OFFICIAL REPORT-1944 THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS A Department of the X.nJoml Education As.sociation of the United St;ucs /fvy 57^,. WARTIME CONFERENCES ON EDUCATION r H E M E Tk Pt'oplc'5 Scliools m War awA Peace Seattle • Atlanta • Islew York • Chicago • Kansas City UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA LIBRARIES EDUCATION LIBRARY OFFICIAL REPORT Wartime Conferences on Education STATE ri^T ;Vf ■ '• ^^ "^^ AND «-**—— ^^j^ ••*- >»Aii>i£SV|iajB, FLA. SEATTLE January 10-12, 1944 ATLANTA February 15-17, 1944 NEW YORK February 22-24, 1944 CHICAGO February 18-March 1, 1944 KANSAS CITY March 8-10, 1944 THE.AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS A Department of the National Fducation Association of the United States 1201 SIXTEENTH STREET, NORTHWEST, WASHINGTON 6, D. C. March 1944 PRICE, $1 PER COPY J 7^. Cr rDOCATIOS LfBBlil N FEBRUARY 1940, the railroad yards at St. Louis were filled with the special trains and extra Pullmans handling the convention travel of the American Associa- tion of School Administrators. Special trains and extra Pullmans for civilians were early war casualties. In February 1941, two hundred and eighty-two firms and organi- zations participated in the convention exhibit of the American Association of School Administrators in the Atlantic City Audi- torium. Today, the armed forces are occupying that entire audito- rium, one of the largest in the world. In February 1942, the official count showed that 12,174 persons registered at the San Francisco convention. The housing bureau assigned 4837 hotel sleeping rooms. *Now every night in San Francisco, long lines of people stand in hotel lobbies anxiously seeking a place to sleep. In 1943, the convention was cancelled at the request of the Office of Defense Transportation. In 1944, it was neither ppctical nor appropriate to hold a great national convention, and yet the need for school administrators to get together to discuss present problems and future plans afifect- ing education was more urgent than ever. To meet this need, a series of five regional conferences was organized. This Official Report includes addresses delivered at each of the five conferences. Due to rationing of print paper, its size is limited to 256 pages, and so a number of excellent addresses are neces- sarily omitted. The central theme of the regional conference programs was "The People's Schools in War and Peace." The five headings under which the addresses in this volume are organized correspond with the sub-topics for the five general sessions of each conference, which were : The People's Schools: An International View The People's Schools: A National View Free Schools for a Free People The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow What's Right with the Schools in 1944 CONTENTS PART I The People's Schools: An International View The Schools of Britain Carry On — McClure Education and the People's Peace — Stoddard Education and the People's Peace — Carr . . To Bind Up the Wounds in the Schools of All Nations . . . . — Russell . Education for Citizenship in a Reorganized World — Hunter . Page 5 17 29 37 49 PART II The People's Schools\: A National View Safeguarding the Intellectual Foundations of America . . . . — Studebaker Morale for a Free World — Reed Morale in Education in 1944 — Nuttall The Teachers of America Serve a Nation at War — Joynes The Military Training Program of the Army Service Forces . — W eihle Education for Civic Competence — Bacon 55 63 71 75 82 PART III Free Schools for a Free People Financing Education in the Postwar Economy — Norton . . 91 Financing Education in the Postwar Economy — Grace . . 100 Protecting Home Rule in American Education — Pillsbury . 105 Universal and Free Public Education — Erivin . . 112 Protecting Home Rule in American Education — JVanamaker 117 ^ PART IV The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow Some Suggested War and Peace Musts for Education . . . . — Bruncr The Outlook for Education — Wade Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs — Gi'vens Minds and Materials — Spratt Today's Challenge to American Schools — Flora The Future of Education in the South — Arnall Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs — Sutton Education and Business — Boushall [3] 125 133^ 138 144 145 u 154 161 172 U*AO 4 American Association of School Administrators PART V What's Right with the Schools in 1944 The Schools as Builders of Men — Engelhardt. 179 Schools, the Citadels of Democracy — Putnam . . 183 What Is Right with Health and Physical Education — Bracken. . 188 What's Right with the Schools — McFarland 195 Preserving the American Heritage — DouJna . . 200 What's Right with the Educational Program in 1944 . . . . — Samuelsun . 207 The Schools as Preservers of Our Cultural Heritage . . . . — H'arrcn . . 213 The Schools as Promoters of Cooperation in the Educational Enterprise — Kennan . . 218 School Citadels of Democracy — Courier . . 224 The Schools as Citadels of Democracy — Stoddard . 231 In Looking Forward — Edmonson . 234 Official Records Also at the Conferences 241 Seattle Conference Program 243 Atlanta Conference Program 244 New York Conference Program 245 Chicago Conference Program 246 Kansas City Conference Program 247 Report of the Board of Tellers 248 Report of the Auditing Committee 249 Yearbook Commissions 250 Officers 1943-44 250 Officers 1944-45 . 251 OUR POLICY — The American Association of School Administra- tors endorses no individual or group of individuals or any sentiment expressed by any speaker or other participant in its programs, except by resolution or by motion approved by a vote of its members. i «. Part I The People's Schools: An International View THE SCHOOLS OF BRITAIN CARRY ON WORTH MC CLURE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, SEATTLE, WASHINGTON ] PRESIDENT, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF SCHOOL ADMINISTRATORS Address at Seattle, Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Kansas City Conferences For some weeks I have been privileged to visit the schools of the United Kingdom, running the whole scale from nursery classes for tots and toddlers whose mothers are doing war jobs, to adult programs like the Workers' Educational Association classes and the men's and women's institutes of the London County Council. I was there under the sponsorship of our own Office of War Information at the invitation of the British Board of Edu- cation and the British Ministry of Information to see boys and girls and teachers at work in wartime schools and to discuss those educational prob- lems which are common to both countries. I have observed education first- hand in a rapid sweep that has included parts of England, Scotland, and the North of Ireland. I have questioned and received open, informative answers from teachers, students, and authorities. I have seen nursery schools and wartime nurseries in Willesden, the Northern Counties, and Scotland. I have attended Workers' Educational Association classes in Manchester. I have visited schools of all kinds in the colliery towns, and I have met with eager-minded youth groups and their leaders. I have visited technical colleges where men and women are being trained for war jobs under the War Office and Ministry of Labour schemes, and members of the armed forces are receiving technical training. I have also spent a day at a famous "Public School" in Surrey. I was the guest of the British for a period of eight weeks. I was gone from this country about three months. I left Seattle on the 6th day of October, and I arrived in England on the 8th day of November. Twenty days of that time were spent in crossing the Atlantic Ocean, which in itself was an opportunity to live several weeks, for we straggled behind the convoy, and after we had been out a few days our engine broke down. We had already had the news that several of the stragglers were sunk. Then we started to go back to the nearest port, which was three days away, so we spent three days without support on the broad bosom of the Atlantic, lots of time to reflect on what a grand and glorious place the United States really is and how you had never appreciated it before. Coming back I had another unusual experience, that is, of flying home, touching four continents in the space of forty-eight hours. I literally filled my pipe in the northern part of the British Isles and smoked it in North Africa — they wouldn't let me smoke when I got on the plane. [5] 6 American Association of School Administrators I left in a sleet storm at 10:30 at night. The next morning I looked out of the window about 9:00 o'clock and there was a beach line seven or eight thousand feet below with a white line of surf, palm trees behind, and sand dunes in the background. After about three-quarters of an hour of flying, we came in sight of North Africa ; a city, partly a native quarter ; some modern buildings ; and a camel caravan winding its way along the road toward the gates of the city. In another five minutes we landed at a tremendous American airport which had been developed within the last year, really an immense project. Here were four Arabs squatted around a fire warming their hands, in spite of what I am sure a Californian would have at once claimed as a California climate. The sun was shining and the air was fresh and brisk, and the only thing that was missing to identify it as California was a sign announcing the city limits of Los Angeles. I had never visited England before. It was, therefore, a totally new ex- perience. Some of my British friends sympathized with me because I had never seen the old England, but after I had been there a short time, I felt I had seen an even more magnificent England than the old England which somehow I felt I possessed thru reading Dickens and his successors. What I saw was the victory of a whole people. The Battle of Britain was not Avon by the military alone ; it was won by the rank and file, the rich and poor, the great and small, the young and old, who got out and fought fires and served as members of first-aid squads, as hospital orderlies, as fire watchers, and all those in the other civilian defense activities. When the raids came during the last week, which were more severe than for many months previous, I am quite certain that London was not caught unprepared. I visited some of those control rooms and I saw how thoroly they were organized, with one or two professional people, and the balance of the work done by nonprofessional people who were there on a weekly schedule. Everybody spends so many hours a week there, in addition to his regular work — a truly magnificent Britain! I was there long enough to find out that the British and the Americans are alike in a good many important disrespects. We think of them as, oh, I suppose, in terms of P. G. Wodehouse's stories, a group of Charlieboys, rather stodgy individuals who haven't very much of a sense of humor, pretty shrewd on the right end of a business deal. They drive on the wrong side of the street, and they think we do! They put their salt on the rim of the plate and dip their food into it, instead of broadcasting it over the food as we do. They are very skilful with the fork in the left hand. One of the amazing things I witnessed on the British ship going over was the skill with which the officers would cement peas on the back of a fork with mashed potatoes, something I never achieved. When we got to Britain, I didn't see that for there were no peas, but plenty of mashed potatoes. However, there was a delightful sense of humor. The English sense of humor is perhaps different from ours because it grows out of the passing events. I judge it must be a general lifesaver for them, the ability which they show to extract humor out of even the most tragic situations. They tell the story of the two shopkeepers in London whose shops were The People's Schools: An International View 7 smashed by a near-miss that landed in the street, and the next morning one of them went out and saw the front of his shop all blown in, his windows and door — everything opened up. He placed a sign above his door in large letters which read: "OPEN AS USUAL." His rival down the street a few doors came up to see what was going on and he saw that big sign up there, "OPEN AS USUAL," and he went back and took a look at his own shop, and repaired to the back room and produced another sign which he put up over his windows: "MORE OPEN THAN USUAL." Then there is the story of the two good ladies who were cleaning up the street, raking up the fragments of broken glass and other things in piles to be removed, and one said to the other, "Isn't it a good thing that we have this kind of work to do to keep our minds off the war?" They get a good deal of lend-lease material over there and along with it a particular kind of tinned meat that our boys in the Army have — and the Army, by the way, is in evidence everywhere. We saw American soldiers wherever we went. The British population have had so much of this tinned meat that they call us Uncle Spam now. I recall talking to members of a youth group down in the "Mile of Docks," in London's East End, where all were blitzed out of their homes, the schools smashed, and the youngsters had to go to work at thirteen and they have been working ever since. They were fifteen to seventeen years of age. That day they sat around the fireplace in the Youth Club, run by the Church of England, and I tried to get them to tell me something of their experiences, and all I got was jokes, the funny side of everything. One lad told with a good deal of laughter how, when the docks were burning, he was serving as a fire watcher. Something on the docks gave ofif a lot of tremendously unpleasant fumes, and he decided the Germans were using gas, so he put on his gas mask and rushed into all the air-raid shelters and said, "Put on your gas masks. The Jerries are using gas." He had to be restrained finally by physical force before they could stop him, but not until he had put on quite a show for the rest of them. That is the type of people they are. They said they can see now that other people might have thought they had their backs to the wall in '40 and '41, but they didn't realize it themselves. You can't whip a people who do not know when they ought to be whipped. Contrary to the general impression given out by press reports, this party of Americans labeled "lend-lease lecturers" didn't go in a group being wined and dined. We went on individual itineraries. Mine was plotted by the Office of Education and our own office at the American Embassy. I went to Manchester, Newcastle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Belfast, besides a number of side trips from London, spending several days in each one of those cities, visiting rural and city schools, taking in a good many youth eroups. I think one of the most interesting meetings I had was one Sunday night at a motion picture house in Kilmarnock, about twenty miles from Glasgow, near the home of Robert Burns, a weekly meeting for the pur- pose of informing the community about the Allies-part of an organized 8 American Association of School Administrators series of fortnightly meetings held all over the United Kingdom. There were fifteen hundred lay people there. My remarks were followed by a question period and by films on American industrial development. Everywhere I was met with warm friendliness, and I rode in third class as well as first class compartments. For those who have not been there before, there is no second class; they have only the first and the third classes. I have come to like the people of the United Kingdom, to know how much like us they are in fundamental ideals and aspirations, and how much our educational systems have in common. I have no desire to pose as an authority after only eight weeks. I have witnessed the amazing spectacle of a people who have not been satisfied merely to maintain schools thru all the grim unpleasantness of blitz but who, in the midst of total war, with the enemy only minutes away — fifteen minutes from some of the German flying fields to England — are con- fidently planning for the greatest educational advance in their history. The Schools at War — Make no mistake about it. These schools have suffered. Yet never has it been more clearly demonstrated that a school is more than bricks and mortar. Buildings by the hundreds have been blasted out of existence. Others have been partially destroyed. Still others have been occupied in whole or in part by the armed services or the civil de- fense. Those that are left to the children have been unavoidably defaced and crippled as to lighting by such things as blast walls in front of ground floor windows and entrances. Valuable building and playground space has had to be taken for air-raid shelters. There has been neither materials nor manpower for the usual repairs. Janitor service has been shorthanded. Shortage of books, paper, and supplies has handicapped teaching tremen- dously. It gave me an opportunity to realize how important the equip- ment is that we have in this country. Yet triumphant above myriad hard- ships and frustrations has been that immortal something which we call a school — the spirit of teachers and boys and girls, living, working, laugh- ing, enduring, matching wits against adversity, growing together. Heroic Teachers — These British teachers have written a brilliant page in the history of the teaching profession. They were evacuated to the country with the children, once in the days of the "phony war" and again when the real blitz came. As the children filtered back, they came back too, to hold classes in private homes and various emergency quarters until better shelter could be had. Their behavior during the blitz was superb. For ex- ample, in Sheffield, widely devastated by a night raid, eight hundred teach- ers appeared at the town hall within an hour in response to a radio appeal. They got there somehow in spite of the fact that a new blitz, more violent than the first, had already begun. For several days and nights they manned emergency hospitals, rest shelters, feeding stations, doing whatever tasks assigned them, snatching sleep or going without, as circumstances dictated. On May 11, 1941, London received its most cruel blasting from the skies. There were 1800 fires in London that night. The Rest Centres were jammed with homeless people, who had to be fed, sheltered, and, in many instances, clothed. All that night and all the next day the teachers of Lon- The People's Schools: An International View 9 don were working, caring for the destitute thousands. By evening of the 12th they had been serving for twenty-four hours and the time had come for them to be relieved. But they did not go home to bed as you might think they were justified in doing; no — a thousand of them went to Westminster that night thru the blitz-torn streets, to hear the president • of the Board of Education and the secretary of the National Union of Teachers discuss proposals for a new program of education for the children. The teachers are still taking their turns at evacuation duty, for 140,000 children are still evacuated. Just before Christmas I visited the classroom of a London teacher who had just returned from eighteen months evacua- tion service. While she was away her former school had been blitzed. She was now assigned to a different school which was itself occupying emer- gency quarters because its former building had been destroyed. Teachers and Pupils — The teachers know their pupils. You are struck with this as you visit their schools. To facilitate this acquaintance small schools are preferred. Infant schools, ages five to seven, are frequently housed separately from junior schools, ages eight to eleven, and the latter from senior schools, ages twelve to fourteen. Even when housed together each division has a headmistress or headmaster. A similar view is taken as to size of secondary schools. Manchester Grammar School with 1384 stu- dents is said to be the largest secondary school in the United Kingdom. Five hundred is regarded as large enough. It is expected that the head of each school shall know the pupils individually, and the heads feel responsible to achieve this personal relationship. Size of Classes — About class size educationalists are less concerned at the moment. Classes are larger than in American schools, especially below the secondary school. Even in infant schools classes of over forty in England and Scotland and over fifty in Northern Ireland are customary. Double seating is almost universal. Lack of housing and personnel shortages account for this in part but not altogether. Class Organization — Pupils are grouped by age-levels, not grade-levels. • That is, all the five-year-olds are regarded as one class, all the six-year-olds as another, and so on. Add to this the fairly general practice of organizing A.B.C.D. "streams," or ability grouping within each age-level, and you have the basis for assignment of pupils. Thus it frequently happens that you will find a few eleven-year-olds with the A-stream of twelves. There is no such thing as our annual promotion. The examination at age eleven or twelve is the standardizing device which takes care of that. Youngsters all remain with their own age groups until they meet this hurdle at which junction their educational future is finally determined. More about this later. The School Meals — School feeding is making a valuable contribution to the national health. Today well over a million elementary- and secondary- school children receive warm, well-balanced school meals at less than cost, the difference being made up by national funds. These funds are chan- neled thru the British Board of Education, the Scottish Education De- partment, and the Ministry of Education for Northern Ireland. Encouraged by the government and the schools, the number of children thus being 10 American Association of School Administrators served is constantly increasing. There is evidence that children are taller and sturdier since this service has been established than before. The Min- istry of Clothing announced that children more than 10 percent overheight or overweight might receive additional clothing coupons, and when they checked up, they were amazed at the number of children much larger than they had ever had before, who exceeded those standards. Supervised by the teachers, the school meals offer wide possibilities along lines of both health and social education. I have eaten these meals in England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. They consist of meat, potatoes and gravy^, cabbage or other vegetable, and a "sweet" as desserts are called. Helpings are generous. There are "seconds" if required and I have even witnessed a few "thirds" disappear miraculously, not without some envy. Besides the school meals, fresh milk is served twice per day at a ha'penny a portion which is one- third of a pint. The New Education Bill — The United Kingdom is on the eve of the greatest educational advance in its history. Just before I left, the president of the Board of Education, who is a member of the House of Commons, had introduced a bill which, in keeping with the previously issued White Paper, makes the following far-reaching proposals: 1. The unification of the national system of education into three stages, to be known as primary, secondary, and further education. Notice they don't say "adult" education; they don't say "youth" education; they say "further" education. 2. The provision of nursery schools at public expense wherever needed. 3. The raising of the school-leaving age to fifteen, and later to sixteen. 4. Further reorganization of elementary schools so that well designed and equipped elementary and secondary schools will be available to all children. 5. Amendment of existing laws to require (1) that the school day shall begin with an act of collective worship; (2) that religious instruction shall be provided with proper safeguards as to freedom of conscience of pupils and teachers; and (3) to enable schools provided by voluntary bodies, e.g., churches, to play their part in the proposed educational developments. This emphasis on religious wor- ship and instruction is not a new thing. It is the first time, however, it will be required by law if this bill passes. 6. Introduction of free and compulsory part-time education in working hours for young people up to age eighteen. 7. Provision of adequate, coordinated facilities for youth and adult education. 8. Extension of existing facilities for securing health and physical well-being of children and youth, including recreation. 9. Inspection and registration of all independent schools — which we would call the privately operated schools, not supported by any government funds. 10. Adjustment of present systems of local educational administration to give effect to the new unified elementary, secondary, and further education program. These have to unify. They have had separate boards for elementary and secondary schools in many instances. The proposal is that they unify the boards now. 11. To finance those improvements it is proposed to increase the national govern- ment's share of the costs from 50 percent to 55 percent by 1948-49. That represents an increase in the total cost of education when this program is complete, of 66 2/3 percent over the present outlay, which is about 120,000,000 pounds. Total additional costs of these reforms is estimated at 5,500,000 pounds the first year, 47,300,000 pounds the seventh year, and ultimately 79,800,000 pounds. Education and Social Reconstruction — There is no doubt that the goal of universal free education is in the public mind of the United Kingdom The People's Schools: An International View 11 and that it is an important part of reconstruction. American high schools are of especial interest because the White Paper and the bill just intro- duced by President R. A. Butler of the British Board of Education pro- pose to extend the age-limits of compulsory education, or as it is signifi- cantly termed, to raise the "school-leaving age" from fourteen to fifteen — significantly, because according to official figures 86 percent now leave school ,at age fourteen. To a great many groups I showed the films of American school life, which I was fortunately able to take with me. Among these, one showing occupations followed by American boys and girls one year after graduation from high school and another picturing student activities con- tributing to citizenship and character education elicited the keenest dis- cussion from audiences of all ages. These films also raised the perfectly natural question of why stay in school until seventeen or eighteen if you have to take ordinary jobs afterwards, and others of similar tenor that brought out sharply our American tradition of universal education as the cornerstone of the Republic. These discussions revealed that the "Dead End Kids," movie version, had given our British cousins a totally fan- tastic notion of American youngsters. British Educational Tradition — Now, in order to understand a little more fully the provisions of this bill, you need to look at the British edu- cational tradition, which has developed out of long centuries during which the church alone kept schools alive and later when education was purely a parental responsibility. The nation has been a relative newcomer as a supporter of schools. In 1833 national funds made the beginnings of mass education possible. Small wonder then that education is still viewed by many solely as a privilege not a duty, as a weapon to be used for per- sonal advantage in the economic struggle ; that mass education for social responsibilities is relatively new. Happily, however, there are today in the United Kingdom strong voices calling attention to the dangers of over-early specialization and training, the importance of cultural studi'"^ to abundant living, and the necessity of understanding today's world as a basis for competent citizenship. The School-Leaving Age — Contrasting sharply with 1940 America, where 73 percent of youth ages fourteen to seventeen were in school, some 86 percent of United Kingdom youth leave school at fourteen. The new bill proposes to raise this to fifteen at the earliest possible date after April 1. 1945, later to sixteen, and contemplates part-time education until age eighteen. When the present shortage of school buildings, personnel, sup- plies, and equipment is realized, the need for this preliminary period of preparation is obvious. And they have set the date for the initiation of this program at April 1, 1945. That is the day when the school-leaving age goes up. They want to take this year to get ready for it. The Examination System — Education in this country is selective in character. Children are examined — "creamed" is the word employed — at ages eleven and twelve, to select those who may attend the secondarv schools. Those not qualifying for the secondary schools are "creamed" again at age thirteen for the junior technical and commercial schools. Those who have 12 American Association of School Administrators been admitted to secondary schools are "creamed" for the university at about age sixteen or seventeen. It is argued by many that it is impracticable to undertake to specialize a child's education on the basis of examinations taken at age eleven or twelve. It is proposed to meet this objection in the new bill by providing for a resorting and readjustment of misfits at age thirteen. It is further argued that the uniform examination system freezes the curriculum, makes changes impossible because the questions of previous examinations are employed for intensive study by pupils about to be ex- amined themselves. I saw that going on thruout the schools, in every sec- tion of the United Kingdom — the pamphlet form containing examination questions for the last twenty-five years, which they are studying in prepara- tion for the various examinations they are about to take. I was told by one inspector that he had introduced some new mathematics questions in the examination, feeling that the mathematics was not quite up to date, but there was a tremendous outcry and he was never again asked to make out any mathematics examinations. It is proposed to meet this objection by a gradual change over to "internal" examinations, that is, examinations set by each school for its own pupils. They are going to take six or seven years to do that. Higher schools have been setting examples for lower schools. They are going to have a few committee members from the lower schools to assist in making examinations and gradually increase it until finally the lower school is making out its own questions! Specialized Secondary Schools or Comprehensive High Schools — The Education White Paper proposed secondary schools of three types — gram- mar, technical, and modern — the first-named representing the traditional secondary curriculum, and the last-named the field of general education. The last-named school, the modern school, would be the successor of the present senior school. It would be raised from ages twelve to fourteen to serve chil- dren between ages twelve to sixteen, and made a secondary school. They say that will serve those who are practically-minded — general education. The term "technical school" is self-explanatory. Some British educationists op- pose this specialization of secondary schools. They point out that the modern school will still be the school for "left-overs" and they favor the compre- hensive American high school, known in England as the "multilateral" and in Scotland as the "omnibus" school. Opponents of this proposal base their onposition in part on the necessarily larger size of the comprehensive school. The new bill leaves this issue open for administrative adjustment. Coeducation — No longer an issue in America and scarcely one in Scot- land, the education of boys and girls together in the same secondary schools is still a question which is far from closed in England. America's experience with coeducational high schools has been the point of manv questions. I was asked about that everywhere, whether we believed youngsters did as much work, with boys and girls in the same school, and why we Vvanted them in the same school, after all, and when the questions were answered, they usually got into argument among themselves, so I could sit back and rest. Youth Activities — The matter of juvenile delinquency was most interest- ing to observe. They haven't indulged in the great mass of words that we The People's Schools: An International View 13 have in this country. You find very little reference in the papers over there to juvenile delinquency, but j^ou do find evidence in the schools of a great deal of activity; in other words, with the enemy fifteen minutes away, they haven't had time to orate about or write newspaper editorials; they have gone to work. They say it is an educational problem and you can see how acute it must have been with five years of blackout, five years of darkness, with a great deal of evacuation, which has disrupted families, with a great many more mothers working than we have here, with fathers in the service, and with youngsters going to work at fourteen and making eight or ten pounds a week, which produces the same phenomenon we have here, namely, youngsters with more money than they know how to spend wholesomely. It is of interest that national funds for out-of-school youth activities, as they call it — they don't say "prevention of juvenile delinquency," you see — both educational and recreational, have been wisely channelled thru the British Board of Education, the Scottish Education Department, and the Ministry of Education of Northern Ireland, to local educational authorities, who are empowered to cooperate with and make grants to the various local voluntary agencies — the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides, the Boys' Brigade of the Church of England, the Y.W.C.A. and the Y.M.C.A.