratic leadership therefore seeks con- 
tinually to provide opportunities for wider participation on 
the part of teachers, pupils, parents, and other interested 
community members in the varied activities of the school 
—in its educational philosophy, in its objectives, in the cur- 
riculum, and in the processes of evaluation and appraisal 
of the educational outcomes. 

A third characteristic of democratic procedure is the 
encouragement of variability—that is, of individuality or 
uniqueness. There is, of course, a certain kind of satis- 
faction in living in a homogeneous group in which every 
one has the same standards of value, the same ideas, the 
same interests, and holds the same prejudices. However, 
I believe this to be the antithesis of democracy. In some 
respects it may be more uncomfortable to live with peo- 
ple who hold various views, to listen to persons who are 
always conceiving novel ideas, and to be continually sub- 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


jected to influences which require a reconsideration of 
one’s own patterns of values and methods of work but the 
potentialities for improvement of any group lie in the de- 
gree of freshness, of originality, and of the uniqueness of its 
members. Some degree of uniformity and standardization 
of action is necessary for survival but within wide limits in- 
dividuality should be encouraged and conflicting ideas pre- 
sented for examination, for reconsideration, and for ten- 
tative trial. This is, perhaps, the most difficult aspect 
of democracy to safeguard. The Bill of Rights, the first 
ten amendments to our federal constitution, represents one 
important effort to safeguard some of the fundamental 
ways in which individuality may be expressed, that is, 
through freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly. 

As a school system becomes larger, the desire to or- 
ganize the activities of the school in such a way that they 
may run more smoothly and be administered most “effi- 
ciently” conflicts with this ideal of individuality which 
would give teachers and pupils a considerable degree of 
initiative in experimenting with a variety of approaches. 

Society’s ultimate safeguard against disintegration when 
variability and uniqueness are encouraged lies in the fourth 
essential characteristic of a democratic procedure, namely, 
faith in human intelligence. An undemocratic society seeks 
to control human activities through the formation of rigid 
standards and through a hierarchy of authorities. The 
truth of ideas, the rightness of conduct, and the desira- 
bility of procedures are judged in terms of these stand- 
ards and in terms of their acceptance or rejection by the 
constituted authorities. In a democracy we believe that 
the truth of ideas, the desirability of human conduct, and 
the worth of procedures can be determined by intelligent 
examination of their implications and of their conse- 
quences; that by the encouragement of critical think- 
ing on the part of its members, by increasing the under- 
standing of relevant factors, and by continued reflection 
and re-examination of basic ideas and values, men can 
solve their problems. This means that continued educa- 
tion is essential to any democratic society. 

This concept of faith in intelligence entails a continu- 
ing program of education of teachers and of community 
members. Educational problems are best solved not by 
a set of rules and regulations to be rigidly followed but 
by conscious efforts to help every one concerned to get a 
more intelligent understanding of these problems, by 
encouraging the re-examination of the educational philoso- 
phy of the school, and by providing opportunity for an 
intelligent study of school procedures. 

This concept of democratic leadership and administra- 
tion for the education of administrative officers leads me 
to discuss elements not usually included in the training 
program for school administrators. Of the main elements 
which seem to me neglected in the usual training program 
for administrators, I should like to mention four which 
seem worthy of emphasis. The first of these is derived 
from the fact that administration is so largely concerned 
with human values. I realize that school administrators 
must deal with many material aspects of their work. To 


15 

















obtain financial resources, to make budgets, to purchase 
materials, to plan and build buildings, and to distribute 
supplies and equipment are problems which administra- 
tors must learn to solve, and their training must touch 
upon these matters. Basically, however, the solution to 
these problems is not acceptable unless it promotes the 
schools’ educational effectiveness and has a salutary effect 
upon the human beings concerned. Hence, basic in the 
training of administrators for democratic leadership must 
be the study of human beings: how they develop, their 
abilities, their interests, their motivation, and the relation 
of physiological factors, of social factors, and of emotional 
factors to their development. A training program for 
administrators, it seems to me, should include ample op- 
portunity for the study of human growth and develop- 
ment through a study of both children and adults. A 
laboratory school and a child development laboratory are 
as essential to the education of administrators as they are 
to the education of teachers. With an understanding of 
child development and of human beings, administrators 
can provide opportunities for the continued education of 
teachers in service. Otherwise there is danger that the 
teachers will be unable to utilize what ideas they have 
about child development and that there will be little op- 
portunity for them to continue to develop in this field. 

An interesting application of this idea is available from 
the experience of the Kellogg Foundation, which is devot- 
ing a portion of its resources in helping to develop the 
educational programs in some seven rural counties in 
Michigan. A survey of these counties revealed the fact 
that many of the schools were not vitally affecting the 
children and it was inferred that much of the difficulty 
was due to the lack of understanding of children upon 
the part of the teachers and of the administrators. The 
Foundation arranged for a training period one summer in 
which administrators from a number of the schools were 
brought to the University of Michigan, where for six 
weeks, under the leadership of Professor Willard Olson, 
these administrators participated in the work of the child 
development laboratory observing children, discussing and 
interpreting what they had observed, reading reports of 
other child development studies to assist them in this in- 
terpretation and understanding, and finally discussing 
the implications of what they had learned for the ad- 
ministration of their own schools. The foundation re- 
ports that these administrators were uniformly enthusiastic 
about the experience and that its effect upon the schools 
in these seven counties has been marked. Of course, the 
Foundation also arranged to have such experiences made 
available to teachers, but it is significant that the initial 
training program was set up for the administrators. 

At the University of Chicago we have excellent facilities 
for the study of child development and of human growth 
and development at the adult level. These facilities can 
and should be made available for the training of admin- 
istrators so that they in turn will be able to deal more 
effectively with the human aspects of their work. 
Administrators would also benefit from an opportunity, 











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under leadership, to reconsider their whole scheme of 
social, educational, and personal values. Probably this 
might be thought of as the study of educational and social 
philosophy but it is not the usual sort of philosophy in 
which one traces historically the development of systematic 
philosophy. Perhaps we might refer to this experience 
as the study of functional philosophy. 

Since democratic administration is based upon a faith 
in human intelligence and in the belief that the better 
one understands the implications and the consequences 
of his activities the better they will become, it would 
seem that a second major element in the education of 
administrators involves the study of those fields which 
give a better understanding of some of the basic problems 
of the school. Some of the basic problems faced by ad- 
ministrators cannot be adequately understood without a 
comprehension of the material which does not usually fall 
within the department of education. In the field of sociol- 
ogy, for example, a good deal of material is available 
regarding the community, regarding social groups, regard- 
ing social ideals, and the 
educational influences of 
agencies other than the 
school. Such material, if 
carefully selected, can make 
an important contribution 
to the administrator through 
the better understanding of 
his activities. In similar 
fashion, problems relating 
to taxation, salaries, and 
expenditures have economic 
aspects which can be better 
understood when one has 
some conception of the 
economic life and economic 
problems of contemporary 
society. Furthermore, the 









































organization of the school and its relation to other 
political organizations involve problems which are better 
understood by those who have some comprehension of 
public administration and of the field of political science. 
I am not suggesting a certain number of courses in 
each of these fields but I am suggesting a careful 
selection of material from these several fields properly or- 
ganized as part of the training of administrators. 

A third essential of democratic leadership is an extensive 
opportunity during the training period for the adminis- 
trator to participate in a variety of educational activities 
with teachers, pupils, parents, and other community mem- 
bers. This is advisable since often administrators have 
difficulty in the give-and-take of democratic activity be- 
cause they lack confidence in their own ability to deal with 
the problems that are being faced by the staff. For exam- 
ple, they may feel that they do not know how to attack 
curriculum problems and hence they fear a free discus- 
sion which might bring out their own ignorance. They 
believe that the respect of the staff is partly due to illu- 
sions about the knowledge and ability of the administrators. 
Under democratic leadership, mutual respect is built 
through recognizing the sincerity of the efforts put forth by 
those working on a common problem and from a recogni- 
tion that each has something important to contribute. It 
is not necessary that the administrator know more than his 
teachers in order to have their respect. But they must 
be able to recognize that he has a function and that he is 
sincerely working with them on common problems and 
is interested in their development and is trying to give 
opportunity for every one to participate. 

Difficulty in the give-and-take of democratic participa- 
tion also grows out of the fact that some administrators 
are not interested in the problems which concern the 
other members of the staff, but are engrossed with prob- 
lems of budget, of finance, of materials, and of politics. 
Democratic participation is difficult to build where there 
is lack of common concern and common interests. 

A third reason is the sheer lack of skill in working 
with other people. In such cases there may be no fear 





















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that the staff will show lack of respect or any lack of 
interest in common problems but the administrators do 
not know the ways by which groups can be most easily 
brought together and most harmoniously assisted to think 
and to work together. 


These three difficulties can be largely overcome if the 
training of administrators is not confined to classes, to 
reading, and to observation but includes opportunities for 
various types of participation. With a little effort many 
of our graduate schools could provide opportunity for 
administrators to work with teachers on curriculum prob- 
lems, on problems of guidance and of evaluation, to meet 
with parent groups, and to learn through such experiences 
how democratic processes of this sort can easily be car- 
ried on. This implies that any center for the training of 
administrators should also be a place where they can work 
with teachers, with pupils, with parents and with others. 


Finally, as the fourth aspect of the program, I should 
like to emphasize the importance of a training period for 
administrators which begins with pre-service education and 
continues throughout their professional life. As suggested, 
the pre-service preparation can include work with child 
development groups, study in the field of philosophy, of 
sociology, of economics, and of politics and special prob- 
lems of administration relating to organization, finances, 
selection of personnel, buildings and materials. Part of 
the pre-service education should be in the capacity of an 
administrative intern in a co-operative school system. 


It is clear, however, that the training period for ad- 
ministrators must be longer than any pre-service pro- 
gram whether one year or four years. The only means 
by which adequate training can be provided is through a 
continued in-service education. Graduate colleges which 
provide programs of training for administrators should 
assume the responsibility for a continued relationship with 
the school systems from which these administrators come. 
During the school year, the graduate colleges can pro- 
vide assistance in self-surveys, in helping to plan adminis- 
trative programs in giving some direction to special study, 
and in holding periodical conferences with the adminis- 
trators and with other members of the school staff. Dur- 
ing the summer, a more intensive experience can be pro- 
vided. The summer program should be planned to ex- 
tend through a series of years. As summer workshops are 
established in which teachers may attack some of their 
problems, administrators can work part of the time with 
the teachers in the workshop and then spend a portion of 
the time in considering the implications for administration 
which grow out of the programs being developed by the 
teachers. 


A virgin field for effective training for administrators 
awaits the co-operation of graduate colleges and of school 
systems. Representatives from both groups need to come 
together to consider the basic implications of democratic 
administration and to plan a long-time program for the 
better education of school administrators for democratic 
leadership. 


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What Should Our Children 
Inherit ? 
(Continued from page 11) 


“You have a passion for simplicity,” snorted the man 
with the mathematical nose. “It is this messing around 
with such questions as how the local fire department ought 
to be run that keeps the so-called progressive schools from 
giving the proper mind-training to their pupils. It is this 
dabbling with paint and projects that prevents children 
from knowing how to parse and diagram an ordinary 
sentence. Every time you try to make a world-saver of a 
child, you seem to produce a sloppy thinker who can’t 
learn trigonometry because he was never taught geometry. 
Every time you try to turn out a free and untrammeled 
personality, you seem more liable to get a dope or a 
criminal.” 