— thus utiliz- ing to the fullest both public and privately supported community resources. In every community visited I have seen the fruition of this policy in youth centers and youth clubs, which are going concerns. America has much to learn from the United Kingdom in this regard. Now let me give you three examples. First, in the city of Darlington, in the colliery area, I saw an ele- mentary school being utilized every night in the week from the time school was out until about ten o'clock, for these youth activities. This program was in charge of the headmaster of the senior school, which occupied that build- ing, but not only were members of the school staff employed there, but there was an expert in dramatics, a physical education expert from one of the voluntary agencies ; there were leaders of various kinds from youth groups who were privileged to use the building on the basis of a schedule. All the activities you might think of were there, from social dancing to hobby clubs and cabinet making, and radio and construction work of all kinds, and plenty of games like table tennis, and the inevitable canteen where you could get a cup of tea for a penny, and a sandwich for a penny, and so on. Now, in Edinburgh, on the waterfront, where they had a great deal of delinquency among girls, the Girl Guides had been endeavoring to operate, but weren't able to get anywhere, first, because they couldn't find a place to operate and, second, because the girls down there whom they wanted to reach, were inclined to believe the Girl Guides a bit too goody-goodV. The educational authorities were able to get hold of a steel hut released by the Army down on the waterfront. They employed the director of the Girl Guides, who was really an expert, a well-trained individual, to set up this club, and it was called the Girls' Club, and they enlisted a lot of girls in that community to help organize the program so that it was organized along the lines of what would interest them. After it got going, some of the younger girls wanted to come in and that 14 American Association of School Administrators was permitted, and finally the boj's wanted to come in, too, and so they had a staff of three people, all of whom were well qualified. The night I was there the place was swarming with youngsters of all ages. They operate on a schedule. At that particular time they had table tennis games. One group was working on Christmas cards, which are very difficult to get over there because they are not being printed. Another group was making dolls. The girls were making dolls out of stockings for younger children, and a group of boys was making toys which would be very grate- fully received because toys are no longer being manufactured. In another place I saw a building, an old home, a mansion rented by the local school committee, which had been turned over to these voluntary agencies. The Education Committee had placed in this building a man and his wife who were well qualified as directors. They invited these voluntary agencies to come in and take over the place and use it for their meetings and for their activities, and that place was being very well occupied the night I was there. Groups were there. They were redecorating and refurnishing that house themselves. There were a good many athletic activities going ,on, from wrestling and boxing down to table tennis. So I think there are two things which are distinctive about their dealing with juvenile delinquency, aside from the fact that they don't talk about it as such, and give the youngsters the idea that they are all delinquent and must be taken care of. First, they regard it as an educational activity, and they make the educational system of any community the coordinating agency, with authority to cooperate and funds to cooperate with all of the agencies in the community. Second, they insist on qualified persons as leaders. No funds are available until that requirement has been met. Rationing — Now, the matter of rationing is of great interest to us be- cause we have had some of it to do here. In issuing ration books the schools assisted but the job was simplified. As described, the procedure has been about as follows: (1) Registration blanks are distributed by postal authorities and when completed are collected by them. (2) Completed blanks are de- livered to the local school in each neighborhood with the requisite number of ration books. (3) Names are written on the covers of the books by the pupils under teachers' supervision. (4) Completed books are collected by the post office and delivered to the homes. So there were no queue-ings-up or interruption of school to the extent it was brought about here. Personnel Shortages — Evidence of thorogoing overall planning is seen in the national program recently announced for emergency training of 10,000 teachers annually for seven years. You see, when they add two years to the school' program, they are going to need a great many teachers to meet that as well as to replace the losses which have come about thru retirement and other causes. The teacher-training institutions in the United Kingdom have not been so severely depleted of students as have those of the United States. Men are gone, of course, but women of registration age — remember, women between eighteen and fifty registered for national service — have been con- tinued at college. And those who are qualified for teacher training are re- served for that purpose. They are kept on the job at teacher training. So they The People's Schools: An International View 15 haven't suffered so far as women are concerned. Contrary to some reports in the United States, schoolmen have been called into service in large numbers. A rising birth-rate coupled with the extension of compulsory attendance makes emergency training of teachers necessary and the program announced has been based upon estimated needs. Schools and Parents — Schools of the United Kingdom, with the possible exception of London, do not seem as close to the community as our own, but everywhere I have found great interest in American parent-teacher associa- tions. It is noteworthy that Belfast now has fourteen parents' associations. There may be a growing tendency, hastened by the war with its extension of school activities, for a closer community tie. Universities and Human Resources — The university student body of the United Kingdom today is normally about one-twentieth of America's. They have a total of 50,000 in the universities of the United Kingdom, as against our 1,000,000 or perhaps 1,250,000 in peacetime. However, up to the pres- ent, 40 percent of the students of the universities have been supported at least in part by national funds, and British educationists hope the percentage will be increased. This liberal interpretation of a conservative policy gives America pause. We boast of our great university facilities, yet every year some of our best brains are wasted because talented young people lack the funds to carry on. Britain has lost by too early and too frugal selection per- haps, but we have lost because, after making it easy to prepare for college, we have left the selection to be determined on the basis of financial ability. Education and the People's Peace — We all of us, I am certain, hope that the desire of the American people, as expressed in the resolutions which have been passed by the Senate and the House of Representatives overwhelmingly, will be brought to fruition thru some kind of agreement which shall be reached at the peace table. Yet, if we assume that when that document has been signed, the job shall have been done, we assume that which never has been and never can be. It takes time to change attitudes; it takes time to develop understanding, and so there must be educational emphasis upon the ideals and aspirations which the peoples of the United Kingdom and of the United Nations and the United States hold dear. More than that, these plans must be based upon acquaintance and understanding. Many thoughtful persons in the United States and in the United Kingdom think that there must be provision for educational planning within the framework of the United Nations. I am one of those persons. Perhaps the beginning might well be made by our two countries, who share a common language and a common heritage of culture. I believe the time is ripe for such a beginning between these two nations. Everywhere I went in the schools, I was greeted with "The Star-Spangled Banner," so much so that just before Christmas I had to ask to hear some carols. I did want to hear British children singing carols. They sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with a good deal of facility. There was one line they sang, "The shots bursting in air." It took a few times to learn it was not "bombs" but "shots" — "The shots bursting in air." However, the spirit is there. They are teaching American history in many of the schools. Manchester 16 American Association of School Administrators is making a special project of it. The Board of Education has been offering courses in the summer. For the past several summers there have been courses in education for the British teachers, and great public schools — Charter House, for instance, which I visited — also are teaching American history. There is a great deal of interest in it. I find our British cousins to be very realistic in their approach to this subject. They desire to think in terms of practical next steps rather than of generalized uplift. Just before leaving I had a parting conference, quite unofficial, with the secretary of the British National Union of Teachers. This organization represents 150,000 of the 200,000 British teachers. Contrary to what the name implies it has never affiliated with the Trades Union Congress, believing itself to be most effec- tive when it can work with "acceptable individuals and groups, irrespective of their political color, on common educational policies." It is, therefore, what the British call the "opposite number" of the National Education As- sociation of the United States. Summarizing his position on international teamwork in education, at the end of our conference, the Secretary said, "I hope we will organize ourselves on practical lines rather than sublimate ourselves on transcendental lines." Most needed now is to keep the way open for further conversations. The Gilbert Murray Report, which attracted a great deal of attention in this country, has been received rather unfavorably there because it is believed the proposal to take over the schools in the oc- cupied countries is impractical and unwise ; therefore, I found a certain amount of reticence on the part of the leaders of their organizations to dis- cuss this matter until our position, which has been made clear thru our Educational Policies Commission, was understood by them. I have faith that it will be possible to explore this new and crucially im- portant field of international teamwork in education to keep ourselves from becoming "sublimated" on the one hand, and lost in arguments over niceties of detail on the other. I found great interest among teachers on the other side in teacher ex- change. We have had experience with the interchange of teachers between school systems in these United States. Will you not consider on the basis of that experience what might be the result in terms of increased understand- ing and confidence if we could have each year five hundred teachers from the schools of Great Britain and Ireland serving in America's schools and communities, and a like number of American teachers serving in the United Kingdom, returning home after a year of interpreting their homeland, to again become interpreters there of the land they had visited. Here is one activity which might well be the forerunner of continued international team- work in education for a stable world. At any cost, let us cultivate every op- portunity for continued acquaintanceship. In the name of the generations of children yet unborn, let us not falter now. The People's Schools: An International View 17 EDUCATION AND THE PEOPLE'S PEACE ALEXANDER J. STODDARD, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, PHILADELPHIA J CHAIRMAN, EDUCATIONAL POLICIES COMMISSION Address at New York, ChicagOj and Kansas City Conferences Some day this war will end and we shall try again to make peace. But this war will not end as the last war ended. That was a war along a big ditch, or a whole maze of ditches, on a continent. This is a war in the streets, over the fields, on the beaches, in the passes, on the snow-capped mountains, in the trees, in the fox-holes, in the trackless jungles, in the seas, and in the skies. This is a world war. The last war stopped suddenly with an armistice that began at a split- second after eleven o'clock one morning in November. But the end will be different this time. It may take days or even weeks to throttle down the present gigantic war machine. Whether the end comes in a certain second, or during a certain day, or month, or year, what a glorious time it will be when the boys come home again ! Millions will dance in the streets for joy. They will tear up a billion books and shower the confettied paper down from skyscrapers and the clouds; they will tie any tin cans that are left to any old cars that may still be able to run and drive hilariously down the mainstreets of a thousand towns and cities ; they will dash wildly along the marching columns of returning soldiers throwing roses in their paths and kisses to their lips. They will shout and sing until the piled up chorus of ecstacy mounts to the throne of God ! Other millions over the world will stand numb and silent, too tired to weep, as if in a trance, unable to comprehend. Whether laughter or tears or merely dry-eyed staring into space, never before will so many have wel- comed the end of a war, and never before will so many have suffered and lost so much to make it come true. The war will end, but will peace come ? That is now and ever has been the one supreme question confronting mankind. Always the human race has made the fatal assumption that peace naturally follows war, that the alterna- tive to war is peace. What has followed every war thruout the ages? Not peace but an armi- stice which should not be confused with peace. An armistice is a suspension of hostilities, a period when the machinery of war, the arms, stand still for a while. The time may be short or long during which an armistice lasts. But peace has the characteristic of permanence — it abides as do faith and hope and charity. We must not make the mistake of assuming again this time that the inevitable consequence of war is peace. In the 1920's and 30's we thought that a peace had been made. We did not realize that we had run out on what we had made, and it turned out to be only one more in a seemingly endless series of armistices. At one of the great national educational conventions immediately follow- ing the first World War, one of the speakers cried, "Imperialism as a world force is dead ! The funeral was but yesterday." The United States Com- 18 American Association of School Administrators missioner of Education declared, "all isolations, splendid or otherwise, are gone forever." Who would dare think otherwise? Had we not just finished winning the war to end war? And then almost before the boys of World War I had folded their uni- forms and stored them away with mothballs and sacred memories, the American people ran out on them. Almost before they had looked up their old jobs, we turned back to our classrooms, our offices, our newspapers, our politics, our pulpits, our automobiles, our golf courses, our night clubs. Heaving a gigantic sigh of relief that the war was over and peace had come, we turned our backs on the past and sometimes even upon those who had won the war for us. We did not mean to be unkind — we were just tired of war and we assumed that peace had come. Complacency is the most baffling and challenging of all human traits or attitudes. Complacency is a way of retreat, a smug excuse for justifying in- activity, a self-satisfying alibi for lack of concern about meeting and solving problems. In science, complacency takes the form of superstition, unwilling- ness to study cause and effect, objection to experimentation, and belief in all the varied forms of witchcraft, ancient and modern. Complacency seizes upon the highest motives of religion and distorts them into intolerance, dog- matism, and bigotry. In the area of social relationships, complacency leads to self-patriotism, with its evil offsprings of chauvinism and of international, racial, and class hatreds. In human psychology, complacency breeds a satis- faction WMth the status quo and, like the opiate, lulls the human organism into a sweet tranquility in the midst of strife and storm. Complacency has caused every war that the world has known. Com- placency is the arch-foe of peace. The glib generalization that we always have had war and therefore we always shall have war and the philosophy of the survival of the fittest are the answers of complacency to the universal call for the brotherhood of man and a world dominated by goodwill. As Francis B. Sayre said, "What the Allied victory in 1918 did achieve was to give statesmanship an unparalleled opportunity at the conclusion of the war to work out and apply solutions upon which a stable civilization could be built. Military victory gave us our chance, but we lost it." We failed to realize once more that peace, like freedom, must also be bought at the price of blood, sweat, and tears. How noble it is to pay for victory in war with blood, and sweat, and tears. What a deadly tragedy it is to as- sume that peace can be bought for a lesser price ! Everyone admits that war involves marching and fighting and dying, but it is assumed altogether too often that peace means quiet, rest, sleep, and pleasant dreams. But this is not true. Peace is no less dynamic than war; peace has its marching heroes just as has war; peace involves conflict and struggle just as much as war; peace requires red blood just as much as war. If we are to have peace, we must win it even as war must be won. We could call a million witnesses to this fact. The lives of the saints and all who have died that we might have life more abundantly, present a mountain of testimony that the ways of peace call for as much real courage, noble sacri- fice, high adventure, and a willingness to die for a cause as does war. Even The People's Schools: An International View 19 after the world rids itself of war between nations, there will still be an end- less succession of battles to establish a decent world and the kind of man qualified more fully to live in that world. The mistaken assumptions that men make, either consciously or uncon- sciously, get them into their worst troubles. Witness the pay-off on the idea that the world always has had wars and therefore always will have wars. Several of the world's greatest leaders have told us time and time again that this present war could have been prevented. They have even placed their pointing fingers on the dates and places. Wars are not like the inexorable succession of events that we call the seasons. Wars are made by man. They represent a stage in our development as human beings. Wars are the effect of causes and these causes are within the control of man. No matter how much we may vary in conviction on the question of the prevention of war, nothing but gain can come from striving toward that hypothesis. It is one of those bets where only the size of the winning is in doubt. Who knows what generation of men and women may live in the last days of war? Maybe we are that generation — the last generation before peace. I ofifer no pet formula for ending war. Probably there is no one formula and certainly there is no simple formula. Possibly all that any one person can do, especially if he feels very humble when contemplating the word "peace," as I do, is to suggest some steps or make some proposals that may seem to reasonable men to offer some hope. And none of us should hesitate to do that. Ending war is such a complex and vast problem that everyone, everywhere, should accept the responsibility of trying to help. We have finally succeeded in waging a war so vast that all people in the world are either in it or affected by it. Maybe we can conceive a con- dition under which all the people everywhere might contribute toward peace. A people's peace may be possible if a people's war is possible. In the spirit that we may soon have one more chance to try to end war, and that this may possibly be our last chance, and feeling that we all have a right and a responsibility to try to postpone or prevent another war, I submit these propositions for your consideration : 1. The people must roll up an avalanche of demand that cannot be denied that their voice be heard in making the armistice and the treaties of peace after this war. The framework of the treaties should provide a long enough armistice so that the processes toward peace might get rolling. 2. Some means must be provided for an intensive and yet worldwide battle on intolerance, selfishness, superstition, and exploitation so that cooperation, intelli- gence, respect for human personality, and the spirit of live and let live have a chance to become the bases of human relationship. Some machinery must be provided thru which the forces of goodwill — burning now feebly, now brightly, but always burning — may find expression. 3. Finally, there must be provided an agency, or complex of agencies, that will wage an eternal battle for peace, even when individuals who planned and consti- tuted the agencies are gone. The watchtowers must be manned continuously and eternally, even tho the people may sleep. 20 American Association of School Administrators Never before were as nearly all the people engaged in any war as they are in this war. There is scarcely a home anywhere in our land from which the long ribbon does not reach out to some camp here or there, to some battlefront in the far away nooks and crannies of the world. We are all paying for the war in one way or another. Our play has lost much of its zest, our laughter its ring, our smiles their optimism, and even the enter- tainment of our night clubs has a metallic ring to it. How can life be the same with our young men gone! But we who have stayed at home are all fighting too. Never before has the expression "home front" had the deep significance that it has today. This is a people's war and we the people are all in it together. Why then should we not have a right to think of the possibility of a people's peace? What is meant by the expression, "a people's peace"? Two things are meant most of all. One is that the people themselves shall have as direct part as possible in the making of the peace. If we are to think again in terms of peace commissions and peace treaties, there should be as many channels as can possibly be provided thru which the thought of the American people on the peace can be made articulate. There should be as many types of people, representative of different racial backgrounds, different religious points of view, different national streams, different economic levels, different social status, as can possibly be gathered together on commissions. There should be included men who know what it means to labor with their hands or at a machine, for who pays more for war than such men? Businessmen should be included, for who knows more than they do about the terrible waste of materials involved in war? There should be educators on the commission because who knows more about the cost of war in human life than those who give most of their lives that others might live more abundantly? Religious leaders should be on the commission because will peace ever be made except by men who be- lieve that there was some power before they were, is now, and will be after they are gone? And there should surely be one or more women on the commission ! If the women of America allow this peace treaty to be made by a commis- sion without a woman on it, they will almost deserve to go on generation after generation down into the valley of the shadow to give life to boys to be killed on battlefields ! The politicians and the statesmen will be there too — I have no doubt of that — and we have no objection to their being there if they are not the only ones who are there, as has been the case up to now. But, someone will ask, "Do these laymen, do we the people know enough to help make a treaty of peace?" The record on peace treaty making up to date does not provide convincing evidence that some other formula of peace treaty personnel might not be given a trial ! Without too much acidity of expression, it might not be amiss to suggest timidly that the pages of history are not exactly strewn with brilliant records of peace treaty making. We can at least be comforted by the possibility that the whole people are The People's Schools: An International View 21 not likely to commit any more colossal blunders than have the professional peace makers of the past. It is not suggested that the commission charged with making the armistice or peace after this war should be composed of delegates or mere repre- sentatives of the various groups, large and small, powerful or weak, that make up our society. But there should be enough laymen on the commission who will insist that the people be heard, who will provide channels thru which the people can be heard, who will be able to understand the people as they do speak, and who will insist that the interests of the whole people in the peace shall be paramount to any partisan or selfish interest or any minority or majority part of society. What kind of peace treaty do the people want at the close of this war? Certainly the treaty must give attention to minority rights, certainly it must prohibit colonial exploitation, certainly it must heed the cries of the naked, the hungry, the destitute. Problems of international economics, national boundaries, balance of power, buffer states, freedom of the air, control of airports, location of gasoline stations — all of these and an almost infinite number and kind of other problems and issues must be dealt with fearlessly and fairly and, even to a degree, unselfishly. But the people of America have one paramount interest above all others in this treaty — we want a treaty that has some decent chance of being kept, and kept for a long time. We want this to be a treaty of peace — not just an armistice. The philosophy, the supreme objective, the overall criterion that must be applied to every part and to the treaty as a whole must point to the maintenance of peace as the supreme goal of every stage in the de- liberations. Peace should be the one and all upon which the treaty is to be judged and approved. We must do a lot of getting ready for peace. The armistice should be long enough to make this preparation possible. Any abiding peace will in- volve machinery, and there must be adequate provision made for that ma- chinery to be established and put into action. There may be much in favor of a long armistice and plenty of time to make the peace treaty. Do we really mean what has been said, that this war is to end with unconditional surrender on the part of our enemies? If so, the armistice should not be an agreement between two contractual parties, one party the victors and the other the vanquished. It should rather be a definition of terms or specification of directions for the surrender of our enemies. Any making of terms with the leaders of Germany or Japan will be an in- sult to every boy who has died in this war and a defalcation on the honor of every decent citizen of every Allied Nation ! So it will be with the treaty of peace itself. It is very likely that for many years there will not be responsible gov- ernments in the enemy countries with which to make treaties. So it is pro- posed that both the terms of the armistice after this war and of the treaty of peace to follow should be between and among the Allied Nations and not between the Allied Nations on the one side and the enemy peoples on the other side. Why should we degrade ourselves by trying to enter into 22 American Association of School Administrators treaties or contracts with what we know as Germany or Japan? Would we be fools enough to believe again that subscription to a treaty by any of their present leadership or any that might be substituted for the purpose would be anything other than a travesty and a joke? No, this time our treaties should be between those who fought together on the same side. They should define clearly the rights and responsibilities of the respective Allied Nations in building the peace. And the guaranties and binding promises should be definitions of the part that each Allied Nation should play in establishing the new day. In time, it may be possible that nations that may again be called Germany and Japan will grow far enough beyond national adolescence to be allowed to assume a share as adults in building the brave, new world that is to be. But they should be required to win that right and to demonstrate that their people have de- veloped to that stage and have established control of the means of their own actions before they are given the right to be accepted as parts of the family of nations. Cooperation, tolerance, and respect for human personality were mentioned as essentials of peace and as if they are attainable human characteristics — and they are. Despite our wars, there never was a time in the history of the human race when so many people everywhere hated bigotry, superstition, exploitation of the weak by the strong, ignorance, filth, disease, and hunger as much as do people today. Never before in the history of the world have the faith which makes us strong and the hope which makes us brave been the possession of such a large proportion of the human race. We have con- demned those who have claimed to be a master race. We have died to prove that no man is better than we. Can we live to prove that we are no better than other men who are willing to pay the price of freedom? On the answer to that question hangs the destiny of any peace that we may plan. But the best treaty of peace that could possibly be devised is after all and at its best only a formula for action, a chart for steps that must follow. The means must be provided for carrying out the formula, for giving effect •to the plan of action. Treaties of peace do not implement themselves — peace must be won continuously and perpetually or it is not peace. It is not within the province of this address and certainly not within the prerogative nor the ability of the speaker to define or even suggest a complete formula for peace. But two proposals can be offered with a certain degree of assurance. First, it may be possible for the treaty of peace between the Allied Na- tions to contain a memorandum of understanding on the subject of peace. This may be somewhat in the nature of a philosophy of human relation- ship and the respective roles that national and international organizations might play in maintaining peace. Second, there might be a further memoran- dum on education as the basis for peace. The kind of education that enables men to achieve the status that we call freedom, should be defined clearly. Then^ as part of the treaty itself, should be established an international The People's Schools: An International View 23 office for education, charged with the responsibility of giving continuing reality to the educational philosophy of the memorandum. Many organizations and groups and individuals are novi^ advocating the establishment of an international office for education. While it is difficult to choose any as more important than others, it is suggested that no one should regard himself as informed on the subject unless he is familiar with: 1. The activities of our own professional organizations pointing up in Education and the People's Peace, published by the Educational Policies Commission, and in the objectives and program involved in the NEA War and Peace Fund Campaign. 