“J shall not address my further remarks to you,” the 
man with the social expression said stiffly, “but rather to 
our friend here who asked the original question. I have 
no objection to a child having a trained mind. I am 
merely convinced that his abilities are best developed by 
attacking difficulties which he and his society want and 
need to have solved.” 

“And I maintain,” said the man with the artistic gleam 
in his eye, “that the child must not be developed at all, 
in fact, cannot be developed. He is not developed—he 
develops. He is not developed by some school master with 
a nice, neatly ticketed and numbered set of distilled- 
wisdom-of-the-ages tools and devices or even by society. 
He develops himself, using the wisdom of the ages, the 
phenomena of social existence, anything, everything he 
needs in the process of growth.” 

The stubby-faced man said nothing. 

The professor looked more worried than ever. 





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The Devil smiled democratically and pulled his chair 
nearer to the professor. “They can go on like this for 
hours,” he whispered, “and what’s more, they will unless 
I stop ’em.” 

The man with the mathematical nose had started to 
repeat his arguments with a new vehemence. The man 
with the social expression was pretending to listen but 
was obviously rephrasing his next comment. The man 
with the artistic gleam in his eye did not pretend to listen 
but gazed idly about the room, waiting for his turn to 
make a statement which he knew so well that he did 
not need to rehearse it mentally. 

The stubby-faced man continued to say nothing. 

“Why doesn’t that one man say something?” whispered 
the professor. 

“Well, I don’t know,” replied the Devil. “I guess it’s 
because he’s got nothing to say.” 

“Is he always like this?” 

“T don’t know that either. This is the first time we’ve 
had him down here.” 

“Did he just—ah—has he just arrived from—is he 
like me,a... ?” 

“Oh, no. I don’t even know that he is dead. He was 
sent down as a representative on this panel from the other 
place up there. They always have one representative. 
Those other three who are doing all the talking are local 
boys. They know their stuff, such as it is, but this silent 
chap—. Of course, I don’t know. You want to hear 
him talk?” 

The professor nodded. The Devil waited for a break 
in the flow of argument and then cleared his throat for 
an opening. 

“We have had a wealth of discussion here,” he said, 
“and the issues have been clearly isolated and ably 
worked over. There is one member of the panel, however, 
who has not yet contributed to the discussion, and we 
all know he has a contribution to make. We'd like to 
hear from you, sir.” 

The stubby-faced man shifted uneasily in his chair 
and twisted his clasped hands without breaking them 
apart. “I—I don’t rightly know the terms being used,” 
he said apologetically. “I thought I might just listen and, 
you know, maybe learn a little—not that these gentlemen 
haven’t been saying a lot but just that I was never a 
school master and so I can’t understand everything.” 

“Oh, come on now,” urged the Devil heartily. “Thank 
badness we’re still democratic here, and every man has 
got to say his say whether he feels like it or not. Go ahead 
and give us your answer to this question of what our 
children should inherit.” 

“Certainly, go ahead,” said the man with the mathe- 
matical nose. The man with the social expression nodded 
approval. The man with the artistic gleam in his eye 
leaned forward, waiting. 

The stubby-faced man began slowly. “I have to tell 
the truth,” he said, “without cover of even a single word 
that is not needed to make it truth. Where I come from 
there is no shelter from the glare of truth. 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 




















“IT will not speak of schools; they are merely instru- 
ments. I will not speak of the wisdom of the ages; it is 
only a mumbo-jumbo for pedagogical medicine-men. I will 
not speak of society; it is a false idol that demands human 
sacrifice. I will not speak of precious personalities devel- 
oping as they may; they are the elements in an escapist 
game of psychological marbles. 

“IT will speak of men, young and old, men who can learn, 
men who can change their ways. For many hundreds of 
years they have changed their ways, sometimes with great 
speed and effect, sometimes slowly and fumblingly, some- 
times in the direction of the stars above their heads and 
sometimes in the direction of the dirt beneath their feet. 

“Nothing is sharper truth than that men change their 
ways for purposes, sometimes lofty, sometimes base, some- 
times clearly seen, sometimes muddled and muddy. The 
greatest hoax of the last two thousand years has been that 
perpetrated upon the world by formal systems of educa- 
tion which claimed to have no purposes outside themselves. 
They claimed to give men education for its own sake. 

“It is that kind of education today whose supporters say 
is not designed to prepare for citizenship in a democracy 
any more than in a dictatorship. Men who do not have 
purposes for their lives clearly enough in mind to know 
whether they want the masses of their fellows to order 
their own ways for their own benefit, certainly do not 
know enough to help change the ways of their fellow men 
intelligently. Their proposal to educate just for the sake 
of education is like that of the sailing master who, when 
his vessel was on a lee shore in a black storm, decided 
to go below and memorize a few more tables in his 
navigation textbook in the hope that it would make him 
a better seaman. 

“By education we give our people purposes, clear-cut 
and unshakeable. If we do not, we cheat them to pro- 
tect ourselves from the pain of recognizing and accept- 
ing goals for changing ways. Do we want children 
to starve because they were sent by God to the wrong 
side of the railroad tracks? Do we want the maternity 
death rate to be far higher than we know how to have it? 
Do we want to kill our fellow men, sometimes in dreary 
economic stealth and sometimes to the proud accom- 


FEBRUARY, 1940 











paniment of drums and ban- 
ners? If we do not want 
these purposes, we must set 
up the purposes we do want 
and follow them in the chang- 
ing of our own and our chil- 
dren’s ways. 

“By education we give our 
people motives, driving de- 
sires, to achieve their pur- 
poses. If we do not, we are 
merely playing a game for gentlemanly exercise instead 
of fighting to reach real goals. It is a superstition, 
developed by those afraid of a truly motivated changing 
of human ways, that education must be always coldly 
calm, balanced and unruffled by emotion. Learning that 
lasts, learning that shakes the foundation of men’s accus- 
tomed ignorance, is a learning white-hot with motiva- 
tion towards great goals. 

“An education like this cannot be given by schoolmas- 
ters in pedagogical corners. It must be given by men, 
old and young, men of all callings, men of all abilities, 
working together. The final and most priceless inheritance 
we can give our children is more willingness and skill in 
this working together to change their ways in the direc- 
tion of clearly-seen and strongly-desired goals.” 

The stubby-faced man fell once more into silence. His 
fellow panel-members spoke briskly again, battling for 
the chance to repeat themselves. 

“He made a speech,” apologetically whispered the 
Devil to the professor. ‘I would have stopped him, only, 
you know, a visitor and everything. They've got no really 
democratic procedures up there where he . . . Thank 
badness this is one place where we still have . . . .” 

“Certainly he made a speech,” interrupted the pro- 
fessor testily. “But look what he said!” 

“Ah, yes,” agreed the Devil whimsically, “and that, 
my friend, is the hell of it.” 

























| 
| 
| 
| 
| 


—— 















mong the 





New Books 








NEXT STEPS IN CONSUMER EDUCATION, Bulletin 
No. 1, Institute for Consumer Education. Columbia: In- 
stitute for Consumer Education, Stephens College. 189 
pages. $1.00. 

Consumers are banding together to make themselves heard 
as thinking contributors on the manufacturing-marketing-con- 
suming chain. They have found a need for information which 
will bring them out of the objector-doubter class into the 
realm of useful contributors. 

Education has accepted the challenge that this need pre- 
sents, and consumer education, that very new member of 
the curriculum family, has found its way into the educational 
planning of a great many communities. In the secondary 
schools and the colleges, in adult, vocational and workers’ 
education, consumer education has been tackled as one of 
the most “live” fields in which guidance and instruction are 
necessary. Many departments of the schools have assumed 
responsibility for the task, chief among these the home 
economics, social sciences and the commercial studies. 

To discuss the experiences gained over the last few years 
and to plan for the future, a national conference on con- 
sumer education was held early in April, 1939, which brought 
together 600 delegates from 31 states in the union. College 
and high school teachers, leaders of women’s clubs, govern- 
ment representatives, business men, magazine editors and offi- 
cials of testing agencies assembled at Stephens College to 
consider the theme, “Next Steps in Consumer Education.” 

The report of this first conference is issued as Bulletin 
No. I, August, 1939, Institute of Consumer Education, 
Stephens College, Columbia, Missouri. The Institute was 
started a little more than a year ago under John W. Cassels 
as director. The work of the conference is summarized by 
James E. Mendenhall, educational director. 

“Consumer Education, A National Necessity’ was the 
first paper of the conference and was delivered by Alfred P. 
Sloan, Executive Director of the Sloan Foundation which 
finances the Institute. Another speaker likened consumers to 
“voters who cast their ballots after dark in polling places to 
which little light is admitted and most of that artificial.” All 
agreed that consumers need much more “light” in the form of 
education. 

Consumption, it was noted, can be viewed upon three 
levels—purchasing, budgeting and economic statesmanship. 
The first two include such personal matters as wise buying 
of goods and careful planning of family expenditures. The 
last covers matters of broad social policy such as chain store 
taxation and internal trade barriers. To be complete and 
most effective, a program of education must inform people 
on all three levels of consumption. 

Much attention was paid to the schools. Consumer edu- 
cation, the discussion indicated, should go on from the kinder- 
garten through the high school or college and on into adult 
life. It is a never-ending process through which persons 
learn how to use their limited economic resources to better 
advantage. 

Speakers made an outstanding contribution through citing 
basic books and other materials which are especially valuable 
to those who are carrying on programs of consumer education. 
It was shown that an overwhelming proportion of available 
materials is suited for use only by the upper 10 per cent of 
our consuming population. An urgent plea was made to the 


20 


delegates to give special attention to the preparation of mate- 
rials for families compelled to live on low-income levels. 

The issue was raised regarding the relationship of consumer 
to producer groups. A number of speakers expressed a belief 
that consumers and producers should each form their own 
organizations independent of one another. One or two 
speakers declared, however, that no such separation should 
be encouraged. There appeared to be general agreement upon 
three points: (1) that consumers and producers have com- 
mon but not identical interests; (2) that at certain points 
and under certain conditions it is possible and desirable for 
them to work together, and (3) that consumers must make 
certain that their organizations and actions are designed to 
protect their own interests, broadly conceived. 

The final speaker stressed that consumers and their or- 
ganizations must perforce pay much more attention to the 
political and social trends of our times. In the short run, 
consumers must take account of the fact that their welfare 
is bound up with matters of legislation and its administra- 
tion. In the long run, they must recognize that the political 
trends may serve either to promote or to retard or even to 
destroy the work they are doing or are planning to do. 

GERTRUDE LUEHNING 


EDUCATION FOR DEMOCRACY, Proceedings of the 
Congress on Education for Democracy. New York: 
Bureau of Publications, Teachers College. 466 pages. $2.50 
In another essay I have classified the current literature on 

democracy—the flood of which, by the way, threatens to 

swamp interested reviewers—into three groups, namely, ser- 
mons on democracy, democratic misconceptions and con- 
fusions, and genuine contributions to the theory and practice 
of democracy under modern conditions. It seems to me that 
this volume, Education for Democracy, contains all three 
varieties. Of the thirty-three separate essays included it ap- 
pears that eight or ten may be considered as serious contribu- 
tions to democratic thought. Among these are addresses by 

Charles Beard, Frank P. Graham, T. V. Smith, Dorothy Can- 

field Fisher, Henry Sloane Coffin, Chris L. Christensen, Karl 

W. Bigelow, Mildred H. McAfee, and Josiah Stamp. The 

foreign participants were, on the whole, uncreative and dull 

in their presentations. Some speakers, while making no con- 
tribution to democratic conceptions as such, aided in clarify- 
ing certain basic issues. Thus, Anton Charles Pegis added 
some clarification to the position of the Roman Catholic 

Church with respect to the struggle for democracy, and Mr. 

H. W. Prentis, Jr., speaking as a representative of industry, 

revealed the great distance between his idea of democracy 

and that, for example, of Charles Beard. These are helpful 
distinctions and, if considered reasonably, they will also play 

a part in our emerging concept of democracy in the modern 

world. 

There seemed to me to be a somewhat nervous quality at- 
tached to this Congress on Education for Democracy, a kind 
of urgency which comes from crisis. I recall, for example, 
that I was lecturing at a teachers’ college far away when the 
president of the institution received a telegram inviting him 
to participate; the telegram arrived fully five months before 
the conference was held, but I still remember the grimness 
with which he set his teeth as he determined to attend, come 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


what may. I am happy to say that very little of this nervous- 
ness has found its way into the present volume. The con- 
ference was called for a sober purpose, namely, to sensitize 
educators to their responsibility for conserving and enhancing 
democracy in the United States. The formal addresses were 
intended, I presume, to do the sensitizing whereas the smaller 
seminars were designed to indicate what educators (and their 
lay colleagues) could and would do about it. Hence, from 
the educator’s point of view the seminar materials are more 
important than the speeches. Since many of the topics 
utilized by these seminars may find their way into textbooks, 
syllabi and educational discussions, it may be worth while 
to include them here. The seminars discussed the meaning 
of democracy, the influences which are changing democracy, 
education for citizenship, for economic life, for personal and 
family life, the adaptation of education to individual differ- 
ences, freedom of teaching, freedom of teachers, education 
and government, minorities, education by non-scholastic agen- 


cies, the study of foreign systems of government, population 
changes and ethical and religious education in a democracy. 
The sixteenth seminar made proposals for implementing the 
congress, and its members formulated a generalized affirma- 
tion concerning the purpose of education in a democracy, 
outlined seven “next steps” in education and suggested four 
ways by which the Congress is to be projected into the future. 

These are familiar themes; the questions which lie beneath 
these considerations will, no doubt, haunt democracies so 
long as there is belief in human progress. No advance will 
be made, so far as education is concerned, until we learn how 
to translate our democratic protestations into democratic be- 
havior. This cannot be achieved in conferences; if it happens 
at all, it will take place in administrative situations, in faculty 
meetings, in classroom exercises, in student self-government 
councils, in autonomous bodies of organized teachers (teachers’ 
unions) and in school board or trustee meetings. 

Epuarp C. LINDEMAN. 


Democracy and Higher Education 


An Educational Policies Committee Panel which was 
Presented to the AFT Convention at Buffalo, N. Y. 





George E. Axtelle 
Northwestern University 


THERE ARE two points I would like to make in introducing 
this panel. First, I would like to suggest that in its origins as 
well as its subsequent history, higher education has been voca- 
tional in character. What were the special preoccupations of 
the early European universities? The University of Salerno 
was devoted to the study of medicine. The University of 
Bologna to the study of law, the University of Paris to the 
study of theology. Similarly Oxford and Cambridge were 
devoted to theology. Other medieval universities were like- 
wise professional schools devoted to training for medicine, the 
law or the priesthood. A study of our early American univer- 
sities will reveal much the same story. 

How then, it may be asked, have we come to associate the 
university or college with the broadly cultural? Why have we 
come to think of them as so remote from the world of practical 
affairs? The British universities are commonly looked upon as 
a sort of finishing school for gentlemen. How does this fact 
accord with the propositions that Universities have been pri- 
marily vocational in character? The answer seems clear. 
What is practical for “gentlemen” is obviously not practical 
for “the many,” and since the word practical is associated with 
the activities and needs of the common man, it has acquired 
a negative value, particularly in the circle of “gentlemen.” 
The “gentleman” had an occupation, the occupation of ruling, 
of maintaining vested interests and privileges. We should 
therefore study his education in terms of his practical func- 
tions in fulfilling that role. Closer examination will reveal 
that the regimen and life of the British as of other universities 
were admirably designed to serve the vocational needs of a 
ruling class and their professional associates, soldiers, lawyers, 
doctors and clergy. 

With the advent of the sciences and advanced technology 
based upon the sciences we find higher institutions grudgingly 
giving place to them in their program of studies. In America 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


we find other occupational needs receiving more ready acknowl- 
edgment. 

The second point I would make is to call your attention to 
the great inertia of human institutions. I might use our Con- 
stitution as an illustration. Created to serve specific needs 
and functions peculiar to late eighteenth-century America, a 
sparcely-settled agrarian society, largely located along a thin 
strip of the eastern seaboard, it and the doctrines which it 
expressed continue today to dominate our political life under 
circumstances and needs as widely different as could be easily 
imagined. So with our institutions of higher learning. Estab- 
lished to serve the rather narrow occupational needs of ruling 
classes in a highly authoritarian and aristocratic agrarian 
society, their successors in America, a highly industrialized, 
urban, technological society dedicated to the democratic ideal, 
maintain much the same outlook and habits of thought. The 
administration, organization, program of study and methods 
of teaching appropriate to an aristocratic society and the 
needs and interests of their ruling classes carry over and dom- 
inate instruction in twentieth-century America. It should be 
obvious that under such circumstances our higher institutions 
betray the interests and needs of a democratic society. 

It is my conviction therefore that there is no more impor- 
tant movement in higher education than the growing conscious- 
ness of identity with the rest of society on the part of college 
university teachers. The finest expression of this conscious- 
ness is the growth of the College Section of the American 
Federation of Teachers. We have on this panel representatives 
from various fields who will discuss very briefly certain changes 
in outlook and procedure which occur when workers in higher 
institutions become conscious of their democratic responsibil- 
ities. 

The idea that higher education is merely “cultural” in the 
sense of not being practical has fostered an isolation of intelli- 
gence and appreciation from the main streams of the culture. 
Its apparent “disinterestedness” has actually often served as a 
cloak for aristocratic and non-democratic bias, and has done 
so in ways that were difficult to get at. Its insistance upon 
the ‘“‘cultural” as opposed to the practical has resulted in the 


2! 











drawing off of interest and systematic intelligence from the 
more urgent practical necessities of a democratic society. Its 
preoccupation with “culture” has usually been in the interests 
of cultures and groups far removed from the more urgent 
necessities of the modern scene and at the actual expense of 
what is vitally cultural. 

This panel can do but little more than state the problem 
of higher education in a democracy and democracy in higher 
education, citing implications in specific areas. When higher 
education takes seriously this problem it can stop nothing short 
of rebirth. 





Abraham Edel 
City College of New York 


MY PROBLEM may seem rather preliminary to the panel, but 
I think we will see very readily that the question of the ad- 
ministrative organization of colleges and universities is not 
purely an administrative question. It is bound up everywhere 
with educational issues. 

As you know, we are in the midst of a movement in this 
country for the democratization of institutions of higher learn- 
ing. This movement is gaining in force and strength. It is 
not a chance phenomenon but expresses certain insistent needs 
of the rank and file of college teachers today. On the one 
hand economic hardships and violations of their rights as teach- 
ers and as workers lead them to seek a share in the determina- 
tion of their working conditions; on the other hand, the recog- 
nition of the needs for changes in the very structure of tradi- 
tional education prompts them to seek a share in the de- 
termination of educational policies. They realize soon enough 
that their reflections on students needs, educational require- 
ments and even teaching methods will provide merely idle 
dreams where the government of higher education is a hide- 
bound aristocracy or even a benevolent despotism. Their ideas 
and plans can be efficacious only in a system of cooperative 
consideration of problems and democratic decision and exe- 
cution of policies. It is the double character of the whole 
issue—the needs engendered both by economic and educa- 
tional considerations—which makes the question of demo- 
cratic reorganization of American colleges so insistent today. 

You are no doubt familiar with some of the successes that 
the movement for democratizing college administration has 
achieved. At the city colleges in New York this last year 
the new system has been on the whole very successful. Em- 
bodying in departments the election of department chairmen 
for a three-year period and the control of policies by the 
department as a whole, including instructors, it has thrown 
initiative into the hands of the teachers themselves. Cur- 
ricular revision has been growing; interdepartmental coopera- 
tion is increasing; and there is a new spirit of constructive 
freedom. In the new and enlarged faculties (and their faculty 
councils) with their democratic committees, the new atti- 
tude is such as to break forever the conception that faculties 
are capable of dealing only with trifles that do not matter. 
The strains in the new system have occurred chiefly at the 
point of budgets and relations of faculties and trustees. The 
former is a wider problem; the latter difficulty may be dimin- 
ished by the setting up next year of regular faculty-trustee 
relations committees. In addition there has grown up the prac- 
tice of having a faculty committee aid in the selection of 
college presidents. 

We have found in discussing these questions in the Col- 
lege Section at this convention that there are going on through- 
out the country numerous attempts, formal and informal, to 
democratize various institutions. The very breadth of these 
attempts, from Kansas to Colorado to Northern New York, 


shows the need for concerted formulation of problems and 
exchange of experiences and hypotheses. It is to be hoped 
that the newly set-up College Section Committee on Democ- 
racy in Higher Education will fulfill this function. It is, I 
think, a fair estimate that there is embodied in these expe- 
riences a full-fledged program on the way in which the internal 
administration of colleges should be carried on, a program 
sufficiently clear, sufficiently attractive to the mass of college 
teachers to enable our locals to develop campaigns, gathering 
eventually tremendous strength. 

On one question we have not as yet a well thought-out 
program, although the direction is clear enough. I refer to 
the composition and constitution of boards of trustees, an issue 
raised in the case of Dr. Fisher which was discussed here the 
other day. The importance of challenging eventually the 
autocratic control of higher education at its very source is 
clear to us all. The solution lies, as Dr. Fisher said, in 
restoring the colleges to the people. This must be given con- 
crete form by the elaboration of a definite program. I am 
happy to announce that Dr. Fisher has consented to serve on 
a special committee which shall be set up to explore the 
problem and recommend a program. Where advisable, as it 
seems to be in Washington, this will be incorporated into 
legislative proposals as part of a political campaign. 

I think that I have said enough to indicate that we are 
embarked upon a task which will eventually tax our full 
strength, but which we cannot avoid if we are to be faithful 
to our trust as educators. Putting it in its broadest terms, 
it is the restoration to teachers of the creative role in higher 
education which rightfully belongs to them. It is a restoration 
to higher education of the creative energies of teachers whom 
an autocratic administrative system has left only the privilege 
of pedantry. Finally, where the movement gains momentum, 
it will lay the groundwork for a restoration of higher educa- 
tion to the people. 





Hugh Wing 


University of Pittsburgh 





DEMOCRACY, if it is to work, depends on two principles: 
first, the right of every man to make his contribution to the 
general group knowledge and decision; and second, the right 
of every man in a democracy to hear the truth. We in the 
Federation, because of our special occupational emphasis, 
tend to forget that in the final analysis, free speech and free 
enquiry are valuable only because they are the first require- 
ments if everyone is to hear the truth. For democracy de- 
mands of every citizen the utmost of participation both in 
fact-finding and in action. 

This puts the teacher into a special dilemma. When a 
teacher stands before a group, he exerts a power which forces 
them into dependence on his integrity. Because he usually 
knows so much more than they do, and because through the 
hidden pressure of marks, tests and credits he can and usually 
does more or less compel his students to accept his conclusions, 
he exerts a power of persuasion and conviction far beyond 
what is to be found in any other situation in life. Therefore 
the conscientious teacher, aware of his power, feels a heavy 
obligation not to coerce his students into passive acceptance 
of his ideas and attitudes. 