2. The program of the Liaison Committee for International Education, represent- ing more than thirty educational organizations, and its publication, Education for International Security, presenting the highly significant proposals resulting from the now famous Harpers Ferry meeting last September. 3. The organization and objectives of the American Association for an Inter- national Office for Education, composed primarily of laymen interested in a pro- gram of action that will result in the establishment of an international office for education. 4. The pamphlet series on Post-ivar Problem Analyses by the Universities Com- mittee on Post-war International Problems in association with the World Peace Foundation. The proposal for the establishment of an international office for educa- tion as a part of the peace machinery and procedure is not made with the assumption that this would be any more than one of a large number of steps that must be taken. Many other agencies of peace must and will be established if there is to be any real hope for preventing or postponing the next war. Many individuals and groups will contribute toward establishing these agencies. The teachers of America will have met their responsibility, at least in large part, if they are instrumental in, first, bringing about the incorpora- tion in the peace treaties of a recognition and definition of the role of education in the armistice and the peace, and second, the establishment of a permanent international office for education to carry out that role, not only in the days immediately following the cessation of hostilities but, far more important, down thru the years to come. The critical period in the life of the peace will come after most of us here today are no longer active in the cause. The accomplishment of these two objectives will not be an easy task. After the last World War we cried out for peace and the establishment of a machinery to effect peace. The school administrators of the nation met in Chicago in the spring of 1919, and the NEA met in Milwaukee that summer. Speakers at these conventions voiced the universal happiness that the war had ended and pride in the great military victory that had been won. They said, "In the crisis of war the schools were a mighty agency for victory" and they pledged the continued devotion of public edu- cation in the days of peace to "true Americanism and world democracy." The president of the NEA rejoiced that during the war "education has become the chief concern of the statesmen of the world." These conventions passed strong resolutions in favor of the League of Nations and urging "the creation of an International Commission on Edu- 24 American Association of School Administrators cation ... to provide for a world-education in the elements of democratic citizenship and the extension of the privilege of education to all people and to all classes." And then what happened? Even the educators of America, who of all people should know better, left the peace to the caprice of chance. Even we who were the teachers of history and the writers of the history textbooks turned our backs on the inexorable lessons of the past and devoted our atten- tion to school building construction and per capita school costs — highly sig- nificant but relatively unimportant problems as the events of the last five years have demonstrated. How long, oh, how long will it take us to learn, how many millions must die to teach us, that peace will come only as the result of careful planning followed by determined, continuing, and consecrated action, which recognizes peace as the supreme objective of mankind, whatever price may be the cost? It should be remembered at this point that all organizations and groups did not run out on the last attempt at peace. As a part of the Treaty of Peace there was established, to the surprise of the world at large, the In- ternational Labor Office. We may well study the forces and conditions that made this action possible. More important still is the history of the activities of the Office since that time. In the month of April 1944, there will be held in Philadelphia the International Labor Organization Con- ference at which some forty countries will be represented and participate. It is significant that no similar international educational convention is planned, altho one could yet be planned and held before it is too late. There is little doubt but that labor will be represented at the next peace table. Nor is there any doubt that labor will again be included in the peace treaty. In fairness to education it should be mentioned that in 1922, four years after the Armistice, the League of Nations, of which we were not a part, did create a Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. However, this Com- mittee had "neither the authority nor the resources to make a direct attack on the problems of general education as these relate to international re- lations." ^ But let it be said to the credit of this Committee that it did demonstrate that intellectual cooperation on an international basis was both possible and practicable. The story of its accomplishments and the stories of other attempts made by individual countries toward international educa- tional cooperation should encourage us not to be afraid to dare on even a greater scale to write an international office for education into the coming treaty of peace. Let us consider more fully what should be the nature of the memoran- dum on education proposed as a part of the treaty of peace. First, the memorandum should express the faith of the Allied Nations in the role that education can and should play in establishing and main- taining peace. ^ Quotations not otherwise credited are from' Education and the People's Peace. Educational Policies Commission. 1201 Sixteenth St., N.W., Washington 6, D. C.. The Peopl*e's Schools: An International View 25 Second, it should be made clear that the Allied Nations have faith that no political and economic provisions of the Treaty can and will be effective without parallel and continuous educational programs of action to support the peaceful reorganization of the world. Resolving the problems of national sovereignty and empty stomachs will not alone guarantee peace. Third, the memorandum should condemn the use of education within nations to promote chauvinistic attitudes and activities or the use of the schools as the agencies for developing highly nationalistic faith in war as the means of solving international questions. Finally, the memorandum should provide for the establishment and maintenance of an international office for education as a part of the treaty of peace. While all nations might be equally represented in the organization of which the international office would be the agency, the financial support should be relative to the varying economic resources of the nations included. The international office should not be delegated administrative powers over education in the several nations, but should have specific research, publicity, and advisory powers and functions given in the memorandum. It should not be an integral part of any political or other organization of nations that may be established as agencies of the peace machinery. While it should be officially constituted and maintained, it should be entirely free to appraise and criticize, if necessary, the very international power that created it. The duties which would be performed during the period of readjustment immediately following the war would be related to reconstruction of edu- cation in the conquered and devastated territories and would vary con- siderably from the long-term program that would evolve as peace became established more securely. What functions should be performed by this international office for education? This is a question that cannot be answered fully here. I refer to the publications formerly mentioned for a more comprehensive treat- ment of this question. But these suggestions can be made here ! First, one of the immediate postwar functions of the office should be to help bring about the educational disarmament of Germany, Italy, and Japan. In an address in October 1942, Madam Chiang Kai-shek said: When victory is won we should see to it that the evil which has brought about the world catastrophe is attacked at the source — in the schools. If the minds of mil- lions of children had not been poisoned in the schools of Germany, Italy, and Japan, their young men would not have allowed themselves to be led like beasts to the slaughter for a cause contrary to all ideas of humanity and justice. To fail to give our attention to the schools of these nations would be as foolish as to leave their armament factories in good working order. All Axis teachers who functioned willingly during the war should be removed and forever barred from teaching again. New teachers from ivithin these countries must be found or trained or both. If this cannot be done at once, let the schools be closed until teachers can be provided from within those countries to do a trustworthy job. For the peace of the world it is better 26 American Association of School Administrators that the children of Germany and Japan have no schooling for a while than to have their minds twisted again as they were in the years before and during the war. The task of planning for the reeducation of the youth and younger men and women of Germany and Japan will challenge the best efforts and the ingenuity of the international office for years to come. Second, the international office for education should promote in every way practicable the "complete academic freedom and complete academic responsibility and accountability for the teaching staffs of schools in all parts of the world." Third, the international office for education should provide assistance and leadership in many fields of intellectual cooperation. It should "stimu- late and encourage the fraternal contact of scholars, librarians, and teach- ers in various fields of specialization. It should assist in the international exchange of research materials, technics, and findings in the natural' sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. It should encourage international art exhibits, music festivals, and dramatic performances." Fourth, the international office for education should have "one clear-cut appraisal function. It should be solemnly charged with the duty of studying textbooks, syllabuses, and teaching materials, used or proposed for use in any and all countries, in order to determine whether their effect would be aggres- sive, militaristic, or otherwise dangerous to the peace of the world. Jll nations should agree to refrain from such instruction and to submit copies of all textbooks and teaching materials to the international agency. As a permanent policy, the United Nations should not ask any of the defeated nations to submit to any educational appraisal which they are not prepared equally to undergo." Fifth, the international office for education should define minimum standards of education recommended for all peoples everywhere. It should make available expert advice for countries desiring to improve their edu- cational systems. Proper precautions should, of course, be taken to safe- guard the pride and independence of action of the nation receiving these suggestions for help. It should provide, on the proper basis, for the ex- change of students, teachers, and representatives of all areas of culture. It should offer definite factual instructional materials at every level in all school systems concerning the history, culture, psychology, and problems of other peoples and concerning the world organization and problems of international relations ; such materials to be factual and free from re- crimination. Sixth, the international office for education should maintain a "division of radio and visual aids in education, with the presentation of occasional multilingual radio and motion pictures direct to all the schools of the world that wished to listen or look." To summarize, this international office for education should not only attempt to prevent and remove the causes of war, but even more its efforts should be devoted to the development of those positive educational philoso- phies and procedures which make for international goodwill. As the The People's Schools: An International View 27 powerful forces of technology draw the peoples of the world closer and closer together, they must, if they are not to die, learn how to respect the right of the peoples of the world to be different from one another. It may be that we can learn how to understand and appreciate one another's differences in place of hating everyone who is different from us. Our salva- tion lies not in trying to remove all the differences among the peoples of the world or killing those who are different from us, but rather in learning how to live peacefully together in spite of our differences. The increasing officially documented evidence concerning *the atrocities perpetrated by our enemies in this war has shocked us beyond expression. It is difficult to keep from despising our enemies. Their contemptible acts make us realize that peoples at war sooner or later in the way they fight and in their relations toward their enemies reflect the stage of civilization which they have reached. While we may despise Germany and Japan for the way they act in war, let us not hate them. If we allow ourselves to hate them we may drag ourselves down to their level. Let us rather hate the conditions that led to this war. Let us resolve that we will prevent those con- ditions from arising again. What can we do to help bring the peace that may come? Three things at least : First, insist at the proper time in not a few but in tens of thousands of petitions to the Department of State, to the President, and to the Senate that any arrangements for world order after the war, as defined in the treaty of peace, shall specify the role that education can and should play in establishing and maintaining peace. Second, insist in these petitions that there be established an international office for education whose function it shall be ito give effect to the role of education in the peace. Third, support even ivith motjey the promotion of strength and organ- izational machinery within our profession to give the schools a dynamic voice at the peace table and a part in the arrangements established to keep the peace. Fourth, demand that our great national professional organizations pro- vide continuously thru the years some method of reporting at least annually to the teachers of America on the subject, "How goes the peace?" Possibly an annual monograph on the subject would be desirable, informing the world concerning plans and procedures for keeping the peace and the prog- ress, or lack of progress, that is being made year by year. Also, thru our professional organizations and as individual citizens, we can demand of every person who represents us in strategic public office, state or national, that he give an accounting on the question, "What have you done to pre- vent the coming of another war?" before he asks our support for reelection. Who will be the last generation of war and the first generation of peace? Those who are worthy so to be. We pray for peace, but are we willing to be and to do what it takes to make peace? We know that wishful thinking will not bring peace. We wait for some power above us to give us peace, 28 American Association of School Administrators while knowing full well that peace cannot be given to or had by a people who are not prepared to pay the price that peace entails. We might implore some power greater than we to give us the grace to cherish peace, the humility to believe it is possible for us, and the will to discipline ourselves so that we may win it. Peace in our day is not so much a matter of fate and chance as it is a matter of deliberate planning and the determination to make the plans come true whatever may be the cost. The last generation of war will be the first generation of people big enough to reach for peace and strong enough to attain their reach. The supreme test of an educated man, the supreme test of a cultured man, the supreme test of a civilized man is the manner and extent of his care about what happens after he is gone. It will be relatively easy to make an armistice for our time, for 1945 or 1950. Are we ready, able, and willing to take the steps that will be necessary and likely to insure peace in 1975 or 2000? To what extent are we willing to sacrifice now that they may have peace then? Will the story of 1975 be that of 1918-1944 over again? In 1944 there is nothing for us to do but pay the price that unqualified victory entails. It is a bitter price to pay when we think of what we might have done but did not do in the generation preceding 1944. Too little and too late is a new expression but an old, old story. Must history always go on eternally repeating itself? The fact that it has not done this in so many areas of human endeavor gives us hope. The time to determine the question of war and peace in 1975 is now. It is not too late to prevent the next war now. When and if the next war comes, it will again be too late to prevent it. Then the only choice that will be left will be to fight thru to victory, just as now, regardless of the cost. Americans have never been .afraid to take a chance, to try a course of action even tho failure may be one of the alternatives. An abiding peace will be established some day only if those who lived before were willing to have enthusiasm for and confidence in whatever next steps they were able to take. The educators of America, the people of America, are confronted again with the choice between complacency and determined action in the direction of peace. We shall never have peace in the world until we are willing to pay for it with sacrifices at least somewhat comparable in size with those we are willing to undergo to win war. We will pay hundreds of billions of dollars to win the war — are we willing to pay at least tens of billions if necessary to win peace? Until we are willing to do so we shall not have peace. How long will we continue to refuse to pay what peace costs and then continue to pay many times more for the war that might not have been ! The only way in which we can even partially amortize the debt which civilization owes to those who have already died and who are yet to die in this war is to establish now in our day at least a beachhead for peace that has a decent chance of being extended beyond our time. What would man be without Utopia? He must aim at the unattainable in order to realize the at- tainable and to make one step forward. The People's Schools: An International View 29 EDUCATION AND THE PEOPLE'S PEACE WILLIAM G. CARR, SECRETARY, EDUCATIONAL POLICIES COMMISSION ; ASSOCIATE SECRETARY, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION Address at Seattle and Atlanta Conferences Three months after the Armistice of 1918, the school administrators of the United States met in Chicago for their annual convention. In July 1919 the "peace convention" of the National Education Association met in Mil- waukee. Some of you were there. As we read the addresses and proceedings of our profession in that time, twenty-five years ago, we see that these con- ventions exulted in the realization that "in the crisis of war the schools were a mighty agency for victory." The president of the Association rejoiced that during the war "education has become the chief concern of the statesmen of the world." These conventions passed strong resolutions in favor of "the creation of an International Commission on Education." The opening speaker at one convention was vigorously applauded when he said, "The only League of Nations that gives any assurance of a permanent peace is the league which the teachers of the earth shall write in the minds and hearts of the children." These men and women reflected the optimism of the moment. "Imperial- ism as a world force is dead ! The funeral was but yesterday," cried one speaker. And the then United States Commissioner of Education declared, a bit too soon, that "all isolations, splendid or otherwise, are gone forever- more." A few voices were raised in warning. Said the president of the Univer- sity of Minnesota, "It will be futile to . . . establish a League of Nations, unless there is back of the peace terms and of the League of Nations a world- citizenry. . . . Only a peace . . . secured thru definitely planned systems of education . . . stands a chance of surviving." An even more devastatingly accurate forecast was hazarded by another speaker, who declared, "The Great War was a cunningly contrived con- spiracy carried to its tragic climax thru an educational system. Another variety of educational cunning might enable Germany again to become a menace to mankind. Unless . . . the children of all nations are trained for international sympathy and understanding, the safety of civilization cannot be guaranteed." All this in 1919. But no statesman then took up the cause for which the educators pleaded. At the peace conferences in Paris and Versailles they were brushed aside. Altho they and their teachers did not know it, children at that moment in our schools were even then receiving some of the educa- tion that was to serve them, for good or ill, in the second World War. When, during the interval between wars, the educators talked about large-scale international exchange of students, a strong international office of education, consistent teaching of international goodwill, men in positions of power seldom paid attention. It was not a matter of money. One-tenth of the expenditures for diplomatic activities and conferences would have 30 American Association of School Administrators financed the international educational plans with a bounty beyond the wild- est hopes of the educational leaders. But not one-tenth — no, not one-hun- dredth— of these funds were directed to international education. Education, the instrument that had become, in wartime, "the chief concern of the states- men of the world," was, in peace, treated as a minor after-thought by most of the world's political leaders. By most of them — not by all. As the years went by there came to power one group that saw with fearful clarity that effective planning is based upon education. These were the rising leaders of the modern dictatorships. For their wicked purposes, they lavished on education and youth almost un- limited attention, prestige, solicitude, and resources. They militarized the spirit of their youth. Then they led them forth to war. Thruout modern history, the instrument of organized education has been repeatedly used to shape national policies that led by tragic and inevitable steps to international ill will, aggression, and war. It is my thesis that this trend should be and can be reversed. The systematic and deliberate use of education, on a worldwide basis and plan, must help safeguard the peace and extend the democracy for which this second World War is being fought. In the past, statesmen who sought to promote the peace of the world have been so exclusively concerned with political organization and strategy, trade and treaties, armament and disarmament, and issues of international law that they have never given serious and sustained attention to the great force of education. Yet this force, rightly organized, could have added powerfully to their efforts. Ignored or wrongly directed, it has brought their shrewdest plans to ruin. We need not claim too much. We need not argue that education alone is sufficient to guarantee the peace and security of nations. Achieving peaceful and just international relations is a complicated task. Econorhic questions of colonies and raw materials are part of the problem. Political questions of international law and boundaries are part of the prob- lem. Educational questions which touch the way people think and behave are also a part of the problem. Almost everyone will agree to that; not even the educators need to claim more. It is a good thing to strengthen international political and legal organiza- tions. To help provide a growing measure of economic security and pros- perity for all men and all nations is also decent and wise. But economic fair play and political organization together are insufficient, however essential. War will not be brought under control merely by providing men with legal codes and enough to eat. Our whole professional service rests on the proposi- tion that men can and do act upon impulses that reach deeper than politics and higher than appetites. Knowledge and attitudes conducive to peace are developed by education. But here we encounter a difficulty. No nation can wisely and safely con- duct such education unless other nations do so. Indeed, oddly and sadly enough, if our schools teach peace while those of other nations teach war, the net effect is only to increase the likelihood of war. It is clear, therefore, that we must choose between permanently shackling our own schools to the The People's Schools: An International View 31 war chariot, or recognize that, in certain of its aspects, education is a matter of international concern — just as much so as foreign trade, or munitions factories, or diplomatic negotiations. To be more specific, the use of organized education to help establish and maintain the peace will require three definite steps : 1. It is necessary to develop an informed and aroused public opinion with ref- erence to the place of education and other issues of peace and international organization. 2. It is necessary to create soon a council on education for the United Nations. 3. It is necessary that a permanent international agency for education be planned now and established soon after the war ends. There is time to speak only very briefly about each of these steps. I As to the first step, the basic consideration is just this: Adult education and educational leadership generally, in this country, now face the supreme task of their history. The American people have to learn to understand unerringly that the only goal fully worthy of the vast sacrifices of this war is the establishment of a just peace. We should learn our way around among the various types of international organization that have been tried or suggested. We should develop a strong feeling of responsibility for world order. We should consider the limits to which we are prepared to go in joint international commitments. We should achieve mutual confidence with the people of the other United Nations. We should emerge from this war a stronger and more purposeful democracy than we were when it began. We must develop an understanding of inter- national issues too strong to be shaken by specious slogans. Only education can strengthen in our adult population this sense of civic responsibility and help it to reach intelligent decisions ; only education can prepare the oncom- ing generation of youth to approve and carry out these decisions. Let every responsible citizen be enlisted in this campaign of enlighten- ment. For as surely as the earth turns, force and violence shall be the law; and wars of cataclysmic destruction shall be the penalty ; and blood and tears shall be the inheritance of that people who neglect to learn and to teach in time that the earth has grown smaller and that science has made it necessary for men to live at peace if they want to live at all. II Effective prosecution of the war, as well as intelligent planning for the peace, would, I believe, be greatly aided by the prompt formulation of a constructive educational policy by and for the United Nations. Some pre- liminary conferences have already been held. Action by the governments concerned ought to follow. The functions which could be performed by such a council would be nu- merous and useful. I shall mention only three. 32 American Association of School Administrators Its first function should be to help increase the wartime usefulness of education in the several nations. Information could be exchanged on the plans found most effective for training for the war industries and the armed forces. School programs and curriculum changes, adopted by the various nations to meet wartime needs, could be explained, studied, and applied wherever appropriate. Governmental policies relating to such matters as the support of education in wartime, the means of maintaining an adequate staff of teachers, and the use of older students to meet wartime emergencies could also be analyzed, with significant mutual benefits to all the participat- ing nations. It could assist in planning for educational reconstruction in the countries that the enemy has invaded, in lands where teachers have been killed, li- braries burned, schoolhouses destroyed, and cultural activities bled white. Postwar reconstruction is not limited to measures of sanitation and nutri- tion. Food and medical supplies may well be the most urgent need, but the most difficult (and lasting) reconstruction is the rebuilding of faith and purpose. That, in large part, is an educational process. The occupation of enemy territory by United Nations military forces re- quires that these forces assume some degree of control in those areas over the normal functions of civil government, including that of education. Our troops will find in existence an educational system based upon the convic- tion that attitudes are formed in the earliest years of a child's life and that attitudes so fixed will be translated into action. For instance, the following is a prayer designed to be used in all German kindergartens as a grace be- fore meals : Fold your little hands, Bow your little head, Think of him who gives us Our daily bread. Adolf Hitler is his name, Him we as our Savior claim. The inculcation of Axis doctrines, thus begun in the enemy countries as soon as a child can speak and understand language, drags its evil course thruout the entire educational system. Such deliberate betrayal of the Axis children and youth is one of the great crimes against humanity. Other crimes committed by the enemy — often in the heat of battle or at least in the heat of anger — seem mild in comparison with this premeditated, cold blooded, and terribly successful effort to destroy the minds and souls of their own chil- dren. Surely, those who devised and managed the Axis system of education have offended the little ones. The regimentation of the Japanese and German youth, the inculcation in them of false principles and wicked standards of conduct, is largely responsi- ble for their evil designs and for the fanatical way they fight. The educa- tional systems of Germany and Japan helped make this war. Left unchanged, they can and will do it again. To leave the educational systems of Germany and Japan untouched would be as great a mistake as to leave the Axis armament factories in good work- ing order. The People's Schools: An International View 33 Some people say that we should not concern ourselves with the educational systems of enemy countries because our enemies would not like it. When war was forced upon us by Germany and Japan, we did not ask ourselves whether those countries would be gratified over our destruction of their transporta- tion systems, their economic systems, and their political organization. We set about destroying all of these with as great a thoroness as was in our power. Their educational systems are even more dangerous to the peace of the world. When this war is won, the United Nations will be able to choose whether the educational systems of the Axis countries shall be allowed to lead us into another war by continuing to make knaves and fools of their own innocent children or whether they shall be compelled to mend their ways. If we choose the latter, the United Nations will have as one of its duties the dis- missal of all Axis school officials and teachers who are distinguished by strong antidemocratic tendencies and their replacement with teachers from the Axis countries who can be trusted to do an honest and competent job with their own children. It is to be hoped that there are such teachers still alive in Ger- many and Japan and that there are enough of them. If not, let the schools be closed until teachers can be prepared who will do a trustworthy job. It would be better to let the children of Germany and Japan grow up un- tutored than to have their minds twisted and their virtue destroyed by the kind of teaching that has been imposed on them in the past ten years. Ill After the end of hostilities, the United Nations council on educational policy should be succeeded by a permanent and more inclusive international agency for education. What would an international organization for educa- tion do? First, and obviously, this agency should give assistance in the field of in- tellectual cooperation. It should stimulate and encourage the fraternal con- tact of scholars, librarians, and teachers in various fields of specialization. These functions comprise a great expansion of the work of the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations. Second, the agency should be a great center and clearinghouse for studies on educational subjects. It should have authority to request educational data from all the participating nations. It should maintain a library of educa- tional literature, including files of educational tests and measurements, school building plans, textbooks, teaching materials, recordings, and visual aids to education. It would build upon the fine work that the International Bureau of Education has done. Third, the agency should have one clear-cut appraisal function. It should be solemnly charged with the duty of studying the instructional programs in all countries, in order to determine whether their effect would be aggressive, militaristic, or otherwise dangerous to the peace of the world. In the event that the international education agency should conclude that, in its opinion, instruction dangerous to the peace of the world is occurring, the agency should file a notice to that effect with the government of tlie country con- 34 American Association of School Administrators cerned, citing the objectionable practices as concretely as possible. Full op- portunity for discussion and conference should be provided. If no adjust- ments are made in a reasonable period of time, a full report on the matter should be submitted, together with documents and evidence, to w^hatever overall agency may be established to deal with international affairs in gen- eral. The international agency for education should be required to make this report public. The specific responsibilities of the international agency for education should not extend beyond study, discussion, public report, and referral. We would all hope, of course, that it would never be necessary to apply this power of the international agency for education. Perhaps it would not be needed. But we would be foolish to neglect the possibility. Never again must the educational forces of the world remain ignorant and impotent while educational measures like those of the Axis brutalize an entire generation. Never again must we be left helpless in face of the wholesale prostitutions of the great instrument of organized education to the mad whims of some power-crazy dictator. Think, think if you can, what Hitler has done to the boys and girls of Germany, children who might have been very much like those in your schools. If something like that starts again anywhere in this world, we ought to know about it at once. The international agency for edu- cation would be the lookout and sound the alarm. Fourth, a more constructive and continuous activity of the international agency for education should be the formulation and progressive improve- ment of educational standards, particularly for the elementary education of the common people. Just as the International Labor Office has encouraged the adoption of standards regarding working conditions, so our international agency could propose educational standards to the governments of the par- ticipating nations. Fifth, the agency might well administer, with the cooperation of the participating governments, far-flung systems of student travel, student ex- change, and teacher exchange. A tenfold multiplication of the prewar activ- ities in these fields would be a good beginning basis. Why should not the international agency for education keep several school ships in constant op- eration for the purpose of encouraging fruitful travel and study of young people in other countries? Attention should be given to improving the kind and distribution, as well as to increasing the amount, of student travel and foreign study. Finally, none of the possible duties of an international agency for educa- tion should rank equal to that of deliberate leadership and encouragement for the teaching of international understanding. The emphasis in this part of the agency's leadership should be positive. To think of education for international understanding merely as a means of preventing war, is to com- mit the same fallacy as to think of training in national citizenship merely as a means for preventing crimes of violence. The international office of educa- tion should take the lead in formulating a program for development of atti- tudes toward world affairs, not fundamentally unlike that which our schools The People's Schools: An International View 35 now attempt to develop toward national affairs — attitudes of responsibility, tolerance, respect for principle, and desire for justice. Such a program would not mean the end of patriotic education. It would, let us hope, effectively discourage the aggressive, self-centered caricature of patriotism, which actually harms, morally and materially, the country and the people which are the supposed objects of its devotion. IV Anyone, including even your speaker, can easily think of several objections to the proposals that have been thus far offered. You will certainly have raised a number of questions. Let me attempt to anticipate some of the questions that will occur to you. It will be said that these proposals are idealistic. They are. I propose that our profession plan and act now with faith that victory will be won and that this victory will be made effective in the establishment of peace and freedom. Those who watch the recurring spectacle of world war, benumbed, resigned, mumbling to themselves the hypnotic little formula that human nature can't be changed, tinkering timidly with the mechanisms that make war probable — these are the impractical ones; these are the dreamers, the people who can't face facts. We should know these people by now; they are the direct-line, intellectual descendants of those who once — and not su very long ago — told us that child labor was necessary and wholesome ; proved with an exquisite logic that common people could never govern them- selves; explained carefully why education for the children of these common people was a ridiculous, if not impious, thought ; proved, so that only a fool would doubt it, that no gentleman could ever adjudicate a personal quarrel except with a pistol at forty paces ; mustered all the evidences of science and theology showing that a flying machine was a physical impossibility, the steamboat a dreamer's folly, the telephone a passing fad. W^ell, the prophets of despair were wrong and they are wrong again. Haz- ardous child labor is on the way out. Telephones, steamships, airplanes are commonplace. We take universal suffrage and self-government for granted, too much for granted, perhaps. Education for all children is accepted practice. A moron went, for the first time, to hear a great symphony orchestra. The tuning-up process convinced him that nothing but discords could be produced ; and he left the hall and missed the majestic harmonies that were to come. We educators must not walk out on the main show. It will certainly be said, and with justice, that these proposals have ele- ments of danger in them. It is remotely conceivable that any international organization might by some remote contingency be "captured" by one group or another. Any educational authority — or any representative government, for that matter — is dangerous. True, the Educational Policies Commission has not proposed that the in- ternational agency for education be given authority to prescribe national educational policies. Yet the international agency might attain considerable prestige and influence. I hope it would. The final and adequate safeguard against misuse of influence, however, is the process of enlightenment itself. 36 American Association of School Administrators This is as true in the international as it is in the purely local or national sphere. // may be said that the forces of education have already been given a chance to promote peace and that, since the world is at war, they have ob- viously failed. I would reply that there has been no generally organized ef- fort on a worldwide basis to use education for the promotion of sound inter- national relations. Some countries have accepted the ideal of peaceful living and have taught its virtues in the schools. But while such teachings were permitted in some countries and even encouraged in others, there were still other nations where education was deliberately used to give instruction dan- gerous to international peace. This process went on for years before it was widely known that they were thus arming their people for aggression. The world has had a great abundance of committees, leagues, institutes, and organizations interested in education for world citizenship, but strength does not arise from unplanned dispersal of small efforts. Whether it be measured by the importance of its potential contribution, or by comparison with the efforts expended on other aspects of international relations, educa- tion has never been given a real opportunity. Recognition extended to it has been little, late, and reluctant. This neglect has been a major error; let that error now be corrected. If, as we all firmly believe, the United Nations achieve a clean-cut mili- tary victory, the governments and peoples of these nations will hold in their grasp an opportunity that has seldom been offered before and may never be repeated. To use our next great chance more wisely than we did after 1918 is a trust that we hold alike for our honored dead, for the living, and for generations yet unborn. If there ever was a cause, if there ever can be a cause, worthy to call forth all the effort, devotion, and intelligence of our profession, it is the cause of peace — of victory and peace — for they are now in fact one and inseparable, and must remain so. Organized education has a significant and hitherto unused contribution to make to that cause. Let us see that it is fully and wisely used in mankind's next, and perhaps last, chance to build a peaceful world. If this organization, after due consideration, finds any merit in the proposals I have made, I invite you individually and collectively to support them in whatever ways you deem practical. The People's Schools: An International View 37 TO BIND UP THE WOUNDS IN THE SCHOOLS OF ALL NATIONS WILLIAM F. RUSSELL, DEAN, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK, N. Y. Address at Seattle, New York, and Chicago Conferences This is going to be an unusual talk, I promise you — unusual for me. And, for you, practical school administrators, one that is different and strange. For once in your lives, you realists who fight the daily battle of budgets in the blood and sand are going to hear a college professor discuss a problem in school administration in which he has had as much experience as any of you — and more than most. This talk is no product of an ivied tower ; nor does it come from a brain trust. You cannot dismiss what I shall say as mere theory. My suggestions are based upon what I have seen, what I have done, what I have lived. The time has come, right now, to make plans to bind up the wounds of this war. We are at the beginning of the end ; possibly near the end of the European phase. Thru the smoke of battle, becoming plainer with each pass- ing day, we begin to see the outlines of the postwar world, the shape of things to come. The main problem that is upon us is to discover how to reconstruct our own life and to give all proper aid to others in reconstruct- ing theirs. Part of this problem of general reconstruction — an important part — is the rebuilding of the schools. The kind of world in which our children will live, the kind of people they will be, will depend to a considerable degree upon the kind of education we offer. The hopes of the future, for peace, for plenty, for the good life, depend upon the wisdom we can use and the sacrifices we are willing to make in rebuilding, extending, and improving the opportunities for education. This problem faces not only Americans, but all the people in all the world. The questions that I propose to put to you are these : What is the duty of America in binding up the wounds in the schools of all nations? What part can we play? What part do other peoples want us to play? What part should we play ? What is possible ? We shall not have the foundation upon which to answer these questions until we find the answers to certain other questions. These are: What form of international organization is likely to succeed the League of Nations? What place will education take in this organization ? What will be the edu- cational situation following the war? What kind of help from one nation to another, or from all nations to one, will be desired, desirable, and feasible? No precise answers are possible at this time. We have no omniscient prophet with supernatural powers and extrasensory perception. We can, however, make certain assumptions, provided that we bring to bear all that we have seen, learned, and experienced, personally and vicariously. It is therefore not improper on my part to indulge in guesswork, provided that you know that I am making assumptions. If my guesses seem to you to 38 American Association of School Administrators have merit, then you can follow me to my conclusions, accepting or rejecting them as you think wise. IF hat luill be the postiuar internatio?ial organization? — I assume that the war will conclude with the unconditional surrender of the Axis and the com- plete triumph of the Allied Nations. In gaining this victory four powers will have played a preponderant role: the British Empire and Common- wealth of Nations, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Republic of China, and the United States of America. We may assume that these nations, having plaj^ed a preponderant role in winning the war, will be preeminent in peace. They will be able to exercise their will on the rest of the world. The preeminence of the Big Four must be recognized by all who are planning international cooperation in the postwar world. It follows that all policies and actions should have the approval of the four dominant powers. It is now apparent, from the Cairo and Teheran conferences, that the Big Four do not plan to quarter the globe and each administer a huge empire. Rather they plan to join together into some form of international govern- ment to administer certain activities of international importance. This gov- ernment we shall henceforth term the New League. All the nations of the world will be invited to join the Neiv League. In the Teheran Declaration, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin extended the invitation in the following words : We shall seek the cooperation and active participation of all nations, large and small, whose peoples in heart and mind are dedicated, as are our own peoples, to the elimination of tyranny and slavery, oppression and intolerance. We will welcome them as they may choose to come into the world family of democratic nations. We should be unrealistic, I think, if we should read in this Declaration merely a reconstitution of the old League of Nations. It is true that all na- tions are invited to join "as they may choose to come"; but the entrance re- quirements are (a) that they must be democratic, and (b) that they must have the right "heart and mind." The Big Four will write the examination; the Big Four will mark the papers; the Big Four will hand out the report cards. Within certain limits, each nation will be free ; but standards will be set beyond which no nation may go. We must understand plainly, we must recognize clearly, we must say over and over, that underneath the New League will be the tremendous power of the Big Four, able and ready to act, when any nation, by any action, shall threaten the peace and happi- ness of the whole. Thus we can assume that the New League will in fact set certain limits within which all the nations of the world must learn to live. Self-determina- tion there will be in the great majority of problems, but self-determination within limits. We can expect certain internationally enforced standards with respect to such activities as armies, navies, air forces, armament pro- duction, shipping, air lanes, patents, monopolies, exploitation of raw ma- terials, and, to a degree, education. The People's Schools: An International View 39 IV hat will be the place of education? — We recognize that the seeds of war are sometimes sown in the schools ; that the instruments of education can be captured and prostituted to the end that good clean boys and girls can be changed into bloodthirsty, man-hating demons. The schoolroom can be made a preparation for war. Twenty-five years ago, I saw tiny children goose-step on the school playgrounds of Tokyo, high-school boys snarl in bayonet drill and shout Banzai. Twenty years ago, I saw the outline maps, traced red and green, depicting to the pupils of Belgrade their friends and enemies. I stood in classrooms in Budapest in which facing the class were two maps depicting Hungary before and after the last war; and across the latter in blood-red script, the Hungarian word for Never. I have studied the boastful Axis maps of Europe as it had been, and as they had the ef- frontery to predict it would be. I know as well as any person the debasement of education, the persecu- tion of the unwilling teacher, the fraudulent course of study, the abduction by the war lords of children from their parents. Nevertheless, I assert that the conduct of education is not an international matter. It should be within the power of the family, the neighbors, the community, at least within the individual state — not a function of international administration. It has been said that the schools are dear to the hearts of the American people. Schools are dear to the hearts of all people. They love their schools ; they like to watch over them ; they resent outside interference. You should have been with me when I reached Vladivostok in the sum- mer of 1918. Those people had been at war since 1914; Kerensky, Brest Litovsk had been and gone ; and the Bolsheviks had been run out by the Czechs and Japs. The Czechs, that gallant band of some 15,000 war pris- oners, had seized the guns of their captors, had stolen or made their own equipment, had captured some 6000 miles of the Trans-Siberian Railway ; and were in control from the Urals to the Pacific. The Japs — supposed allies — ^were there to take over, with colonist trains as far as 2000 miles into the interior; and the town was full of French, British, and American sol- diers, there, I suppose, to hold the Japs. I looked around for the teachers, but could find none. The schools were billets for the soldiers. Many a lab- oratory table was lighted by an operating lamp. The pupils roamed the streets at will. In September the military moved out and the people took over, as well as was possible in a war-ridden, disorganized, impoverished city. Did thev wait for help from overseas? Were they waiting for a band of educational Messiahs? Not in the least. For each of some twenty elementary schools and several high schools, committees were organized of former teachers, pupils, local officials, and parents, among whom there was considerable leadership. They swept out the filth, scrubbed the floors, salvaged what books, paper, pens, and ink they could find, and started school. I was there. I saw a school system reconstructed. I watched them plan what to teach — how, by whom — where to get the money, how to pay the bills. I was even called in for a little help, but I soon found out that no good came of giving direct advice. They used me as a pipe line to transmit the results of American experience. They 40 American Association of School Administrators did not want American schools, or foreign schools of any kind. They defi- nitely wanted education of their own choosing. I learned the same lesson in Bulgaria, where I worked with the Agrarian Party. You remember that in the last war Bulgaria was soundly defeated, and they knew^ it. Following the defeat, the quislings fled ; and Bulgaria was taken over by a group of progressive, peace-loving, horny-handed peas- ants, and small-town merchants, teachers, and newspaper men. They knew little of polite society and cared less. They hated the politicians who had sold out their country to the Germans. They loved Bulgaria ; they wanted to rebuild it; and they didn't want a Balkan replica of Germany or France or Britain ; they wanted a happy, peaceful, self-supporting little country of their own. Stambouliski, the Premier, and Omarchevski, the Minister of Education, studied the schools. Here, they said, we have a history of schools built by the people themselves. Before the liberation from the Turks in 1878, we had local schools in every village, with no central control or support from the capital. At death, money would be left to the school, and often land. Almost every small school had its own farm, left by legacy. Yet in 1878, with the independence, a great change had taken place, and the leaders had Germanized the people and with them the schools. This situation it was that Omarchevski resolved to correct. Here was a little country, he said, where 56 percent of the people lived without recourse to trade — that is, grew their own food, made their own clothes, built their own homes, with- out having to buy a thing. Why should it have a German school system? So he developed his own program, stressing rural education and work ex- perience, and adjustment to Bulgarian life, customs, and traia. How is it going to meet that competition? 106 American Association of School Administrators There is only one answer. We must produce the managerial skills and the productive capacity that will offset this differential in wages. This can be done. Let me illustrate. If you were to build a skyscraper right here in the city of New York today and build the same skyscraper in the city of London, the materials for that building would cost vastly more in New York than thev would in London. The labor scale would be at least twice as high. And yet the finished building can be produced for less money in New York than in London. The difference is due to managerial skill and pro- ductive capacity. Most of you have undoubtedly read that best seller, Willkie's One World. I am sure you were interested, as I was, in a description of the production which went on in Russia, far behind the lines, around the Ural Mountains — the way in which they had courageously and effectively taken the machinery out of the factories that were close to the line of battle, and transported it far to the rear, and in a very short space of time set up new factories which were going full blast and producing munitions that were at least as good in quality as those of the original establishment. One thing that impressed Mr. Willkie as he visited these industrial estab- lishments, however, was the fact that they had to use from three to four times as much manpower as an American factory to produce the same result, despite the fact that the Russian workman was on a sixty-six hour week and working under a tremendous drive of patriotism. He talked with some of the managers about it and they indicated that this was true and that it would continue to be true until they acquired the kind of education that would enable their people to produce as is done in a mass production country like America. So, in the period which is to come, vocational education is destined to come into its own. It will be an integral part of all high-school education in our composite high schools. It will take its place alongside the more abstract types of study and on a basis of equality. Probably we shall have general vocational education up to the twelfth year and there will be a strong tendency to expand into the thirteenth and fourteenth year for specialized trade and technical training. Vocational education is not cheap. It is less expensive to operate a pro- gram of abstract education within a traditional classroom. Vocational educa- tion is expensive to house, to equip, and to operate, and yet there is no question in my mind hut that we are destined to have a great expansion of vocational education in the immediate future. Can you imagine, for example, the business people of this country, either management or labor, permitting business to slip thru their fingers because the schools haven't equipped their people to do the job, regardless of cost? The businessman is coming to realize that education is to business what fertilizer is to farming. Without it there can be no prosperous business life. No longer will vocational education remain a stepchild of the educational system. Now, just as we shall have to train the hand, so also shall we have to train the head. If we are to meet the demands of the postwar world with Free Schools for a Free People 107 anything approaching adequacy, there must be a tremendous expansion in the field of general and cultural education. The most critical problem before us will be the necessity for a sound and lasting peace. Peace is a difficult thing to achieve. It has its price in terms of money and thought and effort, just as much as war. Furthermore, peace isn't a thing which will be deter- mined once and for all. We talk about sitting at the peace table as tho when the peace pact has once been signed, we can go home and let it run on its own momentum. Well, it just doesn't operate that way. The price of peace is eternal vigilance, no less than that of liberty. The problems of peace are continuous problems and will never be finally settled. A durable peace involves the acquisition of those understandings and wisdoms which are necessary for people to live together. In the past our problems have been primarily those of conquering physical things, and we have done a tremendous job in that area. Now we are going into the vastly more complicated, more subtle field of trying to conquer the dif- ficulties of human relationships. We have found plenty of problems in a single nation of 135,000,000 people. Now we are going into the problems that are involved in close relationships among three or four billion people. This will require many abilities which have not characterized us too con- spicuously in the past. It means that we must understand and appreciate world cultures. It means that we must eliminate those divisive forces and intolerances which tend to separate us. We aren't by nature a particularly tolerant people. We inherit our religion and our politics and thereafter cease to react to them except in terms of emotion. If I am a traditional Republican, I hate everything that comes out of the New Deal, and I don't need to examine its projects on their merits. All I need to know is where it comes from. I don't care to listen to any Democratic speaker ; in fact, I go out of my way to avoid any information that might tend to change my bias or my prejudice, and whenever I hear a speaker who agrees with me, I know I am in the presence of a perfectly sound thinker ! There isn't anything new about this. It has always been characteristic of the American people. If you go back to the records of the old town meet- ings when democracy was at its purest in this country, you will find even then, when a citizen attempted to advocate an unpopular measure he was given the Bronx cheer. They didn't call it that to be sure, but there were cries of "Throw him out!" and all the prejudices and biases were just as active then as now. Somehow or other, we must alter our attitudes even as the Southern lady who said, "This war is making a terrible change in our ways of think- ing. You know those people up North — we always used to think of them as 'damn Yankees.' Well, now, today, they are our allies — just like the Chinese." In addition we need a tremendous expansion of adult education. In the past, we have thought of adult education as a process of Americanizing 108 American Association of School Administrators foreigners, of orienting them to American life, habits of thinking, and customs. Now the process becomes directh' reversed. It