On the other hand—and this is a danger too often over- 
looked—in trying to be fair, scientific, open-minded and ob- 
jective, he runs the risk of training a generation of students 
who believe that the mark of the scientific intellect is a refusal 
to make up his mind and act. 

One of the finest intellects I know, one of the most coura- 
geous men I know in the field of education has been misled 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


this way and has misled his students. Again and again outside 
of the classroom he has risked his career and under pressure 
stood up courageously and delivered himself of his final con- 
victions. Yet, when through his reputation for courage and 
scholarship he drew the cream of the student body into his 
classes, he gave them a magnificent training in fact-finding 
and research but left them with the feeling that because they 
knew all the answers they were exempt from ever doing any- 
thing about them. All they do is stand on the sidelines of 
society and explain to themselves and each other why these 
things are happening. In some ways these students would 
be better off without their training, for in the social field 
we study and analyze facts in order to act; fence-sitting is 
a form of inertia which stultifies. 


In my opinion, if a man does not give his conviction, and 
give it forcefully, the person who listens does not have the 
complete truth. For the intensity of feeling with which one 
regards a conclusion is also a measure of its value and there- 
fore an aspect of truth. Only by giving our personal con- 
victions, then, can we give our students a complete picture of 
democratic teaching in action and develop in them a desire 
for participation in the educational process. 

This principle applies with peculiar force in the field of 
literature. In the arts and literature, values are not fixed and 
cannot be fixed. There is no scientific yardstick to make sure 
that Grapes of Wrath is a great novel. We may think so in 
ten years. But even then we shall not know. This generation 
will not know. John Donne was the rage in England about 
the time of Shakespeare; but fifty years later he was read 
by only a handful. From then until our time he had hardly 
any readers at all. Even when I went to college, the antholo- 
gies of literature we studied had only three of his poems, 
and these we skipped over. Then about 1925, interest sud- 
denly began to rise, and in no time he had become the most 
popular Elizabethan poet after Shakespeare. Between 1700 
and 1900, who would have said Donne was a great poet? 

Nevertheless, it is precisely for this very reason that we 
teachers of literature must give our convictions. If we do 
not have intense convictions about literature there is little 
point in urging others to read it. Certainly only by making 
plain our feelings will we arouse the student’s interest in lit- 
erature. And only when our personal attitudes color our 
lectures can we rouse our students to bestir themselves to 
any consideration of their own of literature and its values 
for them. Standards of value are matters of emotion. 

Unless the student is used to finding strong convictions in 
teachers who expect the student likewise to have strong and 
individual convictions, he is not prepared to participate in 
the work of democracy. It is dangerous now to train stu- 
dents to a habit of studied indecision. We are living in a 
period of grave crisis, apparently in the twilight of the most 
magnificent system of productive economy the world has yet 
seen. In the last 150 years man has raised his standard of 
living more than in the previous 50,000; he has increased his 
control over nature perhaps more than in the whole previous 
history of the race. Yet the depth and tenacity of the present 
crisis suggests that the system we have known is cracking up. 

If this is true we must find a new form of social, political 
and economic organization. We have the resources, the tools 
and the skills by which to create a society of abundance in 
which democracy can really mean the “pursuit of happiness.” 
But if our values become meaningless, if our relationships 
break down and our economy falls into paralysis, we shall 
not have the opportunity to work out the answers. For break- 
down means starvation, violence and chaos; out of that situa- 
tion would surely come dictatorship. 

History moves swiftly. We cannot wait. Indecision, pas- 
sivity, silence or cowardice now in this time of decision 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


mean disloyalty to democracy. Every man who thinks he has 
an answer must give it. But he must give it in such a way 
that it is perfectly clear that he is one man and that there 
are other men with other answers. The problems of our 
society are complex and continental in scope; therefore the 
more points of view that get heard and the more seriously each 
individual in our society puts forth his claims to considera- 
tion, the greater the chances that the impending changes in 
our social structures will be just and workable for everybody. 

This lays a heavy responsibility on us teachers. We must 
constantly stress that democracy is a system of society in 
which every interested party says his say, everyone has a 
right to listen freely and then, on the basis of this pooling of 
information and judgment, everyone participates in making 
those decisions upon which the welfare of the group depends. 
Then we must teach our students how to talk in a free 
democracy—honestly, personally, boldly, without cowardly 
reservations. A teacher with powerful convictions and frank 
manners, eager to give his own point of view and eager to 
hear others, willing to admit that no individual in a democ- 
racy can have the final answer—such a teacher will encourage 
students to believe in democracy and live it. 

Here is the real problem of education for democracy, 
and we Union teachers, progressive leaders of the teaching 
profession, must face that problem and solve it with hon- 
esty, self-control and courage. 





Margaret Schlauch 
New York University 


IN ADDRESSING YOU on the subject of modern foreign 
languages and the linguistics, I speak for a group which is 
seriously threatened with technological unemployment. At 
the annual meetings of the Modern Language Association 
there is a constant wail of lamentation concerning the threats 
to the august citadels of Old High German, Anglo-Saxon, 
Old French and Spanish and Old Church Slavonic. It is true 
that these languages and their more recent descendants are 
losing ground to a certain extent in the curricula of the 
institutions of higher learning, and I think that is partly due 
to those who teach these languages themselves. 


I mean that these teachers have not perhaps seen as 
sharply and as clearly as they might that they are functioning 
in a democracy and they owe a certain obligation to that 
democracy. You see, without realizing it, these people are 
competing with the tutors, the governesses and nursemaids 
who rear the aristocratic young of Europe. Generally the 
students of European universities have already learned modern 
languages, prattling them at the knees of governesses long 
before they begin advanced studies. Our professors, on the 
other hand, have had to be tutors, nursemaids, philologists, 
pedants, scholars and everything in one, and to compete with 
that is admittedly a difficult job. 

If they should see where they stand economically and how 
our institutions differ from the European ones, they might 
function more effectively. In the undergraduate colleges we 
have unfortunately seen much of the instruction in the hands 
of persons who are trying to live up to the ideal of the be- 
whiskered professor, very learned about rhotacism in early 
Latin or the disappearance of digamma in a Greek dialect, 
but not quite realizing that the students are frequently the 
sons of working people. 


I think that the problem that faces these teachers very 
concretely is to place at the disposal of this new type of 
university student the treasures that have come down in the 


23 








modern and ancient languages; and in order to do that, all 
sorts of new devices must be used. 

One of the members of this organization, Dr. Holland 
Roberts, has published some very suggestive and interesting 
articles on the subject of revised curricula in modern foreign 
languages. He has a number of suggestions concerning tech- 
niques. May I mention just one thing, the advisability of 
having even the most learned and polyglot of our professors 
give occasional courses based very largely on translations. 
This is already done in many places. In the graduate school 
of the University of Chicago, for instance, a course on the 
modern Scandinavian novel has been given in which it was 
possible for the student to read every novel required either 
in English or in German; and yet that was a graduate course. 
Nevertheless, as Dr. Roberts points out, the high-school teach- 
ers and often the undergraduate professors are a little squeam- 
ish about doing this. 

To be sure, I think we ought to require of the professor 
giving the course that he at least can read the language of 
the original so that he can say to his students that such-and- 
such a novel has been badly translated or that another has 
been noticeably abbreviated. But there is no reason at all 
why he cannot open up to much larger bodies of our university 
students the thrilling syntheses of modern culture which are 
represented in some of the outstanding achievements in novels, 
such as Thomas Mann’s Zauberberg and Romains’ Men of 
Good Will, even if they are unable to read the original lan- 
guages. It is a suggestion of a possible reorientation of atti- 
tude among the teachers of modern languages, and they 
might remember that those European children who do learn 
to prattle three or four languages at the knees of their govern- 
esses are not necessarily more intelligent than our handi- 
capped students. 

Perhaps philologists could make use of a little humility in 
considering their work. I recall that when I was studying at 
the University of Berlin, the woman who kept the pension 
where I lived seemed to be afraid that members of our 
profession might be conceited, and as warning she told me 
of a man who had lived there: “Er beherrschte siebzehn 
Sprachen und war in allen dumm.” (He commanded seven- 
teen languages and was dumb in all of them.) That is a 
little caveat for learned pedagogues. 

I want to spend just a minute or two on linguistics. The 
study of language for its own sake might seem remote from 
the problems of the day, certainly not as close as the study 
of outstanding monuments of literature, whether in the 
original or in translation. Even here, however, there is a 
definite social responsibility involved on the part of persons 
giving the philological training. One very conspicuous ex- 
ample is the fact that the moment you begin to introduce 
students to the discussion of the relations of families of 
languages, you have a marvelous opportunity to clear up all 
sorts of vicious superstitions on the question of race. You 
cannot give a course on Indo-European philology without 
running up against the word Aryan, and the moment you 
explain to your students that technically the word Aryan, 
refers to those who spoke Ancient Persian and Sanskrit, you 
have an opportunity to inoculate them against all kinds of 
racial prejudice. 

Even in undergraduate courses in the introduction to the 
science of language, one can use a few weeks to introduce 
the students toe the structures and the grammatical problems 
of languages quite remote from the ones spoken in Europe, 
which in our own concepts appear all too often as the only 
possible bearers of the cultural ideal. 

Again to cite an example from the classroom, I have found 
it most salutary in a course on general linguistics to include 
the study of a dialect spoken on the West Coast of Africa. 
Mende was presented to the students at the time when Italy 


24 


invaded Abyssinia. I had an ardent young Italian in that 
course. I suspect from things I heard that he believed Il Duce 
could bring a higher type of civilization to the inhabitants 
of Africa, but when he had discovered some of the musical 
qualities and flexibility and possibitities for new formations 
of words in this language, he emerged with a new respect for 
the latent possibilities of any language in the world, including 
those which he might have originally tended to despise. 

Therefore, even in such a remote subject as linguistics we 
philologists have an unparalleled opportunity to do the one 
thing which is our major job in a democracy and that is to 
inculcate respect for and a desire to learn of the highest 
achievements and contributions of all groups of humanity to 
those human ideals for which we all stand 





Alban Winspear 
University of Wisconsin 


I AM REMINDED of a friend who moves in such circles 
who tells of an instance that happened around Lady Astor’s 
fireside. There was an argument going on between George 
Dawes and Bernard Shaw. Bernard Shaw was putting for- 
ward one of his extremely subversive theories—I think it was 
vegetarianism—and finally in a burst of anger Dawes, who 
couldn’t stand it any longer said, “Shaw, you make me sick, 
undermining the morale of our young men in this way.” 

With a quizzical smile, Shaw said, “At last, the voice of the 
Middle West.” 

As an authentic voice of the Middle West and professor of 
Greek and Latin, I get a great deal of ribbing from my friends 
that I should also be an active trade unionist. It seems to 
them funny. Perhaps it seems funny to you. In seven min- 
utes I am not going to be able to put forward a complete 
apologia for my life, but I would like to suggest one or two 
ways in which the study of ancient classics, and particularly 
Latin and Greek, can be of profound importance in helping us 
to face the problems of democracy. 

When you are studying the Greek and Latin classics you 
are studying literature in its context. It is highly coherent; 
it is highly organized, a rather neat little society. You are 
doing something very different from the kind of thing which 
is rather popular in some quarters at the present time, mak- 
ing a kind of general survey of literature, taking these monu- 
ments, each of them, out of their context and doing a sort of 
sweep over all time. That may be a valuable thing. I don’t 
know. 