is rather one of orienting Americans into the world scene, enabling us to understand the cultures and points of view of these other nations with whom we must live so closely. This, like vocational education, will cost more money than we have ever spent for it before. I predict that the time will come when we shall spend as much money for adult education as we are spending today for the educa- tion of youth. That may sound to you like an extravagant statement, but we are already well on our way. President Roosevelt recently suggested we spend a billion dollars for the continued education of the young men who return from the Army. Bills for this purpose are already being introduced in Congress. A billion dollars is a mighty good start in the field of adult education ! Furthermore, we shall need a very considerable expansion in our program of guidance — guidance of all kinds — personal, social, educational, and voca- tional, guidance for adults, as well as youth. Guidance is destined, as I see it, to become the very core of the curriculum, if we are going to produce those attitudes and understandings which will be necessary for the critical period ahead. To produce a durable peace involves getting the best out of each indi- vidual, insuring that the brains of the country will have an opportunity for the kind of education which will make a full return to society. In normal times we could take the entire student body out of the colleges and replace them with equally capable boys and girls who are not going to college because of economic circumstance. Our neighbors in Germany have learned that no nation can afford to neglect its potential leadership, and they have done a remarkable job in that field. A democracy even more cannot afford the price which comes from making our potential leadership purely a matter of economic status. The time is coming (and the amount of money being spent for the returned soldier will be a wedge in that direction) when we will, if necessary, subsidize brains in order that democracy may have the leadership which it needs. I think perhaps I can make clear the need for guidance quickly and per- tinently if I read a short extract from an article which I saw recently in the Clearing House. It is entitled, "I Taught Them All." "I have taught in the high school over a long period of time. During that time I have given assignments among others to a murderer, an evangelist, a pugilist, a thief, and an imbecile. The murderer was a quiet little boy who sat on the front seat and regarded me with pale blue eyes. The evangelist, easily the most popular boy in school, had the lead in the junior play. The pugilist lounged by the window and let loose at intervals a raucous laugh that startled even the geraniums. The thief was a gay-hearted Lothario, with a song on his lips. The imbecile was a soft-eyed little animal sitting in the shadows. "The murderer awaits death in the state penitentiary. The evangelist has lain a year now in the village churchyard. The pugilist lost an eye in Free Schools for a Free People 109 a brawl in Hong Kong. The thief, by standing on his tiptoes, can barely see the windows of my room from his county jail, and the once gentle-eyed little moron beats his head against the padded wall in the state asylum. "All of these pupils once sat in my room, sat and looked at me gravely across w^orn brown desks. I must have been of great help to those pupils. I taught them the rhyming scheme of the Elizabethan sonnet and how to diagram a complex sentence." What I am trying to say to you in this long introduction is that if we are going to meet the complicated situation which faces us, there must be a tremendous expansion of education both in quantity and in quality. Such an expansion involves a corresponding increase in the cost of education. We need better teachers and that means added expense. We need new tools of learning which are in themselves more effective but also more expensive. Increased expenditures are inevitable. How much is it going to cost? I don't know, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if the expenditures for education in this country were doubled in the next ten or fifteen years. If the American people see the need for an expanded education, they will have it; there can be no doubt of that. Where is the money coming from? Well, it is not coming from local sources. The only resource that the local community has in most cases is real property. In the early days, when we were an agricultural people, that was the natural source of taxation. Real property is tangible, it is easily assessed, it is a constant source of income. But we are no longer an agricultural people. We are largely engaged in industry and commerce. Real property represents only a small fraction of our presentday wealth, and taxation on this source, particularly in our war- impact areas where rents are frozen, at times exceeds the total income of the property. The real estate tax has actually become a capital tax in many of our communities. It is obvious, therefore, that increased support for education cannot be obtained from local taxes. Additional revenues must come from the intangible sources of wealth. This is where the real wealth is. The smallest unit that can tap this source is the state. And there are some states wealthy enough to support such a program as I am outlining today. These are, however, by all odds, in the minority. Many others, even if they set up the most rigid system of tax- ation, couldn't support our present program, to say nothing of the tre- mendous expansions which the critical period ahead demands. Obviously, then, we must look to the federal government for support. I don't like that particularly, any more than many of you do, but we might just as well face the facts. The federal government today is tapping all the most prolific sources of revenue and that trend is irreversible. We are going to be confronted, when this war is over, with a debt so laree that our an- nual interest will amount to something like six or eight billion dollars. And we have embarked on a series of social experiments in this country which will not be abandoned, regardless of which administration is in power. The people will continue to demand them. The support of our armed serv- ices will constitute no small addition to our tax burden. Lender such con- no American Association of School Administrators ditions, it is perfectly obvious that the federal government will continue to preempt all the most lucrative sources of revenue. That is where the money is. That is where the money will continue to be. That is where the money must come from. As John K. Norton has so well pointed out, it is entirely too late today to discuss whether the federal government shall participate in the support of education. It is already participating and in a big way. More than a century ago, two sections of each township were given to the states to be set aside for education, and many of our school systems over a large part of the country are even today being financed in part by the money which came from that land grant. In 1864 we had the Morrill Act, which gave grants in aid to our land-grant colleges, which have been in operation for over eighty years. In 1914 we had the Lever Act, which gave a limited amount of aid to adult education. In 1918 we had the Smith- Hughes Act, followed by a number of amendments. These have aided voca- tional education for over a quarter of a century. During the depression the government spent millions for education under the guise of relief or social service, but, nevertheless, for education. At the present time it is financing education all the way from the nursery school to the graduate college. Billions are being spent for education in the military services. Furthermore, educational programs are operated by various departments of the federal government itself. In the single year 1942, $456,000,000 were spent for education by these various departments. And there are vast plans for the period ahead. The President's recent suggestion of a billion dollars for the continued education of returning soldiers is an example in point. There can be no question, therefore, of federal participation in the sup- port of education. To attempt to avoid federal control by refusing federal aid is to assume an utterly unrealistic position. It is analogous to that as- sumed by Belgium in its relations with Germany. The only thing that could possibly have saved her from attack would have been a strong combination of all the small countries of western Europe with England and France for mutual defense, but so fearful of German aggression was she that she would have none of it. She would neither build strong defenses herself nor allow others to do it for her. As a result, she kept herself weak and defenseless and thus insured the very disaster which she was trying so hard to avoid. So with the attempts to avoid federal control by resisting federal aid. In this matter we have two alternatives. First, we can pursue a laissez-faire policy in education, drifting with the tide. We can ignore profound social changes which the postwar world involves and prepare for a "return to normalcy" as soon as the war situation permits. And we can resist all federal aid, leaving our local systems inadequately supported and quite unprepared to meet public demands for needed expansion of services. If we choose this alternative, federal control of education is practically inevitable. When the people become conscious of the need, the demand for expanded services will be irresistible. The needs will be national rather Free Schools for a Free People 111 than local in their scope. The demand, therefore, will fall primarily on the federal government which alone has the means for supporting such an expanded program. We shall have a new and glorified youth-serving agency far surpassing the earlier NYA and CCC. While it may be set up under the guise of social service, can there be any doubt that it will gradually take over the education functions? It will be heavily financed and will be controlled by the federal government from top to bottom. As an educational institution, it will be extravagant and inefficient but as a political machine it will be a most effective instrument for perpetuating the party in power. Such an agency will constitute a dis- tinct threat to democracy in this country. Meanwhile, the schools will become vestigial appendages to the educational system, concerned only with those traditional practices which were designed to meet the needs of a previous century, but which will have little or no relation to life in the postwar world. This is one alternative. It is the line of least resistance and it is the sure road to federal control. But we do not have to choose this road. Fortunately we have a second alternative. We can face the situation realistically. We can use the best minds in our profession in a study of the postwar situation, its needs, and the programs necessary to meet these needs. We can arouse the rank and file of our profession to an understanding of their findings and to studying ways and means for adapting programs to local community needs. We can put our state and local houses in order by consolidating weak and ineffective districts into strong and efficient educational units and by strengthening our state departments of education. We can remove the United States Office of Education from its weak and anomalous position in the federal government. For this purpose I would call to your attention the suggestion recently made by Willard Givens in one of the discussion groups, namely, the creation of a strong national board of education com- posed of laymen of recognized ability who would select the United States Commissioner of Education and thru whom all educational activities of the national government would channel. We can enlist public understanding and lay participation in our pro- grams, thereby creating a local interest which will protect the control of education from federal encroachment. And we can unite lay and pro- fessional influence behind such legislation as the Thomas Bill to secure adequate support for an expanding program carefully safeguarded against federal control. Thus we will present the following picture: 1. The federal government will act largely as a tax collecting agency, distributing its funds to the state departments of education and thru them to the local communi- ties. If the purposes of the expenditure are definitely stated in the act and not left to the discretion of governmental officials, federal control is avoided. 2. State departments of education will assume the responsibility for establishing standards, providing leadership, setting up programs for meeting the purposes of the act, and exercising general supervision over its operation in the local community. 112 American Association of School Administrators 3. The local community will initiate and operate its own local program for carrying out the purposes ot the act and adapting it to local needs. This alternative meets the situation in the hard way. It involves all the wisdom and understanding which the profession affords. It involves educa- tional statesmanship of the highest order but it is the one sure road for pro- tecting home rule in American education in the critical period ahead. UNIVERSAL AND FREE PUBLIC EDUCATION CLYDE A. ERA'IN, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC instruction^ RALEIGH, N. C. Address at Atlanta Conference I. Our Heritage — Last spring when I was making a few commencement addresses, I had a very interesting and illuminating experience. On one occasion I spo^e to a group of Indians in Robeson County. A little later I spoke to a group of Jews in convention in the city of Asheville. A few days after that I addressed a group of Gentiles at East Carolina Teachers' Col- lege, and two days after that a group of Negroes at their college in Fayette- ville, North Carolina. The illuminating thing that came to me was the fact that in every single instance I was speaking to a group of American citizens. There were four races represented, but they not only represented the popu- lation of my state but they represented the history of America. This is a land of no particular race and no particular creed. Our people, for more than three hundred years, have come from everywhere to form here this land which we call the United States of America. The Jew and the Gentile, the German, the Frenchman, the Italian, the Englishman — all peoples have come here into this land of freedom. They have worked together; they have developed that which we have gnd it has grown up unmarked and unmarred by the stamp of racial division or racial prejudice. We have not been free from conflict, but the processes of the great melting pot have proceeded in- exorably and today we represent a picture of harmony and a spirit of unity which is sadly lacking in the rest of the world. The racial group which we represent, in Europe for instance, is engaged in the destruction of all that which they iiave built up thru the years. Not only has this peculiar develop- ment been true with reference to our citizenship, but to other phases of American life. Ti-.ke our culture as an example. You can go into the Library of Congress in Washington and you will find there books which represent the culture of all the peoples the world has ever known, who have left traces of their culture in recorded form. Out of this vast storehouse of knowledge belonging to the whole course of human events, we have taught the American citizen in our public school, in our college, and in our uni- versity. His culture is a composite of all of the cultures of the past, a cul- ture to which he is giving a distinctly American personality. Free Schools for a Free People 113 Our wealth is a further evidence of this interesting development. Yonder at Fort Knox in Kentucky is the greatest accumulation of gold the w^orld has ever known. That gold has an interesting history which reflects also this great unique American development. Some of that gold is ancient and some is new. Some of it reaches back into the dim and distant past when the world and its people were quite different from that which we know today. Some of it is the result of intrigue and mystery and some reflects the joy and ac- complishment of the peoples who have possessed it. Some of it is stained with the blood of men who have died for the yellow wealth. Some of it has been marked with international intrigue and its geography is as broad as the world itself. That gold has come from the jungles of India, from the flood- swept rivers of China, from the mysterious interior of Africa, from the frozen wastes of the Yukon, from the hands of Spanish-driven slaves in the bowels of South American mountains, and from the gold-laden sands of our own magnificent country. It is a wealth which has come to us because of our enterprise and because of the virility of our economic system. The history of our music and art is the same. The treasures which we love and enjoy have come to us from ihe skilled hands and inspired hearts of artists from everywhere and from every age. All of these people, all of this culture, all of this wealth, and all of this art have become a part and parcel of American life, and today we present to the world the swiftest and most powerful developme'^t of an organized society mankind has ever known. While this has been happening, what have we seen elsewhere? Europe to- day is a shambles. Her cities have been laid waste. Her colleges and uni- versities have been destroyed. Her homes have crumbled into dust beneath the impact of bursting bombs. In vast areas of Europe are children whose legs are bent with rickets, whose features are drawn and hungry, who are dwarfs because of the lack of necessary food which they would have except for war. The minds of these little children are filled with haunting fears. Their mothers are hysterical, and normal life is impossible for these who bear the scars of conflict. The young men of Europe, the hope of her next generation, lie dead upon a thousand battlefields, a drain more terrible than all of the wastage of material resources. These younger generations, who might have built a greater and bigger Europe, today are silent or afraid. This is true of both our friends and our enemies on the other side, and these scars will not heal fully and -completely perhaps for decades to come. During the period of our settlement and growth, we have practiced a policy of isolation. Thomas Jefferson is reputed to have counselled the American people to avoid entangling alliances. This doctrine of isolation has been followed for political purposes during a substantial part of our history, but I should like to call your attention to the fact that it has not been followed in periods of international conflict. Since the establishment of our first colony, the people of this country have been involved in every international conflict. That was trie when we were colonies and it has cer- tainly been true since we have been a nation. The war of 1812 was fought to preserve freedom of the seas. The American sailor was detf^rmined to sail his ship with unrestricted freedom wherever the waterways of the world 114 American Association of School Administrators might lead. That involved the establishment of principles which went be- yond the boundaries of our infant nation. The promulgation of the Monroe Doctrine was again in violation of our policy of isolation, because it threw the protecting mantle of American influence over two continents and said to the rest of the world, "These nations here shall have the right and priv- ilege of working out their own destinies according to the wishes of their own people." The war with Mexico is another case in point. Problems of international significance were quite clearly evident in that early conflict in our history. In the war with Spain, we again went beyond the boundaries of our nation and heeded the great humanitarian heart of America to fight for the liberty of oppressed people. The sinking of the Maine was simply an incident in bringing about the conflict. In the first World War we again went beyond the boundaries of our nation and threw our weight with the democracies of the world in a conflict which was truly international in its scope. After each of these wars we have attempted to recede into our shell of isolation. We have taken the position that the affairs of the rest of the world were of no concern to us. We followed that policy after the first World War, and we remained aloof from international situations in which we might have held the balance of power had we assumed our responsibility, and in which we might have prevented the war in which we are now en- gaged. We looked with complacency when Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and appropriated its lands and its people to the purposes of his Fascist govern- ment. We viewed with detachment the march of Hitler into Poland and Czechoslovakia and said that it was no concern of ours. We have witnessed for many years with pitiful apathy the march of Japan across the properties and rights of Chinese citizens, and we have said that it was no business of ours. But Pearl Harbor has awakened us to the fact that wherever the rights of men are trampled upon, wherever freedom is in danger, it in- volves in the ultimate end the welfare and security of our own people. That is an inescapable conclusion that one must draw if he reads with open mind the course of our history. II. Our Destiny — As I contemplate in history the magnificent develop- n^ent of our nation — its people, its culture, its wealth, and its art — I am re- minded of a period in biblical history. It was Joseph who became a great man at the peak of Egyptian prosperity and who gathered into the granaries of Egypt her surplus crops. In a day of famine he measured these out to the people again in order that they might have sustenance when adversity came. Can it be said that an all wise Providence has decreed that here in America, against a day of destruction and conflict in the rest of the world, human and material resources should be piled up against the hour of world adversity. It seems to me that this is true and that now it is our duty and responsibility, after we have helped the democracies of the world retard and destroy the forces of totalitarian power, to step into the picture and thru sound and wise leadership lay the foundation for democratic government and individual en- terprise wherever men live. We are no longer citizens of a limited area. We are citizens of the world and it will take world vision if we are to perform Free Schools for a Free People 115 our duties and responsibilities wisely. We have found that what happens at Tokyo, what happens in Argentina or Madrid or Milan or Rome or London in the final analysis affects the welfare of these United States of America. The world is no longer a place of isolated areas. It has become a unity in disaster; it should be a unity in peace. A great Christian nation, we cannot escape this destiny. Jesus Christ said nineteen centuries ago, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature." I have a new conception of what He said. His gospel is not only a gospel of religion but it is a gospel of comfort ; it is a gospel of health ; it is a gospel of education ; it is a gospel of freedom ; it is a gospel of brother- hood ; it is a gospel of concern for the welfare of men regardless of location, creed, or race; and it is a gospel of unity of effort and interest if the world is to heal its scars of war, build back its crushed and crumbling cities, and catch again the inspiration of its high ideals. In my judgment, education for the new day in its basic philosophies and concepts must take these things into consideration in attempting to help the rest of the world to have the things which we have known and which we love. I am not advocating a program of educational imperialism nor political imperialism nor governmental imperialism ; I would not propose that thru the processes of force and might we should attempt to impose upon the rest of the world any idea or ideal simply because it is ours. We would be guilty of the same thing for which we have fought the advocates of totalitarian power, but we can lead and we can inspire and we can help thru our leader- ship and thru the idealism of the American people. That is a great challenge to a broadened American education. I have no patience with those who ad- vocate streamlined education. That to me means the limiting of educational opportunities. It means a dictatorship of policies in order to force retrench- ment in expenses and in curriculum opportunities. What we need is a broad- ened and enriched education which still preserves its characteristics of local control and local initiative. The things with which education deals are the things which are permanent and enduring. The conquest of ideas is a thing with which the classroom is concerned. The material resources of a nation can be destroyed. The visible evidences of wealth can be scattered far and wide, but spiritual values endure which make it possible for material re- sources to be built up again. In our own country we have witnessed the ex- penditure of nearly $200,000,000,000 for the purposes of war. At a time when our ideals have been so sorely in danger it has been difficult to secure the adequate financing of educational opportunities. This lack of balance in the true values of a nation must not be permitted to continue. The case for education must be presented along with the case for war that we may have the facilities with which to preserve our heritage and to fulfil our destiny. III. Medium of Accomplishment in Capital — Up to this point, I have discussed our heritage and our destiny. What is the medium of accomplish- ment ? It is our system of universal and free public education. I mean free in a double sense; not only free in its availability to every child, but free in its administration, in its concepts, in its ideals, in its choice of materials and methods. Our system of education has no uniformity of pattern in cur- 116 American Association of School Administrators riculum nor in any other respect. It has developed in every community and it has reflected in every community the wishes, the aspirations, the hopes, and the ambitions of the people. Inhere has been pioneer and imitator; leader and follower. In the individual classroom the teacher has had the privilege and the opportunity of following her own initiative and ingenuity in teaching those who were her pupils. There are thousands of curriculums on file in the research laboratories of our colleges and universities — and who is there wise enough or foolish enough to say that any single one is the Alpha and Omega of education for the new day? It is true that wide differences in educational opportunities have existed under this democratic but highly individualistic development of American education, but these differences have been no greater than other differences of a social or economic nature, and these differences can be overcome by meth- ods of financial equalization. There is certainly a close relationship between the amount of money available in a given community for education and the quality of educational opportunities. The greatness of America is in the composite picture formed by individual efforts. There has been cooperation and integration of course, but it has been democratic. Special privilege and dictatorship are not halters to be worn by American citizens. If our system of free public education is to remain free, the roots of its control must re- main in the hearts and wills of our people. There alone is that freedom safe. The trend of centralization in organized phases of American life has given me growing concern as to what may happen to our schools. Particularly in this century, we have witnessed an amazing centralization in practically every line of business. Selfish assumption of power and privilege have re- sulted in stern governmental control — sometimes even harmful or stifling. In recent years, pressure groups of different types have developed which have attempted to protect or promote vested interests, endangering the public welfare. These, too, have felt the weight of government control. Many of our thoughtful citizens believe that both the controller and the controlled have gone to extremes, but that in this battle of giants the individual or the individual communities can do little but watch vainly the titanic struggle and hope that the freedom of enterprise the little man has known and the democratically responsive government under which he has lived may both be preserved as institutions for posterity. Let us hope that education may remain free in order that his kind with his ideals may be multiplied and strengthened to where the bulwarks of American democracy in every re- spect may be able to resist any power however great, however selfish, or even however idealistic that would attempt to encroach upon the legitimate ex- ercise of individual initiative. During the last decade or more of national emergency — first a great de- pression, then a war — there has been a tendency on the part of federal agencies to dictate types and forms of education which, while having within them worthy humanitarian motives, indicate a trend toward direction of the curriculum which, in my judgment, must be watched closely. During the war period the armed forces have emphasized certain courses that must be taught in the public schools. With a fine spirit of patriotism we have Free Schools for a Free People 117 rallied to the demands and have placed emphasis upon those phases of the curriculum where emphasis was requested. But even here, it would be easy for suggestions to become commands unless this trend, too, is halted when the emergency has passed. There is no educational leader in America who w^ould question the need for meeting any emergency which education could help, but at the same time practices which arise in a period of emergency have not always subsided w'hen the emergency has passed. Home rule in American education has marked the pathway of our progress, a progress without parallel in all the history of humanity. As we chart the course of education for a new and challenging period in the affairs of men, let us remember that the control of curriculum and methods of edu- cational administration must continue to be worked out as they have been in the past and that no Hitler or Mussolini or Hirohito, far removed from the voices of the people, shall command the type of education which their children and their children's children are to have. None of these shall sit in the seats of the mighty, remote from human needs and hopes, and tell the teacher what and when and where and how to teach ; but let her bend her ear to hear the heartbeat of her community and then out of the wisdom of her heart and the knowledge of her mind and her dream of greatness for a little, child, let her teach him how to walk and how to defend and how to preserve the ways of freedom which are his heritage and his destiny. PROTECTING HOME RULE IN AMERICAN EDUCATION MRS. PEARL A. WANAMAKER, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, OLYMPIA, WASH. Address at Seattle Conference Home rule in education needs no "protection" in the ordinary sense of the word. Kipling used the word one way when he said "protector of the poor ; defender of the weak" — certainly no description of home rule in American education. Webster uses such words as "guard" and "shield" when he defines "protect" and those are exactly the words we don't want to use in connection with home rule in education. Home rule in education must be strong — so strong that its automatic inclusion in the future of our democracy is unquestioned, so strong that generations to come will never realize there was ever a thought that home rule in education needed "pro- tection." Believing that, I have no tendency to overlook the factors now at work undermining home rule in education. To say that home rule in education needs no "protection" and then to ignore the forces that are endeavoring to place it in dire need of protection would certainly be a sad reversal of the old quip about being "unable to see the forest for the trees." Sometimes those trees in the foreground are not only mighty important in relation to the 118 American Association of School Administrators forest but they have stubborn and treacherous undergrowth like the wild blackberry vines in our own Northwest timberlands. There are fundamental facts we must know about home rule in educa- tion if we are to do our part in maintaining its strength and position. First, we must know why home rule in education is important. We must know what factors are tending to undermine home rule. We must understand thoroly what measures we should take to build for the future of home rule in public education. History itself establishes the precedent, but while the precedent is help- ful in visioning the future it is never a keystone on which to build. Prece- dents, as we all know, are apt to become outmoded and be discarded with the years, and on this point there must be no discard. Our nation was born in a struggle for home rule. Our history is built around the interpretation and reinterpretatlon of the relation between the several states and the fed- eral government. The tense debates on adoption and interpretation of the Constitution and the tragic issues of the Civil War are centered around this fundamental problem. It is an issue with which every American should be familiar and one which this present war is reemphasizing daily. But along with the inherited respect we have for "states' rights" and "home rule in education" must be a complete understanding of the "why" of home rule in education. We have seen only too recently the tragedies fostered in the dictator na- tions thru centrally controlled education. We know that the dispersion of control is one of the most effective guarantees against the misuse of educa- tion on a large scale. We know that local control means that the schools will be more responsive to the characteristic needs of the people in each community. We know also that local control means more effective adminis- tration. Recently I received a letter from an official in the national capital. It was a three-page letter analyzing the public-school transportation system in one of the counties in the state of Washington. The writer of the letter is to be complimented. His was rather an ingenious theoretical analysis of the problem presented in that county. However, because he was unfamiliar with the characteristics of that particular county his suggestions were, for the most part, impracticable, and I know you'll understand, in at least a few instances, laughable. This is a small but important signpost pointing to the inefficiency and encumbrance national control of education could be. In spite of the historical precedent in favor of home rule in education and the obvious advantages to democracy, there are forces at work tending to undermine local control of public education. I do not mean to imply that there are individuals purposely seeking to destroy local education, but rather that there are broad social trends toward centralization of control. Primarily, there is the lack of interest on the part of the people in their local school systems. In time of war, when ears are strained to hear news from the fighting front, when tragedy hovers over every American home, when momentous decisions are beintr made in the nation's capital, the action Free Schools for a Free People 119 of a local schoolboard at Patterson Corners is apt to go unnoticed in the metropolitan newspapers. It is true the schoolboard did decide to buy new textbooks for the third grade; it is true the third graders have needed the textbooks for several years ; it is true that new books for the fifth graders were purchased just two years ago. Even with this background it is doubt- ful if the public interest will reach any hysterical or even high level. If public interest is confined to the national government, if the people look to the national government for the solution of all their problems, then home rule in education will certainly suffer. Public interest focused at a national rather than a local level is a natural tendency in wartime, since it is neces- sary that the federal government expand its activities and control over all phases of our lives in order to assure effective pursuit of the war ; however, there are certain other factors undermining home rule in education that can be remedied and vigorous correction should start now. First among these factors is the haphazard way in which the local school districts were originally created. ]VIany of our school districts are too small and poorly financed to do an effective modern job of education and the con- sequent inefficiency has caused people to lose confidence in their fundamental democratic value. There is also the unequal distribution of taxation re- sources among the various school districts in the state and among the various states in the Union. The need for greater equalization of financial resources to support educa- tion within the states has led to increased state support. It is extremely im- portant that the method of distributing this money be consistent with the principle of home rule in education, at the same time promoting maximum efficiency. There has also been a reluctance on the part of some schools to attack new problems, particularly in face of legally restricted budgets. Local schools in some instances have forfeited the initiative, so to speak, to fed- eral bureaus with large financial resources which have ventured into new types of education. Leadership in education, as in any other field, will gravitate to the level of government where the strongest direction exists. Another factor tending to promote centralized control of education and undermine home rule is the sudden realization of the American people that education is a national problem. Almost a million men have been rejected for military services because they are functionally illiterate. This has weak- ened our war effort and thrown an unusually heavy burden upon those states which have maintained more adequate educational programs. The American people are realizing that our nation cannot retain its position in the present world or strengthen it in the world of tomorrow unless the full potentialities of every citizen are realized in effective education. If one state chooses to discontinue its whole educational program, it would be of a seri- ous concern to the other forty-seven states, since it would affect standards of living and total strength in wartime, to say nothing of the obvious denial •of opportunity to the individual. As a people we have suddenly realized that a large, well-trained and well-educated reservoir of manpower is more valuable in a national crisis of anv kind than a large pool of obsolete mili- 120 American Association of School Administrators tary equipment. For this reason schools are now receiving, in greater pro- portion, national attention. What can be done to further home rule in public education? They tell me that some newspapermen use the old rule of the five W's in writing a story. I'm not sure it wouldn't be a good idea for speakers, but I'll have to add an "H" to that list of who, what, when, where, and why. That "H" is for "how" and right now how we are going to further home rule in public education is by far the most important point. Let me repeat this point : Leadership in education, as in any other field, will gravitate to the level of government where the strongest direction exists. The local school district in order to retain its home rule must merit that home rule. By constitutional provision and by common interpretation in school ad- ministration, education is the state's major responsibility. When we say this we do not mean that the state organizes and controls the local administra- tion of education, but rather that it is the paramount duty of the state to provide for the education of its citizens in the belief that the welfare of all children in the state is a matter of state concern. The state, therefore, while it does not organize, plan, and operate local programs, is responsible for providing the machinery under which the local district may function. The schools are thought of as local and not as state institutions; yet, at the same time, they are recognized as belonging to both. Every stimulation needs to be given to the local district to develop and carry out its program of instruction, since democracy begins at the local level. This encouragement needs to be given by the state, and in doing this, rome minimum standards and requirements are necessary to safeguard the interests of all the children. They should, however, be only those that will improve the efficiency of the local district and encourage the highest degree of local effort. There is a minimum program that must be guaranteed every child in every district, and every effort must be made to see that this responsi- bility is carried out. This then is essentially the state's duty — to insure edu- cational opportunity within its borders and to exert every service and effort to assist in building strong local school districts efficiently administered and with effective programs. The uneconomical, inefficient school district unit that was established forty years ago must be reorganized on a modern basis. School districts that are efficient and economically organized are, thru those qualities, enabled to stand on their own feet. The state of Washington has undertaken a plan of school district reorganization which is resulting in the development of better local administrative units. I am confident that the cause of home rule in education is being strengthened by this reorganization process, and any ten- dencies of state government to intrude upon the independence of local school districts will be lessened when school districts have been reorganized in accordance with sound educational principles. The problem of the erw- croachment of the federal government upon states' rights in education can be effectively met by similar process, Free Schools for a Free People 121 The majority of state departments of education are inadequately staffed and financed. At the present time in the state of Washington there is one man who must represent the state in all matters affecting public-school transportation. He is outnumbered several persons to one by the personnel of the Office of Defense Transportation. This same man also represents the state in the supervision of the hot-lunch program. Here again he is out- numbered several to one by the federal employees of the Food Distribution Administration, w^ho deal directly with school lunches. Another man on the staff must represent the state in all matters pertaining to Lanham Act aid for the schools. This involves nursery schools, the extended school services program, school building aid, and support for the general program; this in addition to his regular work. He is outnumbered several to one by federal employees working in the state of Washington and administering these pro- grams from the federal level. State control of education is threatened by a sheer weight of numbers in federal personnel. Ours is not an isolated in- stance ; many other states have had similar experiences along this line. We have been talking for several years about the evils of federal en- croachment upon states' rights in modern education. It is time we did some- thing about it. One of our first steps should be the establishment of strong professional state departments of education, since the function of state de- partments is to give leadership, to give those services that cannot be ef- ficiently handled at the local level, and to do research and planning; and then adherence to a strongly established policy that all federal activities re- lating to education be channeled thru the state departments. This will in- sure control remaining in the states and will reduce the administrative costs to the federal government. The afore-mentioned policy is the crux of the whole situation and de- serves a closer examination. A fundamental problem in the retention of states' rights in the matter of education is the unequal distribution of taxa- tion resources among the forty-eight states and the consequent need for fed- eral aid to strengthen the weak spots. This matter of the relation between federal aid for education and reten- tion of home rule in education has received considerable attention of late. There are those who blindly state that if the federal government controls the purse strings it will also control the program — this, mind you, in spite of the fact that in the average American home the man has controlled the purse strings for many years but, and I make this assertion modestly, the woman has usually controlled the home. Federal aid for education goes as far back as admission to statehood when the government gave to the states Sections 16 and 36 of every township for the support of education. Consti- tutional provisions provide for the investment of these funds from the sale of timber and land, leases or rentals on these sections as a permanent school fund, the interest from which is to be used currently. This aid becomes a part of the current school fund and is mingled with all other funds appro- priated by the legislature for use by the local school districts. In addition to this and other types of federal aid going to the state treas- ury there has been federal aid for vocational education. It is true that these 122 American Association of School Administrators other aids are comparatively small, but the principle involved is of great importance. Federal funds are paid to the state school funds in accordance with a legally designed procedure. The administrative cost is negligible. There are no federal supervisors. If federal aid is made available to the states in this manner the result is an improved school system with the control remaining with the state and local schoolboard. This kind of federal aid will not result in dangerous concentration of political control of education. The federal government has made millions of dollars available for edu- cation in programs administered by the Work Projects Administration for nursery schools, adult education, and recreation ; by the Federal Works Administration for school buildings, maintenance and operation of elemen- tary and secondary schools, nursery schools, extended school services under the Lanham Act ; by the Department of Agriculture for the school lunch program; by the Office of Price Administration for curriculum materials for classroom use ; by the Treasury Department for the development of plans and programs for bond and stamp sales ; by the War Department in the setting up of preinduction courses in auto mechanics and radio; by the Civil Aeronautics Authority for the development of courses in preflight aeronautics. This kind of aid is insidious because it is given for specific pro- grams thru noneducational agencies for public and nonpublic education and makes for a federal control that cannot be clearly seen. It is obvious that if this type of aid for education is expanded there will be federal control of education. However, this solution to the educational problem is popular with certain influential groups since it provides an oppor- tunity to increase the federal payroll and to exert a direct control over the training of American youth. The broad implications of this aid to educa- tion are readily apparent. The way for the federal government to assist education is to make funds available directly to states thru the United States Office of Education to assist them in operating their state school systems. Under this plan funds would be apportioned to the several states on an equitable basis and would be merged with other state school funds to strengthen the state school pro- gram. Such a plan of federal aid would require a minimum of administra- tive funds from the federal government. There would be no new agency created and all auditing would be conducted at the state level, utilizing existing systems and requiring a minimum of additional administrative personnel. It is apparent that federal aid made available to the states on this basis provides for local and state control of education and limits the number of federal administrative appointments. There is one more step which locally controlled education must take in order to insure the retention of home rule. Educational progress requires a plan of action just as surely as battles must be planned before they can be successfully waged. Many critical problems are facing education today which cannot be effectively solved without considering fundamental changes in the pattern of public education. Unless a carefully designed plan is evoKed under the leadership of experienced and trained educators at the Free Schools for a Free People 123 local level, these changes may be determined by the chaotic interplay of pressure groups. From this scramble would, more than likely, emerge a new crop of agencies with funds and panaceas for all educational ills. The future design of education cannot be left to chance. The democratic progress in education requires a well-informed lay public. Planning for the future provides an effective vehicle for focusing public attention on the problems of education thru local educational leadership. After all, the local community is education's point of contact with pupils and parents; it is the point where educational problems are most tangible and specific ; it is the point where lay interest is most readily developed. It is, therefore, the vital point in planning the future of education. If educators and friends of educa- tion assume active leadership in the local districts and at the state level, the problem of maintaining home rule in education will be largely solved. A subject such as this has so many ramifications, delves into so many con- tributing factors, and embraces such a wide scope that only the most care- ful and concentrated thought can point the way to us. I have endeavored only to emphasize why we must understand the importance of state control or home rule in education ; what the methods, already launched, are and what they might lead us into; and finally the corrective plans that educa- tors thruout the nation have agreed are feasible at this time and promise the most for education's future. To review them briefly : Home rule in education is important because it is our most effective guar- antee against the misuse of schools for propaganda purposes on a nationwide basis. It is a means whereby we keep our schools responsive to the needs of the people on the community level. It is our protection against the cumber- some inefficiency of centralized control. In simple words those are the "whys" of home rule in education. The way in which the federal government now gives aid to education is by making funds available directly to local school systems for specific pur- poses administered by noneducational agencies. The logical way and the democratic way for the federal government to assist education is to make funds available directly to states thru the United States Office of Education to assist them in operating their state school sj'stems. The success of the corrective measures depends on the establishment of strong professional state departments of education and establishment and adherence to a policy that all federal activities relating to education be channeled thru the United States Office of Education to state departments. A full measure of strength must rest with the local school districts at the community level because in order to retain home rule, the local district must merif that home rule. We, therefore, must strengthen local initiative and control. A carefully designed program at the local level, interrelated and meshed with programs at the state and national level, must be evolved under the leadership of educators representing the villages, the towns, and the cities thruout the state and nation. Education must be kept responsive 124 American Association of School Administrators to community needs and yet kept free from pressures that tend to throw it out of balance. We must stand ready adequately to finance our program so as to attract enthusiastic leadership in our classrooms. In this way, and in this way only, can the democratic future of education be assured and home rule in American education be confident of broader horizons in the world of tomorrow. Part IV The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow SOME SUGGESTED WAR AND PEACE MUSTS FOR EDUCATION HERBERT B. BRUNER, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, OKI vHOMA CITY, OKLA. Address at Kansas City Conference It is a commonplace for speakers and writers to use the expression, "These are unusual times." When the clear, cold light of history is brought to play upon the events of today, there will be little doubt that our times will be judged as critical as any thru which the civilized world has ever passed. Upon our ability as educators to analyze accurately and sensibly the present situation and to act accordingly depends the educational and life fate of thousands. Lord Baldwin, speaking at the Congress on Education for Democracy in New York about a month prior to the declaration of war in Europe, stated that the most difficult task a leader ever faced was to persuade his people to unite behind something he knew was for their good but which they did not want. He was referring to the procrastination of the English people prior to 1939 in preparing for the crisis that was ahead, as instanced by their overwhelming votes for peace and by their unwilling- ness to produce even defense armaments. Altho some doubt the wisdom of Lord Baldwin's leadership in this matter, no true Englishman nor American can deny the untold harm caused by the early lack of unity of the British in preparing to meet the sinister forces that threatened them. Altho we too were quite tardy in recognizing the strategic value of early preparation, the series of circumstances culminating in Pearl Harbor brought to the American people unprecedented unity of purpose. In fact, ic is interesting to note that in all our history there has never been less opposi- tion to something that practically no one wanted ; namely, war. But once our aims were clear we gave and will continue to give our undivided attention to the matter at hand. We intend to be sure that the job is done and done right. If we in education are to carry our part of the respons'bility in this huge national undertaking, we must have this same unity of purpose and action. Indeed, we must share with other citizens a double responsibility. First we must assist in winning the war. In addition, it is peculiarly our duty to see to it that the war is worth winning. In the tasks that lie ahead, those of us in education have a most significant role to play. In discovering and in carrying out this role, we must be a most [125] 126 American Association of School Administrators intimate part of the life of our nation and of the world as a whole and must keep tuned-in continuously on the jobs that face people everywhere. In this paper are listed ten suggested war and peace "musts" for education which it is hoped will assist in orienting our thinking in relation to the work ahead. Space will permit little more than the mere statement of some of these, altho two are developed a little more in detail. I. IVe must forivard in every possible luay that part of the war program which has to do with the speedy production of the actual implements of war and with the preparation of our armed forces for combat. During recent weeks, there has been much to hearten us in relation to the war, such as the prediction of General Eisenhower and of others in high places that Germany would be crushed in 1944, the smashing aerial blows at the heart of Germany, our successes in the Pacific, and the history-making advances of the Russians. On the home front, too, there are signs of approach- ing victory. Our production of certain war materials has reached the point where some plants have been actually closed down or the work decidedly curtailed. There is no doubt but that we are making genuine progress and that the full force of our might is just about ready to function. The truth of the matter, however, is that we are not in Berlin and Tokyo yet. We are witnessing the bloodiest kind of determined fighting in Italy. We are realizing that the second front has not really been established yet because of the gigantic preparation needed for such an efifort. We know in our hearts that more power is required for the offensive involved in this second front than there would be for defensive measures. Thousands of wives and chil- dren know all too well that the war is not over as fathers and husbands are being drafted in greatly increased numbers. One does not have to be a pessimist today to realize the tremendous ad- vantages that have been gained by our foes thru carefully planned prepara- tion extending over a period of ten years. Neither does one have to be too keen a student of economic conditions to realize the enormous resources still in their hands. For ten years the first lesson of a German kindergarten child has consisted of holding a globe in his hands and learning the following two sentences: "This is a world." "This is a German world." In addition, they have had years now to loot the larders of Scandinavia as well as those of the Balkan countries. In contrast to the conditions in World War I, they now have France with a pistol to her head, and in Japan have a most formidable ally. No, this war is not over. My own guess (and I am thankful we are in America where we can express individual opinions) is that the shooting part of the war will last at least two more years, altho I realize that the last war ended suddenly, and following this we shall still be faced by a transition period which will demand of our citizens the soundest thinking in the history of our country. We in the schools must not relax in our war efforts, such as rationing, Red Cross, and scrap drives — four weeks ago six drives were under way at the same time in our own Oklahoma City schools — preinduction courses, The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 127 the Victory Corps, and a host of others. We shall attempt, however, to derive the highest possible educational value from each of these efforts for the com- munity, for the teachers, and for the pupils. II. JVe must assume leadership in the educational aspects of projects con- nected with the war and the peace, such as war production training, nursery schools, and vocational education in all its aspects. The sheer urgency for immediate vocational training of young men and women now and the necessity for retraining millions at the close of the war have raised and W'ill raise serious educational problems. First, let us not de- ceive ourselves as to the amount and variety of vocational and technological work which must be undertaken at the close of the war. Literally millions will have to be retrained not only for jobs which they abandoned for the war but for new tasks which will be opened by aviation, electronics, plastics, medicine and science generally, and by the new standards of living that will be demanded by the world's millions. In such projects, there is grave danger of making the serious mistake of placing the educational aspects of such training under military or government control without properly weighing the contributions that education and only education can provide. We had some experience of this kind during the depression years with our CCC and our NYA. Altho these two organizations were created to meet definite needs — needs which we in education refused to recognize or at least failed to do much about — they would have been far more successful if their educa- tional aspects had been placed in proper educational hands. In the days following the war, demands for vocational education will come from among others the following groups : A. Those returning from the armed forces who are still physically sound. The discharge pay of these men and women will soon be spent and hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of them, will be looking for training that will fit them for the jobs the world has to offer. There will be hundreds of millions of federal money available for the education of our returned men and women. But how much will educa- tion be called upon or allowed to do in this job? It stands to reason that we in education should play a major role in planning for and in pro- viding the educational program demanded here. B. Those returning from the armed forces needing rehabilitation. There will be available for this program, as there should be, hundreds of millions of dollars. In addition, there will be the sympathy of a grateful public. Unfortunately, this sympathy may crystallize in a form of action which will be highly detrimental to the wounded or diseased soldier. This will probably find itself expressed only in larger discharge payments and in complete medical provisions. All would agree that these two are needed and deserved as a matter of cold realism ; however, much more is demanded, namely, an opportunity for each man or woman incapacitated by the war to receive vocational education to the extent he can profit thereby to the end that he may do his share of the world's work. 128 American Association of School Administrators During the last three years it has been my privilege to visit a number of hospitals. Among others there was a large veterans' hospital which I have visited on several occasions where seven to eight hundred physically incapacitated men of the first World War were being cared for. Each trip ended with a visit to the morgue which was never found empty. These forty-eight- to fifty-five-year-old veterans of our first World War had received from a grateful government and people a generous money allowance and every facility modern medical science could supply, but one all important element was missing, namely, the opportunity by which most of these men could have profited by learning to do something of value in our nation's work. To me, it is little wonder that even the longing to live might not leave men when they realize that they are forever denied the right to participate in the work needed for the common good. As a matter of fact, many of the men in this hospital could have been trained to do some kind of useful work. Literally thousands of soldiers are returning wounded or diseased. Alen and women can and must be given vocational educa- tion and allowed to participate in the jobs we have to do. Not only do we owe this to them as individuals, but in the long run it will actually save the taxpayers money. In a large manufacturing ^iant in Hartford, Connecticut, 1 saw the results of scientific rehabilitation when applied to a young man of twenty-five whose left arm had been severed above the elbow. Thru the cooperative and understanding efforts of the rehabilitation office in that state and of industrial physicians and of the head of this plant, this young man had been trained. The muscles of the arm of this young man had been trained for months prior to the attachment of the artificial arm. He