What I want is quite different. I want to see in its particu- 
lar context why a man thinks and feels and writes in a par- 
ticular way—why, for example, a man like Plato should put 
forward the rather curious ideas he put forward in his im- 
mortal Republic and why a book of that sort should be so 
influential. What, in other words, are the specific social, 
economic, political forces which go into the molding of the 
thinker, which go into the molding of the artist? Once you 
begin to look at your monuments of literature in that way, I 
think you begin to see them in an entirely new perspective 
You see the Republic in its time, in its place, in its context, 
and you begin suddenly, I think—I know this is the expe- 
rience of many students—to realize the forces by which the 
thinker, the artist, is moved. That is one definite consider- 
ation. 

The second general consideration which seems to me even 
more important has to do with the origins of some of our 
institutions. In the early Greek world you are dealing with 
the break-up of one great organization of society which has 
been very widespread in the history of culture—the tribal or 
gentile stage. You can see it in the Greek world breaking up 
You can see why it broke up. You can see the effect of that 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


break-up on human institutions; you can see the effect of 
that break-up on human thinking. You can see the beginnings 
of philosophy, the development of private property and land, 
and the development on the one hand of a possessing class and 
landed proprietors; on the other, the dispossessed. 

You begin to see why for the first time man has raised 
self-consciously the problem of justice and what is justice, 
and how, therefore, we have the slow growth of self-conscious- 
ness and man beginning to think self-consciously about his own 
problem as man. When you realize that this period saw the 
birth of most of the great institutions which have predom- 
inated in western history, you realize that the study of those 
origins is of tremendous importance. You can see why in the 
Greek world mercantile culture was more important and tended 
to create this liveliness, this quickness of intellect which was 
so characteristic a mark of the Greeks. You can see why in 
the Roman world the landed proprietors exercised their dom- 
inance for a much longer time and how this tended to mould 
the specifically Roman type of mind, character and culture. 
The moment you approach these times realistically it will 
sweep away much of the splendor and glory that was Greece 
and the grandeur that was Rome. 

But if we stopped there we should face failure. It would 
give rise to something like the intellectual cynicism which 
too often arises as a result of the Beard school of economic 
determination. The third point is that when you come to 
the Greek world you are examining the first case of democracy 
in history. You can analyze what it meant, what this democ- 
racy was, why it was an expression of the interests of newly- 
rising mercantile and artisan groups in their struggle for con- 
trol of the state against the landed proprietors. But you can 
do much more. You can also see something of why it 
failed, and it failed because it was an attempt at democracy 
in a slave-owning society. And students—I have seen it hap- 
pen often—suddenly realize what it means to say there can 
be no such thing as a democracy for special privilege and that 
no democratic society can exist half slave and half free. 

And perhaps the most important realization that a student 
may get out of this study of the first case history of democracy, 
and a democracy that failed, is a realization that if democracy 
is going to mean anything, it must be democracy that is genu- 
ine, thorough-going, honest and complete. 








Joseph W. Cohen 


University of Colorado 


IT IS WITH some hesitation that I talk on such a horrendous 
subject for most of you as philosophy. I cannot help but 
notice the wince that comes over the faces of teachers 
here, the air of concern, and the sense of strangeness when 
they learn in conversation with me that I teach philosophy. 

Dr. Winspear has given you a good example of what I 
would mean by an approach to philosophy in terms of the 
requirements of democracy. You know, if you have ever 
taken a course in philosophy, the great preponderance there 
of the study of its history. Necessary as historical study may 
be, the emphasis upon it should be curtailed. It has tended 
to establish an esoteric reputation for philosophy and make 
it seem remote from the interests of most students. And 
even indispensable historical treatment, like that of Plato and 
Aristotle, is too often approached in over-edifying fashion. 
Nothing could be a better example of a necessary correction 
here than Dr. Winspear’s book, Who Was Socrates? and his 
forthcoming work on Plato which he has been telling me about 
this week. 

The teaching of philosophy in universities today has also 
been befogged with too much stress upon technical problems. 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


Popularly, on the other hand, it has been reduced to a form 
of emotional massage. 

I recall what Montaigne said about philosophy in one of 
his essays—that “there should be nothing more airy, more 
gay, more frolic, and I should like to have said more wanton 
than philosophy.” And it is certainly true that at times those 
who have spoken in the name of philosophy have indulged in 
nothing but “wantonings.” 

Some people think of philosophy as obsessed with either 
an optimistic or a pessimistic world view. This reminds me 
that Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence says: “Per- 
haps philosophy is, after all, the only recognition of the 
abysses which lie on each side of the footpath which the 
vulgar follow with the serenity of somnambulists. .. .” You 
see when you get something like that off your chest it gives 
you a feeling of superiority to say the least. 

But I must be brief. I could talk on forever in this way. 

It seems to me that it would be a very useful thing if 
the combined efforts of the membership of the American 
Federation of Teachers in universities, summer schools and 
extension classes, by every available form of persuasion, 
could make its voice heard in the demand that philosophy 
return to its proper subject matter. I think that the task 
of philosophy is to formulate the sense of direction which 
men have of their civilization. When this is recognized, we 
see at once how deeply implicated philosophy is in democracy 
and in the clarification of leading matters of controversy in 
our social and economic world. 


Social philosophy, therefore, should especially be stressed 
in our day—courses such as ethics and economics, which 
you rarely find in the curricula of philosophy departments, 
courses in ethics and politics. These would enable the student 
to relate ideals to our basic institutions which are in the 
process of change and the evaluation of which is far more 
important to us today than abstract ethics of the individual 
personality. Equally desirable are courses in philosophy and 
literature which would give the student a sense for the place 
of a particular writer in his time, how his work reflects or 
reacts toward the dominant pattern of values of the age in 
the way of acceptance of, escape from or struggle with that 
established pattern. 

From direct experience I have found that nothing seems 
to be more illuminating to the student of literature or more 
novel than dealing with the work of a Milton or a Shakespeare 
from the angle of Protestant and Renaissance values, or with 
men like Proust, Thomas Mann, James Joyce or John Stein- 
beck from the point of view of contemporary intellectual and 
social ideas and ideals. You know that literary students have 
been far too much preoccupied with matter of technique, 
style, linguistic analysis to the exclusion of a concern for 
the thought of great creative writers. This is at least a job 
for the philosopher and, of course, for the critic of literature 
trained in serious philosophical matters. 

Another important task in teaching philosophy in a democ- 
racy is the clarification of the aims of science. J. D. Bernal 
in his recent book, The Social Function of Science, most 
effectively brings together all the significant considerations of 
the role of science in our civilization and the relation of 
science to major social objectives which determine how our 
sciences will be used—whether for the destruction or the ad- 
vancement of humanity. A book by Dr. Stern, who is on 
this panel here with me, Technology and Natural Resources, 
is likewise a significant redirection of emphasis towards the 
study of science in relation to society. 

One other matter, it seems to me, is especially the task 
of philosophy today; that is, to bring before the student’s 
mind those larger vistas of civilization which arise from an 
objective contrast of the place of culture in the three dif- 


25 

















ferent types of society in our world—in capitalistic democracy, 
in fascist Germany and Italy, and in the Soviet Union—and 
by culture I mean education, the sciences and the profes- 
sions, literature, art and religion. I think that there is no 
better way to bring out clearly the fundamental objectives 
of civilized life, and how the basic concepts of the good life 
are related to social institutions, than to deal with those 
familiar fields of culture from the very different points of 
view of these three contrasting forms of modern society. 

Now that, as concretely as I can give it in a brief talk, is 
what I think should be the role of philosophy in a democracy. 





Bernhard J. Stern 


Columbia University 


I COULD SPEND the time which has been given me, and 
many more minutes as well, to tell you of instances when 
sociologists have offered rationalizations for the status quo, 
and apologia for existing social systems. I could also discuss 
now the reasons why some sociologists find it convenient to 
evade reality by total absorption in methodology and in sys- 
tematizations, to the extent that they have unfortunately 
made sociology baneful to many who have tried to study it. 
It was impatience with this type of escape sociology that led 
Upton Sinclair to say at one time that sociology was “an 
elaborate system of classification wholly without meaning, 
devised by learned gentlemen in search of something to be 
learned about.” I could tell you too of how some anthropolo- 
gists find their manner of escape in their exclusive interest in 
primitives rather than in their contemporaries, in modern 
savages rather than in savage moderns. 

But I prefer to spend this time instead in documenting the 
many real contributions that anthropology and sociology 
have made to a philosophy of democracy as opposed to the 
philosophy of fascism. 

The world is stirred by the effects of hereditarian and 
racial theories. These are not new. They have served as 
rationalizations of ruling groups throughout centuries. They 
have always guided imperialist policy toward native peoples. 
But they have reached an especially aggravated form under 
fascism where racialism has become not only the dominant 
philosophy of the ruling classes, but the law of the ruling 
governments. 

This development has had tragic consequences. It has led 
to the disfranchisement of millions, and to hostile discrim- 
inations and violent acts against minority and colonial peoples. 
Because the doctrines of racism are spreading in this coun- 
try and threaten to affect American life profoundly, the con- 
tributions of anthropology and sociology to an analysis of 
their validity is particularly relevant. 

Hereditarian doctrines have broad implications and many 
underlying assumptions. One of the important of these is that 
race determines culture, that the cultural functioning of a 
group is merely the manifestation of its genetic potentialities. 
Hence peoples with “superior” or dominant cultures are re- 
garded as superior biologically; peoples with “inferior” cul- 
tures, inferior biologically. The status of a race (and also 
of a sex and a class) is held to be an index of its biological 
powers. The dominant group is by the very fact of its dom- 
inance regarded as superior. 

Underlying such an hypothesis is the concept of a static 
human nature, of a fixed, an immutable inheritance that will 
inevitably express itself in the same manner. Anthropologists 
and sociologists have provided the data to blast this concept 
as utterly erroneous. Through their interests in the culture 
of all peoples, and not merely in the provincial, narrow, cir- 
cumscribed culture of the western world, they have been able 


26 











to present evidence to prove the extraordinary plasticity and 
versatility of human beings of all races and to show the great 
variety of forms of human behavior under which humans of 
all types have functioned. When one has surveyed the tre- 
mendous range of human behavior, the wide varieties of human 
institutions that have prevailed throughout history, one learns 
to regard as fantastic and untenable the concept of a single, 
stable, preformed, innate human nature which must function 
always as it does in our society, molded as it is by a capitalist 
economy and culture. 

It is imperative to recognize that this is but a transient 
phase in civilization, that the stratifications and disparities of 
functioning in our society have not the seal of eternity. Most 
of the courses in university curriculums deal only with 
the small narrow, circumscribed area of our culture, and, as 
a consequence, not enough students are acquainted with the 
wider variety of human behavior with which anthropology 
and sociology concern themselves to the enrichment of our 
knowledge of human nature. 


Let me review briefly, all too briefly, a few of the argu- 
ments given by sociologists and anthropologists to disprove 
the correlation of race and culture. Did time permit I would 
document these generalizations fully. Under the circum- 
stances I can merely present them. First, closely related 
races have diverse cultures; second, culture and cultural leader- 
ship has shifted from area to area and from people, irre- 
spective of biological types; third, important changes in culture 
are known to have occurred without any prior change in 
biological type, as for example, the changes subsequent to 
the Industrial Revolution in England, and the opening of 
Japan to the West; fourth, what is regarded as the “white 
man’s culture,” which he carries around when he is obsessed 
with the imperialist duty of “the white man’s burden,” is not 
solely the contribution of the white races but a composite of 
the contributions of many races and peoples. The factors 
which gave the white man hegemony are cultural, not racial 
factors. The attempt of imperialists and particularly fascists 
to reconstruct history in terms of race and thus to discrim- 
inate against millions of the minority peoples thus finds no 
support among sociologists and anthropologists. 

They likewise give no comfort to such vested interests who 
seek to perpetuate the fiction of woman’s inferiority, and 
thereby deprive her of full functioning, as is done in fascist 
societies and in no small measure in our own. Throughout 
history the role of women has varied depending upon the social 
structures and social attitudes toward them. There has been 
no fixed economic division of labor between men and women. 
What is done by men in one society is performed by the 
women in another. As in the case of races, so in reference 
to women, status is not an index of their potential func- 
tioning. 

There is an even broader extension of hereditarian doc- 
trine that is of special interest to us as trade unionists aligned 
with labor. Fascist societies stress the concept of the elite. The 
masses of the people, they say, are unable to think; the masses 
of the people are deficient in their intellectual powers, unable 
to function creatively. Again status is held to be the index 
intelligence. A lower class economically is held to be a 
lower class psychologically and biologically. The elite alone 
are thought to have the power to appreciate culture and to 
lead. 

Sociologists have dispelled this great fallacy. They have 
shown that during the history of civilization there has been an 
increasing participation of a larger number of individuals in 
society and that there are within each individual extraordinary 
potentialities and a creative force which, when released, cause 
a tremendous upsurge in civilization. Witness first the ad- 
vances concomitant with the rise of the middle class and then 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 





the new energies released with the extension of political and 
social rights to workers. 

Sociology and anthropology have helped to give democracy 
real meaning. For they have refuted the fallacious theories 
that would not only keep minority peoples submerged, not 
only keep women submerged, but also deny rights to the 
masses of people who, when given opportunity, can contribute 
significantly to the social good. 





Dorothy Douglas 
Smith College 


IF I HAD BEEN ASKED to speak on this subject some five 
or six years ago, I think I should have had to paint a much 
more discouraging picture than is necessary today. Within 
the past few years, within the past two especially, there has 
been a very interesting increase in vital material being pub- 
lished in the field of economics and economic history. I think 
philosophers of the type of Dr. Cohen and Dr. Winspear would 
have no difficulty in telling us why these changes have taken 
place in the complexion of some of our economic and historical 
research. I think it is quite evident that it is because of the 
increasing vocalism, increasing self-expression, of popular 
forces that we are able to begin to produce an economic litera- 
ture which is more alive, more democratic and, if you will 
excuse my saying so, more accurately factual than even the 
most scholarly researches that have been written from the 
aristocratic viewpoint. 

Our field, unfortunately, is one that has been peculiarly 
subject to social limitations. The social forces that have 
gone to shape economic theory and even to direct the forms 
and objectives of economic research are the same forces that 
have been dominant in our social structure as a whole. This 
is very natural, but the effect upon the content of the mate- 
rial that is available to give to our undergraduate students is 
certainly very unfortunate. 

As I was listening to the statements of previous speakers 
about some of the current social untruths that are combatted 
by the findings of their various fields, I began to think how 
widespread the propagation of untruth still is in our very 
economic literature itself. As I said, it is just in these last 
few years that you are beginning to get a widespread emergence 
of a more labor-oriented literature. 

In my particular field, which is “~°: economics, social 
legislation, this has certainly been true. I don’t think there is 
any other period of three or four years in which you could 
possibly have seen books like W alsh’s The C.1.0. (written by 
J. Raymond Walsh who was a national officer of our Union a 
couple of years ago and is a loyal member of it) or Robert 
Brooks’s When Labor Organizes and Unions of Their Own 
Choosing. I could go on with a list of a half dozen other 
books which are written on the subject of labor from a labor 
point of view. I am hoping very much that our organized 
teachers will be able further to help stimulate the people 
who are doing research in the social sciences to give us mate- 
rial of this type. 

In this connection I am very much interested in the fact 
that the College Section is going to make an effort seriously to 
push AFT organization at the meetings of the learned so- 
cieties. We have done something along this line before, but 
much more of it can readily be done, and I assure you it will 
come back to us in the form of a more enlightened teaching 
body in our institutions of higher learning. 

Here are a few topics which are crying for treatment in 
my own particular field of labor. We need books on labor 
legislation from the social and labor point of view. (One 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


excellent piece of research has just appeared from California, 
Factories in the Field by Carey McWilliams.) We need work, 
a lot more work, on agricultural labor. We need work on labor 
in colonial countries. It is amazing how untouched that field 
is. And as for comparative studies, trying to draw out general 
conclusions that shall have validity about the nature of labor 
in colonial countries of different types, it is not available. 
It has not been done. The material is there, but it has not 
been handled. Why not? Dozens and dozens of books go 
out annually on merchandising, matters of retailing, efficiency 
systems, foreign trade and exchange, these types of economic 
study that are directly allied to the problems of the business- 
man, but there is a crying need for material on some of these 
other humanly vital subjects. 

Do you know that nobody has ever made a study of the 
effect of the War and its aftermath upon the labor move- 
ment and labor legislation in different countries, a com- 
parative study that could be done quite simply? It would 
not have to be written in a 1,000-page volume at all. It 
would be very suitable, probably, for group investigation. 
You could have three or four people get together, each man 
taking a country, and then all pooling their efforts, and do a 
nice little piece of collective research, writing on this topic. 

Yes, the effect upon the labor movement of the World War 
and the Russian Revolution and the various rapid social 
changes taking place in the countries of the world immediately 
after the War and then the period of recession of popular 
forces in the twenties—that hasn’t been done. 

You need very much a study from the labor point of view 
of business methods, efficiency systems, types of business 
administration. Many, many books on these subjects from 
the business executive’s point of view have been written, but 
not from the point of view of the worker and of general 
human welfare. 

If I may take the time, I should like to cite to you an exam- 
ple of the sort of thing we need to remedy, a book that I 
have never seen searchingly criticized in our economic jour- 
nals, although one of our speakers today, Dr. Stern, did 
do a splendid criticism of it in the Journal of Sociology. 
To my mind this book is a prime example of the kind of 
scholarship in economics that must be superseded if we are 
going to have vital and democratic types of economic research. 

The book was written by Professor Taussig of Harvard, 
our senior economist today in the United States, working in 
conjunction with one of his colleagues, Professor Joslyn of 
the Harvard Business School. It came out in 1932. It was 
called American Business Leaders. It was written in fairly 
popular style, with dark leaded headings here and there which 
made the busy business executive able to read more easily 
certain of the important points. 

There was a great deal of statistical material. It was a 
piece of statistical research, the object of which was to answer 
the following question—I am quoting from memory; I have 
not had the book in hand for many months—“What has 
determined the present status of our American business lead- 
ers? Was it innate ability that raised them so far above the 
level of the working classes of the country in income and 
prestige? Or was it environmental influence? Nature or 
nurture?” 

And the answer unequivocally was that it was due to innate 
ability, that the preponderance of evidence indicates this. 

Without arguing as to the correctness or incorrectness of 
his conclusions, let me point out to you the nature of the 
evidence by which this distinguished senior scholar in econom- 
ics in America was willing to arrive at his conclusions. He 
sent questionnaires, some 15,000 I think, to business execu- 
tives. The questions were objective, I assure you. They 
were matters of fact. The facts for which they asked were 


27 








simple. They asked the following: the occupation of the 
man’s father and grandfather; the age at which the man had 
entered business; what business he had entered; whether 
he had received assistance to the amount of more than $10,000 
in the first five years of his business experience; whether he 
had relatives or personal friends in the business he first en- 
tered; and as to his education, how much he had had. Those 
were the main things; there were a few trimmings. 

The authors found the following results: first, these busi- 
ness leaders came in the vast majority of cases from the priv- 
ileged classes themselves. Only 10 per cent of the parents of 
these business leaders had been classifiable as being in any form 
of working-class occupation. Only 2 per cent of them had been 
classifiable as doing actual, ordinary unskilled or semi-skilled 
manual labor. The other 8 per cent had been engaged in fore- 
men’s jobs or extra-skilled work. 

Now Taussig and Joslyn do not draw the conclusion that per- 
haps these men came from the privileged class to begin with 
and therefore naturally found it easier to get the jobs. Their 
conclusion is no, that it wasn’t that. The facts indicate, they 
believe, that the parents of these men came from the working 
class in such a small proportion because the working class has 
so little ability. Did these men, granted that they were born in 
the privileged class, have unusual educational opportunities? 
Their statistical answers, worked out in very fine tables, showed 
that only about one-third of them were college graduates. 
another 12 or 15 per cent had gone to college but had not 
graduated and something like, we will say, 75 per cent of 
them had finished high school. The last 25 per cent or so 
had “only” finished the eighth grade. Said Taussig and Joslyn: 
This is an average education; they did not have an unusual 
amount of education. 

Now at the very time that these business leaders were get- 
ting this much education—one-third of them graduating from 
college, over half entering some form of college or equivalent 
education and the vast majority graduating from high school 
—the proportion in the country at large of college graduates 
was less than 1 per cent. Also less than one in ten children 
was graduated from high school. 

Then they go on to say: Did these people receive any 
unusual advantages because of their family or because of finan- 
cial assistance after they once started to go out into the 
working world? And again they say, Oh, no, for the following 
reason. Only something like 12 per cent of them received 
more than $10,000 worth of assistance in the first five years 
after they began to look for a job! Say that eighty-odd per 
cent then did not receive any such financial assistance. They 
didn’t ask how many received $5,000, $3,000, $2,000 or $1,000 
and how many received none at all. They didn’t say, If you 
didn’t get $10,000, how much did you get? And they said 
not a word about whether your parents had the money to send 
you through high school, whether you were able to work your 
way through college, whether you were able to get to the 
place where you begin to enter the business race. 

Last of all, and I think most striking, is the question of 
whether they had personal advantages in getting into business, 
and again the authors say that these men did not. It turned 
out that only 36 per cent entered the identical business in 
which their relatives or personal friends were executives. So 
if I am the son of John D. Rockefeller and I go down to the 
Chase National Bank and they ask me my name and I say, 
“John D. Rockefeller, Jr. I would like a job as clerk at ten 
dollars a week,” and I am “lucky” enough to get that job and 
they watch my job to see how I get along, that is due to my 
native ability! 

Isn’t that quite an example of a preconceived conclusion 
derived from material insufficient and inappropriate, to bolster 
up the idea of class superiority? I haven’t read one search- 


28 


ing criticism of that in our economic journals; yet the men 
who wrote that book were very eminent. 

I believe our younger scholars who have a more labor and 
humanitarian point of view are starting to remedy this situa- 
tion, and I believe in the next five years you will be able to 
look about you and see a crop of new research coming out. 
And when you send us your children from the schools to the 
colleges, we shall be able to give them something better to read. 





John J. DeBoer 


Chicago Teachers College 


IF THE VIEWPOINTS expressed by the preceding speak- 
ers were at all typical of higher education in America, I 
should have very little to say this morning. But there is a 
prevailing conception among students who come through 
American colleges and among teachers generally that the 
higher one comes in education, the poorer the teacher, that 
teaching is relatively effective in early infancy, that it is still 
very efficient in the kindergarten but becomes decreasingly 
so in the upper grades and high school and is almost com- 
pletely lacking in efficiency in the college and graduate school. 
Whether that conception is correct or not, I think it is a 
curious fact that parallel to this alleged trend from the lower 
to the higher levels in education there is a progressive de- 
crease in the affection that is expressed or exhibited on the 
part of the teacher toward the learner. 