had been asked to exercise these muscles as tho he were picking up a pin, turning a door knob, reaching high on a shelf for a small package, and the like. After a proper amount of this train- ing, thru cineplastic surgery, the artificial arm with its metal tendons was fastened to the trained muscles of the severed arm. This young wirker was having no trouble with his job in the tool crib. His artificial arm and hand were functioning in practically normal fashion in the handling of most of the tools in this crib. But this was not all in the story of his rehabilitation. As the manager of the plant was talking to me regarding the superior record of attendance and the equal production of the large number of rehabilitated workers in his plant, he asked me to read the inscription on a large new loving cup. The inscription read," To Factory A for the interfactory cham- pionship in soft ball, Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Two." The young man with the artificial arm had been the pitcher on that soft ball team in competition with normal men from other plants. In other words, this young worker's rehabilitation had consisted not only of basic physi- cal rehabilitation but had included training for a vocation, placement in a job, and complete social economic adjustments as well. The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 129 If we in America allow either an undue amount of sentiment or of government and military control to deprive our returning wounded and diseased of complete rehabilitation, we shall not only be com- mitting a sin against those who have sacrificed but will be robbing our country of the useful work of thousands. As a matter of fact, the war has taught us that fully 50 percent of those we thought unable to care for themselves can do so with proper rehabilitation and can become assets to society by being entirely or largely self-supporting. By so doing, these Americans not only keep their self-respect by standing on their own feet but also save the country money in the long run. The average annual cost for rehabilitating a handicapped person has been about $600 according to figures prepared by the Vocational Rehabili- tation Division of the United States Office of Education, whereas the average government expense of taking care of the handicapped person often runs higher than this for every year until his death. C. The large number of people in essential war industries who must be trained anew. 1. Men and w-men who will return to new vocations or to their old ones. 2. Women who will return to domestic life. For these, consumer educa- tion, mothercraft, and other aspects of the vocational program must be strengthened. D. The new crop each year of so-called normal high-school pupils who will not go to college. E. Youth fourteen years of age and over whose equipment does not fit them for normal academic work. F. The top 1 to 5 percent of adolescents and adults wishing to equip themselves for leadership in the vocations. These individuals will wish to develop their gifts in such directions as invention, more effective social and industrial or-janizational patterns, and improvements gen- erally that will lead to the betterment of mankind. G. The adult education and evening-school groups which will be greatly expanded after the war. Obviously only a small number of the obligations of education in these areas have been mentioned. The opportunities these tasks imply must be developed to the fullest. III. JVe must assist all Americans to appreciate with honesty and enthu- siasm the real values and blessings of democracy, pointing out its origin, its achievements, its h'story, and its problems. This "must" has been stated in the words of the Educational Policies Commission. While it is important and necessary that we point out the problems and even the shortcomings of our democracy, it is far more manda- tory that we do not miss the opportunity of helping to guide all Americans, young and old, into a rr,:-^ thoro love for the genuine and often unappre- ciated blessings which our democracy bestows upon all of us. My hat is off to the teachers of our land for the way in which they are meeting this "must." No more efifective job is being done on any home front 130 American Association of School Administrators anywhere than our teachers are accomplishing daily in leading the young- sters of our land to appreciate democracy's blessings. It is superb! IV. JVe must understand and accept the increasing responsibilities of democratic citizenship both noiv and after the uvir and assist every child and grown-up to do likewise. This is a corollary of Number III and is a task all of us need to assume in increasing degree, in private conversations with our neighbors, in public meetings, and particularly in our classrooms with our pupils. We must help ourselves and others to decide what kind of an America we want and what kind of a democracy we desire. Our friends across the sea may chant, "There'll Always Be an England." But it will never be the same England. In our own country, many will long for the "good old days" but these will never return in the same form. What we want and what we can have are still better days. We must plan now what we want, however, or perish later, and we must teach ourselves and help to teach all others concerning the grave responsibilities and sacrifices that must be assumed if we are to have the America and the world we really want. V. JVe must assist in the preservation of the things we hold dear in our right to worship as we please and in maintaining and developing further our ethical standards and moral values. The Nazi's determination to destroy religion as indicated by Hitler in his Mein Kampf, by the statements of various Nazi leaders and in their anti-church actions, are well known to all of us. We are familiar, too, with the statements of high Nazi officials in regard to the reproduction of children without marriage and with the atrocities the Nazis have committed in Poland, in Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while their diplomats were actually talking peace in Washington, is also a matter of common knowledge. Against such kinds of acts we will fight always. No student of history can doubt that religion has been one of the chief educative forces of all times. Our enemies seem to have forgotten this com- pletely or are afraid of its force for good. It is our privilege and duty as teachers to help pupils, if necessary by contrast, to see what democracy means in respect to religion, ethical standards, and moral values. It is our opportu- nity to help them to develop and maintain respect for freedom of worship, the rights of others, adherence to truth and honest habits of work, and to preserve and to improve upon those spiritual and ethical values which con- stitute the very backbone of democracy. Character education ranks top place in any educational program. VI. IVe must preserve the culture — the literature, the music, the art, and the other refining qualities of civilization — luhich our foes are suppressing thru war and thru their insistence upon might and physical superiority. In the days ahead America must thru education keep alive and, if possible, add to the arts and culture generally. We must not permit our sense of the right and the civilized to be dulled by war. Fortunately, our cultural re- sources both human and material are such that we can accept this obligation The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 131 which bears more heavily upon us than upon any other nation since we are not as near to the actual fighting. In the present emergency there is more emotional strain than exists in ordinary times. In many families both fathers and mothers are working. Thousands of our youngsters are missing home guidance they received for- merly and as a result are under an emotional strain which does not exist to such a degree in ordinary times. Some of this can and should be relieved thru introducing pupils to more interesting and valuable areas of our cul- ture. We should welcome this opportunity to add to the enjoyment, happiness, and stability of our pupils by exposing them to more music, art, literature, and out-of-school experiences than we have in normal tirnes. For example, it may be far more profitable in the long run for teachers to read to their pupils and have pupils read more well-selected materials than to continue an overnecessary amount of drill on little used formalities. Whatever our philosophy in this respect, however, a rebudgeting of time in favor of the cultural seems to be called for. VII. JVe must strive to assist ourselves, and pupils and citizens every- where in gaining more realistic understandings of and practice in dealing ii'ith our own pressing social, economic, and political problems. The war has created and will continue to present a vastly expanded net- work of social, economic, and political problems carrying with them un- precedented educational implications and opportunities. The inventive brains which have been demanded for the tasks of war have produced and will con- tinue to produce technological devices that will affect the lives of all of us. In the field of aviation, for example, we face an enormous new future. Planes are being manufactured at the present time that are five stories high and that carry four hundred passengers. Still larger ships are being planned and probably are being built. Plane passenger and freight service will un- doubtedly be made available to 80 percent of the people of our country by main and feeder lines. It is no longer fantastic to predict that 50 percent of our citizens now under fifty and who now own automobiles will own some form of a flying ship in the period of the next fifteen years and that 75 percent of all of our public will utilize public flying transportation. In the postwar world, we must remain a leading nation in aviation and in this must be included the continued manufacture of fighting planes, for un- guarded wealth seems to tempt war. On the other hand, it is equally im- perative, as Tolstoy and Ghandi have pointed out repeatedly, that we do not allow our planes, our machines, our technology to become exploiters of human values. There are tremendous social, economic, cultural, and char- acter problems involved in this rapid transition to technology which is upon us. Our first duty here consists in acquiring better social and economic under- standings ourselves. This is "must" preparation for any educator. The cur- riculum thruout our schools must reflect these understandings. The actual contacts with life now permitted our pupils in all these areas are extremely meager when compared with existing opportunities. Every community teems 132 American Association of School Administrators with interesting, available, appropriate, and educationally valuable materials, the utilization of which the new program demands. "Acres of diamonds" are around us while within the four walls of our rooms too many of us are still studying forms useful to few and uninteresting to many. Housing, health, communication and transportation, marketing, recreation, and com- munity organizations are areas replete with possibilities for gaining sounder social and economic understandings needed in rich living. It should be possible for pupils to visit and study slums and better housing and factories and recreational facilities. They should be allowed to visit and discuss food markets and to make purchases. They should know better how to arrive at a balanced diet in relation to rationing. They should be able to study with you ways in which they can read, write, figure, and solve prob- lems about things that really matter, that matter now and will i.iatter as long as they live. It is true that there are traditions of long standing and in some instances board of education and other regulations which militate against the introduction or full use of the type of activity proposed above. Nevertheless, this sort of experience is absolutely essential to the attainment of better understanding of and practice in dealing with the actual problems that now and always will afJect the lives of our children and youth. VIII. JVe must assist in making American citizens old and young physi- cally strong and healthy thru programs in health education, physical educa- tion, safety, and recreation. Hitler has made two types of training absolutely compulsory' — training in Nazi ideology and training in health and physical fitness. This training, which no German youth has escaped, presents a tough combination for us to meet. While in America it is true that health examinations of the schools and general populations as well as of selectees have indicated that physically we are far from perfect, the improvement in the last twenty-five years has been considerable. Nevertheless, much more needs to be done. Our old scheme of rather strenuous athletics for the comparative few must be changed to a balanced program of health and recreation in which all will participate. In this area we are faced with such problems as the educa- tion of parents and teachers, nutrition, and ways in which we can work with the community in providing for wholesome recreation facilities. Good health has always been a number one objective of education in theory; we must make it so in fact. IX. We must preserve thru the schools the essential characteristics of democratic thinking and acting so that these may not he lost "luhen peace breaks out." War necessarily breeds a certain amount of authoritarianism. Power and prerogatives ordinarily vested in individuals and in groups are often dele- gated to central authorities during national emergencies such as war. While much of this is mandatory, it is highly important that the things for which we are fighting, namely, the right of the individual to assist in planning, carrying thru, and evaluating his own acts and those of the group of which he is a part, must be maintained thru practice. This is what we mean by The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 133 freedom. The aim of education, as I see it, is to assist each individual in be- coming increasingly self-directive — intelligently, efficiently, and happily self- directive — in enterprises of value to himself and to others. To attain this aim requires a maximum of skilful teacher guidance. We grown-ups and our children and youth must learn to weigh values, to think matters thru for ourselves, and to act accordingly keeping the social good in mind. Other- wise, Avhy democracy? X. We must help our people to see that the success of the program our country faces depends in large measure upon the proper education of our people. This has always been true but is particularly true today. Successful leaders in every country have realized that national aims can be best achieved thru carefully planned purposeful education. It is our duty first to develop with our citizens the type of educational program that will be genuinely vital at meeting our country's goals and second to help people everywhere to appreciate the necessity for such education. This is a job which everyone in- terested in schools must attack enthusiastically and insistently. Each of us must place himself in top condition as far as his abilities will permit to as- sist in determining the emerging social, economic, and educational trends during the war and later, and help our community to see that education is their chief mainstay as well as that of their children in grappling with the unusual problems that lie ahead. THE OUTLOOK FOR EDUCATION JOHN E. WADE, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, NEW YORK, N. Y. Address at New York Conference We face in this city complicated problems and yet the general attitude we take is that we are fundamentally only a school district enlarged some- what, and the problems we have come because of the size of the district. We have the same attitudes, of course, toward education ; we work out our prob- lems pretty much in the same way as you do. If it seems that our problems are complicated, it is just because we are a very large unit. We frequently say when we go to Albany to meet with the State Depart- ment, that we take our place by the side of the smallest district in the state in our attitude toward children and our attitude toward schooling. It is true that the model of education which we have set up in America might well be adopted as a model for the entire world, especially for those nations which are democratic in thought and in action. The fact that we have had the foresight and the courage and the means to establish and main- tain our public schools at a high level of excellence explains in no small measure our success in the present crisis. That leads me to observe that it is only when a crisis does occur, a crisis or a turning point, that real strength is shown. As we go along from day to day, and nothing challenges us, our strength does not show; but the fact 134 American Association of School Administrators that in the short time since Pearl Harbor we have organized our youth, and organized our production, and organized our home front to carry on this great struggle in which we are engaged, shows the inherent strength of the nation, and a nation is not stronger than its institutions — the home, the school, the church, and the community. And so the schools thruout the country, as institutions, are stronger. They have met every demand that has been brought before them, and met it suc- cessfully ; and that is the hope for the future and the problems we shall have to meet. There will be nothing revolutionary, I think, in our solutions. We will build on the wise and firm experience that has been ours in the past, and go on from what we are now to better things. Suppose we talk over, very informally, some of the problems that are around us. Let's take the most uninteresting thing, perhaps, that we can think of this morning; that is school register. I suppose we were glad when we left our home towns to get away from the problem of declining registers and decline in appropriations. We ought to look, however, behind the declining school register, to some of the things it might suggest for us. In the first place, it will make us more than ever on the alert to meet those who say that with declining registers there will be decreased appropriations. We have just gone thru an experi- ence like that ourselves up in Albany, where a strict application of a formula will result in this city in a loss of about four million dollars. I tried to point out what four million dollars will mean. If we took out all the auxiliary services we have in New York City, such as playgrounds and evening schools, even that would add up to only two and a half million dollars, and we would not have met the four million dollars that we anticipate in loss in state aid. So, as I say, when you meet declining registers in your neighborhoods and schools, then at once you meet the taxpayers and others who say, "Oh, in proportion, so your appropriation must come down." As a matter of fact, it doesn't happen that way and everybody knows it. Let's contrast that with what was done in the "good days," in the boom days when registers were going up. Everybody knows we expanded and built new buildings, and class size went up, and we lost many of the essential services that we may be able to give now. In New York City we are propos- ing, in the face of declining registers, to keep all of our teaching positions and to operate class size at a reasonable level. Then we will have teachers of^er to go into these services that we have never had a chance to give be- fore, and which I think probably are the trends in classroom administration. We can bring class size down to a reasonable size and have teachers, or we can assign extra teachers to schools for guidance service. We can assign them to schools without class assignment as health counselors. We can assign them as quota teachers for radio work. We can assign them for other auxiliary services which children need and which we have never been able to afford ; so maybe out of the adversity of falling registers, we can main- tain in some degree our appropriations and maintain our present teaching force. The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 135 In this city, and I suppose in others thruout the country, we are facing now an upset which we term interracial or intercultural. It is not a problem where a community is a unity; it is a problem where there are diverse peoples in a community, diverse races, diverse religions. We are trying to solve that problem here, and you mustn't believe all you read in the news- papers about the terrible things that are going on. It isn't so. By and large, for a community the size of the city of New York, with all its diversities, we are the most friendly city in the world, and the most neighborly, and the place in which I think the worth of people is most regarded. I don't know whether you meet that problem. We have tried to meet it this way: We first try to build up in the minds of our teachers an attitude toward the problem, not that they don't know about it, but it is well to reinforce these things by inspirational addresses and remarks. It is rather personal, but a month or so ago we had Pearl Buck speak to our teachers as part of a series — we have four of them — where we invite in people of prominence to speak to our teachers. We had Pearl Buck, and, of course, the topic had to do with relations between our country and China — and then with the worth of people. We thought it opportune at that time to use that particular incident as a test to bring this point of view to our people. It may be a vexing problem in your community to get out statements of different faiths and different religions, and the like, so the teachers will have this point of view always before them, or to say in somewhat better language, public education in America is founded upon an inspiration, an inspired faith in the perfectability of man. This was the faith of Jefferson, of Lincoln, of Barnard, and of Horace Mann. It is an uplifting faith. It frees the spirit of man for new achievement in the fields of art and science, and, above all, in human relationships. Education today is in accord with this historical tradition. It centers its attention on the many-sided grow^th of the child and on respect for the child as a person. And so we are trying to forward that particular phase of administration which has come to us and may come to you. For the past year we have been trying to develop better school and com- munity relationships. The war brought that need into prominence in organiz- ing the community for bond drives, and for the collection of scrap, and for the giving of volunteer service, and so forth. It was something that we had to do, and I am sure this community relationship which we built up by reason of the war will carry over when the day of peace comes, so that thru the efforts which we put forth in the schools will be added the strength of the community. This has never been done very effectively in our large city, but we hope with the impetus which the war has given that it will go forward. I might talk at great length about the personnel of the teaching corps, because no matter how wisely we plan our administration, it is upon the body of faithful, well-trained teachers that we must depend for the success of our plans. I invite your attention to one or two things — first, the democratization of practice. We look at the references to democracy in education. They go back 136 American Association of School Administrators twenty years and everybody has said something about it, but it is a good deal like the weather, I suppose ; nobody has done very much about it. We have a plan in this city that might be worth talking about. We have established in every area of subjectmatter and also administration, what we call standing committees. They are really conventions because they get beyond the ordinary concept of a committee. That is because we want to bring in as many as we can and get as many points of view. We have found that very helpful, and the problem flows two ways. The superintendent thinks of a problem which he passes down ; the teachers are always thinking of problems which they are passing up ; so you have this flow back and forth, at least theoretically. I look forward in the new days to a development of the idea of democracy in administration. In-service is going to be a problem in the city of New York. The teaching corps is getting on in experience. We have appointed very few here in ten years, so we are getting a group which has been many years out of training school. We have established in-service courses given by the faculty and they have been very successful. That is a type of work I think we shall have to expand considerably as time goes on. The war has shown that our secondary-school system will need some revi- sion. The elementary schools are democratic. They are the schools of all the children. Just a moment's thought will show that the high school has not yet recovered from its aristocratic background. We have not begun to meet, in our city at least, the needs of all children at the secondary level; in fact, you may have read the brilliant suggestion of one of our high-school associa- tions the other day: "If they don't learn, put them out." That is a quick way of doing it, instead of accepting the challenge to find out what the needs of these youngsters are and what their capabilities are, and of changing the old, aristocratic notion of a high school to something democratic. I think the vocational school has done more to democratize secondary edu- cation than any other single factor. It is a school that takes the student and does what it can for him. It is a commonplace in this city that no matter what type of vocational training a boy wants, we will find it in some way — mari- time trades, aviation trades, and so on ; just because we are able to get budget support for all these things, we have this great variety. I think, looking ahead to the future, secondary education is in for considerable change. In this city we have a terrific problem of the adult. We have many, many adult illiterates and also many, many adults whose cultural and intellec- tual life has never gone beyond the elementary schools. Jefferson, I think it was, said, "A people cannot remain ignorant and free," so we are beginning to feel more and more in this city a responsibility for the cultural life of the adult, and we are visualizing schools where any adult may come and get whatever he wants. If he wants formal work, we have the formal high- school work on one side; if he comes to extend his cultural education in- formally, we are setting up on that side Shakespeare clubs and music and reading clubs of various kinds. You find a great demand in this city for home economics courses for adults. Ration points have changed the American kitchen and people are The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 137 coming into our home economics courses which we operate at night to get these newer things. We find more and more a tendency to have handymen around the house. We find our workshops at night well filled with men who come just on a hobby basis, to learn to be handymen. Of course, the forum is always with us. In this city there is a tremendous interest in discussion. You can go to Cooper Union three nights a week and find there some five thousand people assembled to discuss every question under the sun. New York City is a great place for discussion ; so we are working on that. I think as time goes on you will find that your communities will have to take up this problem of adult education in a more systematic way than has ever been done before. You are going to find the retraining of soldiers a problem. We look forward to that with great optimism for success, because over the last year or so we have operated, as undoubtedly you have, probably in a small way, a war industries training program. Almost overnight we transferred our vocational schools into training centers for men to go into production jobs, and so be given financial support. This problem can be solved in terms of present resources. We have already in the city of New York one center of this kind, and I don't know how many returned soldiers have already passed thru that center. It is made up in a very interesting way. The man goes back to the Selective Service Center, not the local one but the main one, and there he is advised as to his rights. If he has a right to reemployment, he is so advised. If he has a right to training, he is so advised. So he goes first thru that particular mill. Then we put vocational counselors up there, men wise in their day and generation, and they talk over with the man his problems, assuming he is not going back to work right away and wants training. It may be in a new indus- try, it may be high-school training, academic training, or what not, but he passes thru this counsel service. We have there also the U. S. Employment Service representative, so if his decision is to get a job right away, he passes thru that center. Some come, of course, for relief. The Red Cross operates there. So, if returning veterans come to your communities in any numbers, you may have to set up some sort of screening center, advisory center, of this kind, but let it not be forgotten that the financial responsibility for this work rests with the federal government, and that is the way that we are operating. It is not a problem for the municipality to finance. I think we are going to need before very long a classification of the pattern of federal, state, and local relations in the matter of control, in the matter of finance. Nearly all the nation's income, it has been pointed out, will be collected by Uncle Sam. Assuming that he will not be able to spend it all, some may come back to the states for help, and we have got to be sure when that money does come back for the support of our institutions that it comes back without strings, for there would be nothing worse than following a theory that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Without local administra- 138 American Association of School Administrators tion, we will have confusion, and the leadership that school administration has been able to build up will be lost. So I might go on, as I said, very informally. I might speak of the public works program for new buildings. I do that for a particular purpose. In the folder which you received on registration there was a very fine booklet show- ing how a problem with relation to the building of a given new school build- ing was worked out. It was boldly emblazoned with the name of the superin- tendent of schools. I should like to point out now that Nick Engelhardt, your new president, prepared that booklet in its entirety, and the only part I had in it was signing my name on the dotted line after he was all thru. I wouldn't want you to go away with the impression that I knew anything at all about it. I do want Nick Engelhardt to be acclaimed for one of the very fine pieces of work he has done since he came to be on our Board of Superintendents. He has been a tower of strength to us in the breadth of view which he has brought to us and the clearness of his thinking, and I look forward to his presiding over the affairs of this Association with profit and with brilliance. When the peace does come, and the war is over, the people will ask more and more of the schools. We have never had, by and large, mediocre educa- tion in this country. We have always had, as you know, the very best that money can buy and intelligence can plan. There will be changed conditions, as we know — social, economic, and industrial — and since the schools are always responsive to changes, since the schools are always responsive to light, undoubtedly our patterns of administration will change, but, knowing you as I do, and you knowing yourselves as you do, I am certain that the chal- lenge of the days to come will be well met. READJUSTING THE SCHOOL SERVICE TO POSTWAR NEEDS WILLARD E. GIVENS, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C. Address at Atlanta and Chicago Conferences For whatever else this global war is being fought, one thing is clear. The American people are fighting to preserve their right to live as a free people. We might have avoided war — if we had been willing to pay the price. That price was clearly marked. It was this: the eventual loss of our freedom, in a world dominated by men who scorn the principles of freedom. That was a price too great to pay. That was a price which the American people never have been willing to pay — and pray God never will be. But war alone cannot guarantee freedom. It can only protect us against the enemies from without who would take away our freedom by force. Only we ourselves can keep our nation free. No one saw this truth more clearly than the men who founded this nation. They, as we, loved peace. They, as we, loved freedom more than peace.