As we go up in the elementary school years, we find that 
there is a progressively decreasing amount of affection and 
interest in the learner as a human being. In the high school 
the relationship is extremely businesslike. In the college the 
student is often regarded as a natural enemy of the teacher. 
In the kindergarten the teacher exhibits a personal interest 
in the success or failure of the learner. In the high school 
the teacher is relatively indifferent to whether the learner suc- 
ceeds or fails. In the college the teacher dares the student to 
succeed if he can. 

Now I offer that merely as an allegation, but it is a fairly 
common charge and one that I think we need to consider. 
The fact is that we in the educational field are guilty 
of violating the very principles we constantly advocate for 
teaching on a lower level. We frequently advance the theory 
that education is not simply the impartation of knowledge, 
that the retention of a-certain quantity of information is not 
the be-all and end-all of learning. But in our practices, in 
out lectures and in our examinations, we proceed on the as- 
sumption that the knowledge of certain information about 
education constitutes the bulk of the work, the core of the 
process. We insist that in the elementary and high school 
learning shall be accompanied by direct experiences which are 
vital and meaningful to the learner. We say that learning 
which consists of mere verbalism is not learning at all, and 
yet in schools of education we proceed on the assumption that 
a knowledge of educational verbalisms makes up an under- 
standing of the educational field. 

We protest vigorously against the presence of the element 
of competition in learning in the elementary and high schools, 
the existence of grades and credits as inappropriate incentives 
for learning, the establishment of examinations which exam- 
ine the things that are not significant in learning. But our 
own procedure in the schools of education does not differ in 
any significant degree from the traditional type of repetitive 
teaching that we attack in the elementary and high schools. 

We say to the elementary and high-school teacher that edu- 
cation deals as much with the emotional and social and esthetic 
life of the learner as it does with the intellectual life, and so 
we insist the program shall be broadened to include other than 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 


purely intellectual factors; but in our own training we are 
not concerned with any type of growth except intellectual 
growth, and usually the lowest form of intellectual growth, 
which is the retention of information. 

I think that it is time that we undertake a fundamental 
re-evaluation of the functions and procedures of teacher edu- 
cation. The problem is not so difficult; it is not so complex. 
The chief difficulty lies in the tremendous inertia under which 
we labor, the fact that we cannot throw off procedures and 
subject matters which are in the curriculum simply because 
they have been inherited from a period when learning was a 
badge of aristocracy, of an intellectual aristocracy, a cur- 
riculum entirely inappropriate to a period when the great 
mass of the children of the community are in school. 

It seems to me that a good teacher is simply a person who 
is well educated and who understands children, and there is 
very little more to it than that. We Union teachers know 
that the causes of docility or, as Dr. Axtelle puts it, the 
asexuality of teachers is not to be found merely in the edu- 
cational program that they have to endure. The causes may 
be found in part in the economic and social background in 
which they live, but our educational program, the program 
through which the teachers too have come, has provided a 
sheltered life. It has been a curriculum which has not ex- 
posed them to the conflicts and stresses and strains of real 
life. For that reason I should say that perhaps the chief diffi- 
culty in the preparation of teachers is the failure to provide 
them with a general education, and I should not limit that to 
teachers in elementary and high schools. Teachers in college 
are notoriously provincial. I think that we should agree here 
that we would accept the social judgments of any group of 
carpenters or plumbers or bricklayers on political questions 
rather than the social judgments of the average group of 
college professors 

The same thing is true of their reading. I was amazed 
not long ago to read a factual report of the reading done 
by college professors outside their fields. I thought only the 
elementary and high-school teachers confined their reading 
to the Saturday Evening Post, but the college professors are 
equally guilty and the teachers come out of the classes of 
those college professors and the pupils come out of the classes 
of the teachers. 

In the field of special or vocational education, the educa- 
tion which attempts to give the prospective teacher an under- 
standing of the growth of the children and young people, we 
find similar weaknesses. Education courses, as has already 
been pointed out, consist pretty largely of an accumulation 
of facts, research data, often entirely unrelated. Our courses 
in tests and measurements are preoccupied with the struc- 
ture of tests which measure only the subsidiary and often the 
trivial aspects of the educational process. The difficulty, it 
seems to me, is the fact that in schools of education, as in 
most of the other departments of colleges and universities, 
we don’t know where to go. We have no clearly conceived 
objectives. We simply assume that any information which 
is somehow relevant to our field belongs in the courses, and 
we have not set up for ourselves clearly defined goals. 

I should like briefly to mention certain goals which I 
think should be basic to any intelligent educational program. 
The first of these is a love of children. I have never seen 
that objective set up for a teacher-education program before, 
probably because it has been assumed. It is felt that this 
has no place in an institution of collegiate rank, and vet if a 
love of children and young people is important in good teach- 
ing, it should be a first objective—an interest in young peo- 
ple and an understanding of how they learn and the prob- 
lems they encounter. 

Second, an institution for teacher education should have the 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


objective of concentrating upon the goals of education in a 
democracy, of relating somehow all of these materials and 
processes that constitute the program of the American school 
to the purposes of the school in a democracy. You can do that 
with any subject; you can do that with any group of subjects 
or with any organization of subject materials. 

I believe that the present trend in the direction of labor 
unity or the efforts that are being made to achieve labor unity 
should be communicated to the educational field. We waste 
altogether too much time in advancing the claims of rival 
fields. We need to set up as an objective in a teacher-education 
institution a school for providing guidance to the children in 
the direction of democratic goals. 

Fourth, we need to set up the objective of skill in evaluat- 
ing achievements in the light of these goals and in promoting 
self-evaluation. 

There is a great deal of hypocrisy in our statements of prin- 
ciples and procedures in education. In the teaching of liter- 
ature, for example, we advance the view that its purpose is 
to develop appreciation for literature, and then proceed to 
teach literature as a body of information to be remembered. 
I was particularly amused, and at the same time somewhat 
indignant, to examine a recently published edition of Ivanhoe 
for the secondary schools in which at the end there were a 
series of study questions. Why anybody should study a good 
yarn like Jvanhoe I don’t know, but there were study ques- 
tions at the end. They inquired into the color of Cedric’s 
tunic, the number of buttons on it, how many inches high was 
the dais, and so on to the point of madness. I don’t know 
what the psychiatrist calls that disease, but it is the same dis- 
ease which afflicts the person you see at the hospital for the 
insane who keeps walking around the yards picking up strings 
and buttons and sticks, putting them in a little bag and then 
having the keeper throw them out at night so he will have 
something to do again the next day. 

If you were to ask the teacher who used those study ques- 
tions, “What is your aim?” she would answer, “I am trying 
to develop an appreciation of literature.” 

The same thing is true of our methods of evaluating results. 
We test for one thing and teach for another, or we professedly 
teach for one thing and test for another. I think the best 
evidence of a teacher’s real aim is in the examinations, the 
tests which are used. They usually have very little relation 
to the alleged objectives. 

I think a teacher-education institution ought to train a pros- 
pective teacher in participation in democratic school adminis- 
tration and in curriculum making. That has been said over and 
over again, but I have not yet found a place where that ob- 
jective has actually been set up, where an effort actually has 
been made to train young people in democratic school ad- 
ministration. 

It is all very well to insist that schools should be demo- 
cratically organized, but we should insist at the same time 
that the young people who go into our schools to teach shall 
be capable of assuming the responsibility for democratic man- 
agement. In achieving these objectives, we ought to employ 
the same principles that we insist upon for the elementary 
and the high school; that is, we ought to give opportunity for 
direct experiences with these objectives, not simply from 
books or magazines, but through actual contacts with human 
beings. 

In the case of schools of education there should be contact 
with schools and young people. The work that is being done in 
various places in the United States, that was done at New 
College before that was unfortunately closed, that is being done 
in Milwaukee State Teachers College and that we of Chi- 
cago Teachers College are attempting to inaugurate, gives 
hope that teacher education is facing a period of renaissance. 


29 








The Teacher’s Union 


In Action 
(Continued from page 2) 


Purpose of the public forum is essen- 
tially to work along the same lines, but 
its primary aim is to formulate, with 
the help of the community, plans for a 
solid and permanent education program 
for the conservation of the youth of the 
state. 

National President George S. Counts 
addressed a recent meeting of the Local. 
His subject was “Education and Democ- 
racy.” * 


NEWARK, N. J. (No. 481)—George 
S. Counts, AFT President, will be the 
main speaker at the third anniversary 
dinner of the Essex County Federation 
of Teachers on March 9 at Hotel Doug- 
las. Board members, administrative 
officials and a large attendance of other 
non-Union guests is expected. 

Legislative action that may establish 
a minimum salary for teachers has been 
presented for the third consecutive year 
by Samuel S. Ferster. The amount 
guaranteed by the bill, which is en- 
dorsed by the State Federation of Teach- 
ers, is $1200. 

The teaching of tolerance in the pub- 
lic schools, a problem that must concern 
many teachers whose schools are in 
mixed neighborhoods, is taken up by 
Michael Conovitz, chairman of the de- 
partment of social studies of Central 
High School of Newark in the February 
edition of the New Jersey Teacher. He 
urges not only social tolerance, but 
economic and political tolerance as the 
only methods of maintaining democracy. 

* 
TOLEDO, OHIO (No. 250)—Express- 
ing his pleasure for the opportunity to 
be of help to the Union in its negotia- 
tions with the school board, Irvin R. 
Kuenzli, Secretary-Treasurer of AFT, at 
the same time warned that the problem 
of Toledo’s school budget had not been 
permanently solved. 

Mr. Kuenzli in a letter to the Local 
declared that only the citizens of Toledo, 
with the aid of labor organizations and 
public spirited groups of men and 
women, could put an end to the crisis 
threat by voting sufficient funds to 
keep the educational system of that 
city operating on a sound basis. 

Otherwise, he said, the city of Toledo 
can hope only for a school system on a 
par with the poorest rural districts of 
the state. 

The Local expressed its deep appre- 
ciation to Mr. Kuenzli and the Toledo 
Central Labor Union. 

' That Toledo will suffer for some 
time to come as a result of the crisis 


30 


was indicated by the departure of David 
H. Patton to another post. The Union 
fears that many other outstanding edu- 
cators will be compelled to leave should 
the proposed levies fail to pass. 

January pay will reach teachers be- 
tween March 1 and 15, the Union has 
announced. * 


SAN FRANCISCO, CAL. (No. 61)— 
The psychology of the WPA teacher has 
been cogently expressed by the WPA 
section of the Local in a letter dealing 
with some of the organizational prob- 
lems facing the Union. Fear, the letter 
says, is one of the most difficult phases 
of this work and must be overcome in 
the unorganized teachers if any head- 
way is to be made. 

The Local asks for the aid of labor 
in its move to point out the value of 
the Union to teachers, whether they 
are on WPA or not, and thanks the 
members and officers of the Union, the 
Regional Vice Presidents and the mem- 
bers of other Locals in the Bay area for 
their assistance in giving the WPA 
teachers status in the community. 

* 

BERKELEY, CALIF. (No. 349)—The 
University Assistants and Readers, an 
AFT University of California campus 
organization of the lower income group 
consisting mainly of graduate students 
working for degrees, is pointing its ac- 
tivity during this semester toward the 
restoration of pay cuts in effect since 
the early part of the depression. The 
group will also seek the answer to the 
question of a proposed university re- 
organization scheme to cut into the 
responsibility of part-time teaching and 
the amount of student-participant in- 
struction. 

The UAR has enlisted the aid of 
near-by central labor bodies and of the 
California Federation of Labor. 

Restoration of salaries to the $750 
level will be sought on grounds that 
living costs have increased and also 
because the state appropriation for the 
university has been increased. Union 
leaders declare that retrenchment in 
any form constitutes a vital danger to 
the entire university teaching staff. 


* 
PALO ALTO, CALIF. (No. 442)— 
Clarence Brooks, member of the execu- 
tive committee of the Typographical 
Union, declared there is no neutrality 
in the schools where unionism is con- 
cerned, when he took part in a panel 
discussion sponsored by the Local on 
“Why a Teachers Union?” More than 
eighty persons were present for the 
dinner and thirty-five more attended 
the discussion. Other members of the 
panel were Harold C. Hand, H. C. 


Brown, former AFT vice president, 
Harvey Mansfield, J. B. Canning, David 
Harris and Gertrude Leuhning, national 
AFT vice president. 

* 

PROVIDENCE, R. I. (No. 197)—The 
second annual Open Forum of the Union 
in Plantations Auditorium heard AFT 
President George S. Counts present nine 
points in a program for democracy. He 
said that the real test of democracy 
will be made in the United States, be- 
cause no country thus far has been able 
to solve current problems by democratic 
means. 

President Counts declared that the 
nine points in a program for democracy 
were: faith in and loyalty to the process 
of political democracy; strong and effi- 
cient government, distinct from dictator- 
ship; maintenance of police power by 
government ; guarantee of civil liberties; 
exposure of political propaganda; con- 
servation of democratic temper; avoid- 
ance of war; encouragement of organiza- 
tion of masses; and provision for more 
enlightenment of people on governmen- 
tal matters. 

The committee in charge of the meet- 
ing, at which former AFT Vice Presi- 
dent John D. Connors spoke, was com- 
posed of John F. O’Connell, Local presi- 
dent, Mrs. Minnie A. Bassett, Alice Cox 
and Lillian Kelman. 

. 
PHILADELPHIA, PA. (No. 192)— 
Court action to compel the Board of 
Education here to restore recent salary 
cuts has been started by the Phila- 
delphia Federation of Teachers. The 
case will determine whether a contract 
can be broken by the Board and whether 
“temporary professional employees” can 
be fired without cause as an “emergency 
measure.” 

The Board, the Union charges, ordered 
pay cuts of 5 per cent on all salaries 
over $2500, even though a tax rate 
boost had been authorized and put into 
effect. This action was taken over 
vigorous protests of teachers’ organiza- 
tions. An alternate plan has been sub- 
mitted by the Union. 

* 

MINNEAPOLIS, MINN. (No. 59)— 
Labor and civil rights, academic free- 
dom, the civil rights of women and 
minority groups were some of the sub- 
jects discussed at the Civil Rights Con- 
ference which was endorsed and _ at- 
tended by members of Locals 444 and 
59. Dr. Frank Baker of Milwaukee 
State Teachers College spoke on, “War 
and Civil Liberties.” 

School board directors Weir, Le Seur 
and Cunningham were guests of honor 
at an “economy” dinner sponsored by 
several Locals and the Building and 


THE AMERICAN TEACHER 




















Service Employees Union. These direc- 
tors voted last fall for full week’s lay- 
off to make up partially for the pay 
cut which had been in effect. 


* 
MINNEAPOLIS, MINN.—The Min- 
nesota State Federation of Teachers 
has undertaken the publication of a four 
page state-wide newspaper, the Min- 
nesota Teacher, in a definite attempt to 
bring the various Locals in the state 
into closer touch with each other and 
to serve as an organizing aid. At least 
four editions will be published during 
the school year. In charge of the paper 
is a committee of five teachers ap- 
pointed by the state executive council 
of the Minnesota Federation. Mercedes 
L. Nelson, AFT vice president from 
1935 to 1939, is chairman of the pub- 
licity committee. 
* 

MADISON, WIS. (No. 223)—The 
Union devoted almost all of its February 
8 newspaper, the Madison Teacher, to 
the report of the University Curriculum 
Committee. The Union Committee is 
advocating (1) redefinition of the aims 
of college education, (2) simplified and 
better balanced list of basic require- 
ments, (3) continuation of present ex- 
perimentation in freshman English, (4) 
a new freshman course in contemporary 
social, political and economic problems, 
(5) a general major, not “distributed” 
but integrated and (6) establishment 
of a standing committee on curriculum. 

The Local is attacking the state 
Emergency Board for its “economy 
drive,” which will seriously cripple 
essential state services, especially relief 
and education. The prospect of a power- 
ful blow against lower income groups 
through the sales tax is also looming, the 
Union reports. 

Economy is already having its effect, 
the Local asserts, with the departure of 
five University of Wisconsin professors 
to more secure posts in different uni- 
versities throughout the country. 

Hand in hand with the economy fight 
is the threat to tenure embodied in the 
referendum asking for repeal of the 
Wisconsin tenure law. Removal of this 
law would expose teachers to the whims 
of administrators and groups and to 
dismissal without cause, the Union 
charges. 

* 


HAMPTON, VA. (No. 607)—The race 
question and retrenchment are holding 
their place as important issues in the life 
of the Union. Under the heading of 
retrenchment comes the unofficial news 
that more than a dozen teachers will have 
been relieved of their duties at the end 
of the school year. 

The Local, examining the basic rea- 
sons for these reported dismissals, asks 


FEBRUARY, 1940 


why high-salaried executives are re- 
tained, while teachers, the basic units 
of the educational system, are dis- 
charged. 

March 26 is an important date on 
the schedule of the Local. On that day 
a Negro teacher in the Norfolk schools, 
a member of the Union, will be heard 
in federal court in a suit brought by 
him for equal pay. The National Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Colored 
People is cooperating with the Virginia 
State Teachers in conducting the legal 
action. re 


NEW BEDFORD, MASS. (No. 263)— 
Working with other city employees for 
an improved pay schedule, the Union 
will soon announce its plans for action. 
Details will be revealed as soon as they 
have been worked out. 

The Union reports that the visit of 
Dr. George S. Counts, National AFT 
President, has greatly stimulated or- 
ganization and other work in the area. 

* 

CLEVELAND, OHIO—Gross dispro- 
portion in the type of representation 
of the Ohio Educational Association has 
been cited by the Union in its analysis 
of the midwinter meeting of that or- 
ganization. The Union charges that the 
OEA is dominated by administrators, 
contending that while 90 per cent of the 
membership of the OEA is made up of 
classroom teachers, representation of 
that group comes nowhere near that 
figure. 

That the Union’s point was well taken 
was proved when the administrators de- 
feated an amendment to the constitution 
which would have required that 50 per 
cent of the delegates be composed of 
classroom teachers. It was proposed 
by a group of ten Dayton teachers and 
endorsed by the Dayton Classroom 
Teachers Association. The move was 
killed when the administrators declared 
that the amendment would create an 
artificial cleavage between the teachers 
and administrators. 

James Dunn, member of a Cleveland 
Local, battled vigorously to modify the 
proposed tenure bill submitted by the 
OEA for more protection to teachers. 
His suggestions were accepted. The 
convention again endorsed a proposal 
for a state board of education and 
has taken steps to draw plans which will 
eliminate objectionable features of the 
bill as it was presented to the recent 
general election. 

* 
ERIE, PA. (No. 337)—The Union 
adopted a program of activities for the 
coming year at its January meeting which 
includes a vote on the new constitution. 
The facts about the Donnelly campaign 
are being broadcast through the Local 





in response to an appeal for aid in 
organizing the Donnelly printing plant, 
one of the largest privately-owned print- 
ing plants in the world. 


* 

PHILADELPHIA, PA. (No. 474)— 
Pointing the way for direct understand- 
ing of the meaning of the larger arma- 
ments budget and smaller social welfare 
funds, the Union has launched a cam- 
paign to prevent reduction in the WPA 
budget and to secure funds for 3,000,- 
000 WPA positions. The WPA Leader, 
the Local’s publication, carries as its 
lead story an editorial attacking the 
move toward heavy armament expendi- 
tures while slashing relief and social wel- 
fare services. * 
COLUMBUS, OHIO (No. 438)—Two 
officers of the Religion and Labor Foun- 
dation addressed a regular business 
meeting of the Union. They were 
Executive-Secretary Willard Uphaus of 
New Haven, Conn., and the Rev. Charles 
F. McLennan, of Willoughby, Ohio, mid- 
western secretary. Both are leaders in 
the important movement to promote 
closer relationships between labor and 
progressive religious groups. Mr. Uphaus 
is an active member of the Yale Local of 
the AFT, and is chairman of its labor 
committee and a delegate to the New 
Haven Central Labor Council. Rev. 
McLennan, active in the Farmer Labor 
Party in Lake county, Ohio, has pub- 
licized facts which the commercial press 
ignored and has testified before the 
Senate Committee on Education and 
Labor on the anti-labor practices of the 
Ohio Rubber Company. 

* 

NEWARK, OHIO (No. 411)—Emer- 
son L. Fishbaugh, president of the New- 
ark Federation of Teachers, is the new 
president of the Newark Federation of 
Labor. A delegate to that group from 
the Local for four years, he is a teacher 
of mathematics in the Lincoln junior high 
school and has been active in the labor 
movement since the Local was formed. 

The Local’s publication made its first 
appearance recently in a new format. It 
contains news and articles of interest to 
members of the Union, with democracy 
in teaching as the keynote. Plans are 
now under way to celebrate the fifth 
anniversary of the founding of the 
Union on May 27. 





March Deadline 
All copy for the March issue 


of the AMERICAN TEACHER must 
be in by March 1. All Locals 
are requested to send in two (2) 
copies of their publications ad- 
dressed to George T. Guernsey, 
506 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago. 





31 














HOUSING 


IN THIS special issue of Survey Graphic for February nineteen 
experts explain in vivid and authoritative articles, charts and 
illustrations why a home in the very fullest sense of the word—the 
house itself and its setting in a neighborhood providing adequate 
amenities—stands far beyond the reach of millions of Americans to 
rent or to buy. Moreover, they point the way to a solution of the 
problem. 

Under the editorship of Albert Mayer, architect, writer, and 
consultant to official housing and 
planning authorities and of Loula D. 
Lasker as associate, this number an- 
swers the following challenging ques- 


tions: 
rn | C How do good homes strengthen our 


democracy? How are builders, finan- 
* * * ciers and planners attempting to solve 
the problems of the family who wants 
a gh nod What = our pore. 
ment dong to raise the standard o 
HOMES * home life? What progress has been 
made in the fields of public housing, 
. investment housing, home and com- 
munity planning? How can we solve 
the riddle of taxation in relation to 
housing? Where will the back-to-the- 
* country movement lead? What sort 
of homes and communities can we 
expect in the America of tomorrow? 
Contributors include Secretary 
Henry A. Wallace, Raymond V. Par- 
sons, Irving Brant, Catherine Bauer, 
Edith Elmer Wood, Ira S. Robbins, 
Carl Feiss, Benton MacKaye, David Cushman Coyle, Charles Abrams, 
Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Canfield, Harold S. Buttenheim, John H. 
Crider, John Palmer Gavit. 
Eleanor Roosevelt calls it “an extremely good number.” The 
N. Y. Times says it “shows comprehensively the need, the difficulties, 
the evils, the achievements and the hopes in American home building.” 


INTRODUCTORY OFFER 
Single copies of the February issue (not generally available on 
news stands) sell for 40 cents. For classroom use the rate drops to 
3 copies for $1. The annual subscription price of Survey Graphic 
is $3. For the next five issues—including the February issue— 
send only $1 with this advertisement to Department AT, Survey 
Graphic, 112 East 19 Street, New York City. 


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THE AMERICAN TEACHER 





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