u want, but it certainly will disturb our schedule." The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 163 What is education to that school? It is a fixed schedule. It is certain hours, certain times, and certain places for this, that, and the other. It is molded and fixed, and anything that disturbs it is dangerous to peace and good order. What we need to do in education is to learn that education is a route, and if we can learn that — the measure of a man is the measure of his responsiveness. I repeat : The measure of a man is the measure of his responsiveness ! Here today I come across a great rock, and on it some lichens and moss. It has been there for two, four, or five thousand years. It has changed a little, under wind and tide and water and heat — but very little. There has been no response. It is still a rock. But near that rock is a tree, which has learned to send its seed by wind and tide in a thousand directions ; it has responded to the warmth of the air and responded to the glorious sunshine, and sent its roots down and responded to the moisture in the earth; and that tree is alive and full of leaves. It is a refuge for birds; it is a shelter in the time of storm ; it is a protection when the sun is hot. It is a form of life that has responded. On the limb of that tree is a bird, and that bird says, "I shall not depend just on the ground and the moisture and the sunshine that come here, but I shall respond as I move out into the ether, and as I seek my food in a thousand places." And that bird has a song in its bill and on its tongue, and a message of life much higher. Seated on that rock is a man, and he says, "I am not dependent on warmth and sunshine and cold. I am not dependent on the water that is here. I will clothe my body with warm clothes, I will feed my body from foods, and I will respond in a higher measure, and, therefore, I am alive." In some ways that represents the four series of schools that are in this country. Thus there are those who live as a rock lives and thank God that they are just like the grandpas and grandmas were, who believe in the three R's, as I believe in them, but in nothing else, and who think that anything else brings on a delinquency. Folks like that have been dead so long — don't disturb them ! Don't try to resurrect them ! Better spend your time on something that has some life in it. We need to learn that education has this great factor — adjustment to war or anything else, and quick adjustment, at that. The failure to adjust quickly means death. France built a Maginot Line and put her trust in the war of 1914, and forgot that the whole air above her was open ; and the planes flew over the Maginot Line and swamped her hillsides and her vales, and destroyed her people, and blotted out her political existence. We must adjust if we live, as individuals as well as nations. Furthermore, we must adjust ourselves particularly to those things that the war has taught us are our needs. I believe in all the ideas of educa- tion. I believe in the humanities. I have a place in my educational theory for Hutchins and all that he stands for. But I want to tell you this: These boys that are coming back to us, and hundreds that are growing up right 164 American Association of School Administrators now, must have their education intensified just as we intensify the war effort, in order to win this war. We are not j2;oi"Ji t<^ P''^y attention any more to the question of whether a fellow has to stay nine months in a graduate system, nine months in a grade, or whether or not he has to take high-school education in four years. I am glad to say when the boys came back in 1919, I took them into our high school. I had a whole football team made up of veterans — and they beat everybody, too. But I told those boys when they came back, "You don't have to stay in any class any three months or six months. Here it is, you are twenty-one and twenty-two and twenty-three years of age. I don't want you to be back with the fifteen- and sixteen-year-old boys. Use your opportunity." Vocational Education and Rehabilitation — I say to you, in the postwar period, if you want to call it that, and I mean this period now — these boys are already coming back — they are not coming back in '47 and '48 and *49. At the rate of about a hundred thousand a month they are coming back right now. They are right here. Our problem is: Are you ready for them? Have you adjusted your program to vocational education, to special classes for them? Have you organized your community? Don't just get educators on your program. I believe in education, and I am going to talk about it in a minute, but I want to tell you this: H you just take schools and principals and superintendents, most of them are so wedded to their idols that they will want to teach these boys just exactly like they always have taught. There are just as many vested interests in education as there are in big business. Folks want to hold their jobs. They have taught Latin so many years they can't teach anything else, and they will want to teach those boys Latin. I taught Latin sixteen years; I am ashamed of it, but at the same time, I did a good job at it, too. Some people ought to take Latin, and some veterans ought to take Latin — but not many. You have got to adjust your program by organizing your community and getting the people to know the needs and bringing some of the students themselves in on your councils, by getting in the men who are going to have to have jobs supplied for these boys, and letting them know what is the program of readjustment in employment, in vocational needs, in specific things that these men can do. The Home — We need to adjust our school program more to the home life of people. Too much education, as we call it today, is in the school- house. More ought to be in the home. There is no man in the world that has fought more for nursery schools and kindergartens than I have, and yet if we had the kind of families we ought to have, I don't know but what it would be a blessing for a boy or girl not to go to school, perhaps, until he was ten years old, except for social purposes. I didn't go to school till 1 was eight or nine. If I had gone, some teacher would have ruined me. I believe in all these progressive things, in nursery schools, in kinder- gartens. As our society is now organized, they are absolutely essential. If The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 165 they were organized rightly, they would be beneficial under any circum- stance. But you must teach children in school and young mothers and fathers, you must teach a community and our people that the bedrock foundation of this civilization has been a good home. The schools must assume part of this responsibility. We can do it. It is not enough for every paper to be saying that the cause of delinquency is failure in the homes. We must realize that the mothers and fathers of those children were once our students, and, if they fail in the home, we can't wash our hands and say, "I have nothing to do with it." We can't escape the fact that all of these bad parents, if you want to call them that, were once children in our schools. I don't say you can teach them as children to be good parents, because children, as children, have enough to do to learn to be good children, but you can have classes organ- ized and people working that will work on community and home educa- tion. I tried this thing out and I know what I am talking about. We had four days of what you call normals or institutes for our teachers. Years and years ago I started those four days. I put the teachers in pairs and sent them out over our city — a teacher who had taught a child last year, together with the one that was going to teach him this year — to meet the mother and father. I made out a list of 167 things they were to find out about the children. I wish I could tell you how many mothers rushed up to me the first year and said, "Oh, Mr. Sutton, you have the finest teachers I ever saw in my life. My little girl went to school for the first time, and the first thing she said when she came home was, 'Miss Bell knew the name of my cat, and knew the name of my doll, knew where I lived, and all about me.' " What a tie ! I want to say I doubt seriously that any first-grade child ought to be sent farther than six blocks from home. I haven't any patience with this transporting little children. You send a little child a long way from home and you break all the ties of security. What attracted that child was that the teacher knew about her cats and dogs and her dolls, her home ties. If we want to reconstruct this country, I will tell you where it is going to be done — not in vocational schools, not in area schools. It is not going to be in any type of school. If this country is reconstructed at all, it is going to be at the firesides and bedsides. It is going to be in the back yard, in the front yard. We will find, if we are going to build men who love home and love country and stand by loyalties, we have got to do something about home life, and we need to start right now. Family Life — ^When this war started and so many boys were going oH and the girls were afraid they wouldn't come back, and they wanted to get married, we set up a council for the Girls' High School in Atlanta and said, "If you want to get married, bring your father and mother and find the boy's mother and father, and bring them in, and come before this council and let us talk to you about the matter, and if they all decide you should be married, then we will let you go on to school." Before that we 166 American Association of School Administrators hadn't been letting married girls continue. We had put them in the oppor- tunity schools and special schools. That was the grandest experience I have ever had in my life — to sit with four parents, with a girl and boy that wanted to get married, and with four people from my stafF, two men and two women, to talk over the problems of home life and married life, and what it meant, what it would mean when the boy came back after two to four years, what it would mean if children were left behind that a mother must care for, and a father killed or disabled. In two weeks we had forty-eight council meet- ings. Sixteen of the couples got married ; the others didn't. After we pre- sented the problem to them, they decided to wait. One of the great adjustments that education has to make is to family life. Health — -We need also to make adjustments to the problem of health. I can make out a good case for the schools myself. I know, I worked at this question of health, and I worked at it tremendously. But what has this war taught us? It has disclosed that as good as our work has been, it has fallen far short of what it ought to be. If we are going to adjust ourselves in this period, or in this postwar period, we are going to learn that we can do a great deal more in the area of health — both physical and mental health. In the early screening of men for the armed forces, an astounding num- ber were rejected for their neuroses, their complexes — their mental un- fitness. And after the combat started in Africa, the number doubled. These boys somehow can't stand the holding together of personality under the great strain. What are we going to do about mental and physical health? I took one little group of 979 children, with the help of Mr. Wolfert, who gave me $15,000 for the experiment, and we followed those 900 children thru six years. We found out that we saved in those 900 children on an average of over 1200 school days a year, with a control group. We found we re- duced failures from 28 percent to less than 4 percent, but those are just paltry things compared with the happiness and joy of living, with the developmental forces that made them stronger, and their children stronger, and the race stronger. If we get anything out of this war, and we see anything anywhere that needs readjustment, it is the amount of time spent by the school admin- istrator on the physical and mental health of the children in his community. It can be done; it has been done, and yet I want to say this to you: We have got out our yearbook on health and it was a marvelous book, and it did a grand job of preaching about the thing we need above everything else, fellow superintendents, which is this: We need to put some of our own time, not just in selecting a physical director or medical director, not just in selecting good physical education teachers — we ought to have them — but we need to spend more of our own time and thought on this prob- lem of health. The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 167 When boys die, girls die, and men and women die, inefficient, and can't fight, unable to do their work, but must become charges of the state, I want to tell you that school superintendents can't sit by and say, "I just had a good physical education program and a good health program. I tried to provide it, but I didn't do anything about it myself." Time Schedules — Let's adjust ourselves to what we have learned out of the World War. Above everything else, let's remember that what you call a time schedule can be stepped up. The Army is teaching us a lot of things. I don't want to hurry education — don't misunderstand me — I think it is a process that has to have maturity, but there are a great many things in which we are just simply worshipping hours. Now and then we reach a place where we need to discard some of the old things and take on the new. I think educators are the best takers-on and the poorest leavers-off that ever I knew in my life. I think there are some things we can't take at all. We have got to leave them off. You know, if Socrates were to come to New York, he couldn't get into a university in this state, not a single one. He couldn't get into a university in Georgia. He wouldn't have any units, poor thing! How could he get in? And what is a unit? A unit is a subject that is pursued at least 180 days — note — at least forty-five minutes a day — note — and which it requires at least forty-five minutes to prepare for. If you take the time out of a unit, there "ain't" any education left. And yet, if you don't have units, well, now, what happens? People work for units — units! And then when they get to college, it is college hours and semesters. I sent the record of four of my men to four great univer- sities. They had done enough work to have three doctors' degrees, but we didn't have an institution in Atlanta that conferred a doctor's degree ex- cept an honorary one, and they couldn't get one without going away. I sent these records, and every last one of the universities sent back the same answer: "Nobody can be a doctor from our institution unless he breathes our air at least one year." Now, what does it mean? What did the Army do? Did they wait on making that fellow captain if he had all the qualifications? In that group of boys out yonder, they stepped him sometimes from first lieutenant to a major. And we learn something about it, and by it, and we need to adjust ourselves. I don't say we are not going to have standards. We have to have some standards. I don't want to throw everything out of the window and start over, but I do say to you: If education is wise, it will stop this worship of time. Why, there is a big image standing at every school door in the state of Georgia — except the doors of a few of us who have paid for our nursery schools and kindergartens out of local funds — and this image is shaking its finger at every child and saying, "You can't come in this door until the clock has struck six. If you do, the state of Georgia won't pay you a cent, and if you take a dollar of the state's money and put it on a nursery school child or a kindergarten child, they will take it all away from you," 168 American Association of School Administrators I don't know what a child is until he is six jears old, some kind of varment, but he is not educatable, not in the eyes of Georgia — but, let the clock strike, and the door is open. I sometimes think that a man with an immortal soul, being ruled bj' a little thing he has on a chain in his pocket, is the biggest fool I know any- thing about. I looked down out of my hotel window this morning as I was making this speech, or thinking of it, and I saw these massive buildings, this marvelous city, and then down in these canyons I saw these ants crawling around on the ground, and I said, "Great God, they are not ants. They built every tower that there is here. They can go far beyond the Empire State pinnacle. They can reach up and touch the hand of God, as these boys say, in the airplanes. Man has aspirations, desires, ambitions, bigger than the Empire State, bigger than all of New York combined." And yet in our schools we grant a promotion only when a student has completed his time. It is a rule of the chain gang. Adjustment to the Individual — Next, education must adjust itself to the individual. I wish we could stop talking about preschool education, primary and elementary education, junior and senior high-school education, junior college education, and college education, and then adult education. We need to adjust our program to the individual. My dear friends, if you have never stopped to think how individual you are, you ought to do it. We have finally worked out four types of blood, but there are just as many types of blood as there are individuals. Dr. Carrel tells us in his great book, Man the Unknown, if you lifted the skull of a man and had the same technics to look at his brain, you would find just as great differences in the structures and tissues of a man's brain as you find in his blood. If, for some reason, I should get a scar on my face here in an accident and reach down on my hand and take a piece of my flesh, or the plastic surgeon should take a piece from my leg or arm and attach it to my face, the tissues on my face would say the minute the tissue touched them, "Yes, that is right. That is part of me," and would start growing immediately, but if he should take the tissue from somebody else's leg or somebody else's arm, the chances are that it would not grow. I am individual, blood, tissue, bone. If that is so, what about my conscious- ness, what about my spirit, what about my soul? And yet, somehow, with the great financial problem imposed upon us from without, we are forced to teach thirty, and forty, and fifty children, and teach them all alike. How little we know about the individual ! 1 want to see a university where as many courses are given in the study of individual children as are given in child psychology. I want to see as many hours spent, not on a child or the children, but on this twenty-five as individuals, as are spent in prepara- tion for all the subjects that I am supposed to teach them. When we get to The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 169 a place where we adjust ourselves to the child or to the adult, then we are going to have a school system. Quality in Education — Let's learn that quality in education is a x\\\n'g that we need above everythinjj; else in this world, yet all of our education is quantitative. You needn't deny it. It is just that. I used to go about to get teachers from teachers colleges — you can't get them anywhere now. I would go to a teachers college to get a boy and I would say to the president, "Is So-and-So educated?" "Well," he said, "I don't know, but we will go and see the dean." Then we two would trot off to the dean and we would get to the dean, and the president would say, "Mr. Sutton is interested in So-and-So. Is he going to graduate? Will he be ready to go out?" "Well," the dean says, "I don't know\ We will have to go and see the registrar." And all three of us would trot to the registrar, and we would get there and bring up the same problem, "Is Johnny Smith educated?" And the registrar would say, "I don't know. I will have to see," and he would pull out a drawer — and the drawer is the only thing that knows whether John Smith is educated. He pulls out the drawer and he sits down and commences to figure on all Johnny's hours and credits, and he adds them up and they sum up to 140, and he turns around with a smile on his face and says, "Yes, John Smith is ready to teach." Quantitative! High school the same way! I even went to elementary teachers, to an elementary-school meeting the other day, where first-grade teachers were discussing, "What Is a First-Grade Child?" That was the subject of the speaker. Among other things, and fundamentally, he must know 744 words. I don't know why it wasn't 743, or 243, but no child could really expect to get out of the first grade unless he knew 744 words. He might be a doctor, he might be a divine personality, but unless he knew 744 words — ! He might smile like a cherub and be the sweetest thing in the world, but unless he knew 744 words, he stayed in the first grade. I am not making fun of education. No, no ! I have no patience with the people who are saying our boys were not prepared for the war. I can stand here and sa)' : Look what they are doing! I am proud of them. We in the schools have done a good job, but we can do a better job, and we can learn from this war that we are not going to depend on just quantity. It was one of Stonewall Jackson's great stunts to make the enemy think that he had 45,000 men when he had only 15,000. That is an old story in warfare. It looks as tho we might have learned it in education. But we educators don't learn that. We don't learn, somehow, that quality of men, courage of men, hearts of men, souls and spirits of men and women — those added attitudes that the great humanities movement has been trying to teach, and which we need to be taught. We don't want to do without litera- ture and music, without art and all those things that are grand. We want 170 American Association of School Administrators to build them into soldiers as well as into civilians, in order that there may be a quality to life. You talk to the average businessman in this country, and especially if you compare this with any other country, and he tells you what the bank clear- ings are, and how much money we have, how many miles of railroads, and how many miles of electric wires and telegraph wires, and telephones, and gadgets, and washing machines, and radios — and on and on he goes into the night. I don't know that any of those ever made a man a better man, except the bathtub. I will give it an "A." But I think you could do a lot with those things to make the world better, and I think also there are a great many ways in which we could use them if we would, but they are not the quality of life. A man is measured by how many people he loves. He is measured by that quality of his sympathies, the extent and expanse of his horizon. A New World of Peace — I close with this story: In studying about the war I got so sad that I "set me aside" thirty minutes every night when our boys first landed in Africa, and they wej-e taking this hill, and Hill 600, and so on — I "got me" a hill. I said, "I have to get on a high place, or I will die," and I named it 2142, because that was two hundred years out beyond here, out yonder in the future. I tried to look at this war and to see it two hundred years from now, and the grandest vision I ever got in my life was in those thirty minutes, for over three months, that I spent on Hill 2142, in the years 1942 and 1943. It was a most illuminating thing. The Detroit riot came and, oh, people were saying how black, and how dirty, and how bad, and how awful white people and Negroes acted. I know a lot of them did wrong, but from Hill 2142 I saw as clear as day that the great Negro race that I love was march- ing, yes, out of riot. I don't want riots — no, but I saw even out of a riot that they were marching toward better recognition and a better world. I saw from Hill 2142, just as clearly as I ever saw anything in the world, the purpose of God going home thru blood, thru sweat, and tears, as Churchill says, but indeed I saw it moving. I saw people moving toward democracy, even in the midst of totalitarianism. I saw the missionary move- ment of the world as clear as anything I ever saw in my life. I saw our boys going out, ten million of them. About that time they were calling for costume jewelry, and we got the junior high-school children in Atlanta to go up and down the streets to get the costume jewelry that our boys might trade it for foxholes and other things, and the government thought enough of it to fly it to them. In one week we got over thirty letters back telling what it did for them over there, and "down under" the other boys would write: "I took this costume jewelry and got seventeen of the natives to go out and search for my buddy, whose plane had gone down. They found him, tho he was cov- ered with ants, and they washed the ants off and brought him back, and brought him to life." And then that boy said in characteristic American fashion, "I tell you those fellows were the blackest people I ever saw, but The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 171 when I saw them come in with my buddy, they looked to me to be the whitest souls I ever looked at." 1 saw those boys come back from Attu, and from Iceland and Greenland, and from Europe, and from the South Seas, and from Australia. I had seen heretofore, now and then, a missionary come to a great metropolitan church. But now I saw them wending thru the waste, the hollows, and the valleys, and the nooks in the mountains, and sitting down around the fireside say- ing, "They aren't all bad. No, there are a lot of good folks out there. You needn't make fun of those people. They saved me in a time of need. They have human hearts and human personalities." I saw ten million men — you may not like what I am going to say — but I saw ten million men, going out to the ends of the earth, that had been adjudged the strongest, the mightiest, the healthiest, the finest inheritance that we had, and I saw them mix and mingle with the peoples of the earth, some of them in legitimate marriage, some in illegitimacy, and yet I saw the fruits of those unions lifting them and making them better and stronger and finer. I don't want immorality. I am not preaching that we ought to have it, but I tell you I saw the greatest host of ten million going out from England and from this country, lifting ! I looked again and from my hill I read in Will Durant's great history of Greece what it meant for Alexander the Great to move across a little segment of the world and leave the elements of Greek culture and Greek learning. I saw the English, and the Free French, and the Polish, and the Norwegians, and the Americans, and the Mexicans, and the South Americans — I saw them, whether they were white or black, wending their way into every channel of the world, and I said, "Thank God, democracy is coming! Thank God, freedom in man is coming, not for a few people that have been economically free, but for all people," and I said, "If God will help me, I will help American teachers to adjust themselves to a new world that gives opportunities to every boy that is going out." You have millions of them. Now, what are you teaching those boys — how to adjust themselves to all these people, not to make fun of the English, not to scorn the South Sea Islander but to know that he is a brother? From Hill 2142 I saw the grandest achievement that the world has ever seen in the fatherhood and brotherhood of man — the welding of the whole world into peace, that we, in turn, might enjoy the benefits that God would give to us, and might crown our lives with individualities and success, and might bring to the whole world not only peace — oh, it would be a shallow peace if we brought it and people lived in want, and lived in squalor, and lived in dirt, and lived in superstition. We don't want a peace like that. We want a peace, as I saw it from Hill 2142, where the grandest thing that man ever saw was a developed human personality enjoying itself and serving God and the world. 172 American Association of School Administrators EDUCATION AND BUSINESS THOMAS C. BOUSHALL, PRESIDENT, THE MORRIS PLAN BANK OF VIRGINIA, RICHMOND, VA. ; CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION, CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE UNITED STATES Address at Chicago Conference The American people need to appraise their proper place in the new world that we shall face on Peace Day. They need to survey the outlook for their development and the means by which that development can be achieved. They need to choose that agency which will assure to them- selves, the world, and posterity, the realization of that practical and attain- able ideal of a magnificent America. It is not my intention to discuss in detail the proper place of America in the postwar world, nor to describe the outstanding items in its outlook, but merely to summarize those points in a few phrases. I want rather to discuss thg means by which the attainable goals may be achieved and the agencies that appear to be the most natural and logical for the realization of the fullest expression of this, the most promising nation on earth. We have in this World War II proved that above all people we are that nation most devoted to the ideal of freedom, not for ourselves alone, but for the people of every land. We have demonstrated that this ideal is not a fancy that we lightly mouth in prose and poetry, but we have rather proved that we can fashion the arms and exercise the might to crush the enemies of liberty with an unselfish courage that asks no reward beyond the triumph of righteousness. No such people can perish from the earth. Their destiny is rather to accept a great responsibility. That charge is not one that compels us to go out and succor a wounded and bleeding world. Our duty in that re- spect is done when we shall have destroyed the enemies of freedom and shall have afforded the redeemed countries a chance to rebuild their nations for themselves. Rather our duty then shall be the task of fitting ourselves into a world community of cooperating nations and of furnishing to those world members an unprecedented and unparalleled example of the full development of a land and its people. This development can only succeed when it is "carried out on the basic principle that every individual that comprises this nation shall be trained and encouraged to give full expres- sion to the latent powers that are within the least and last of this people. For such is the ultimate realization of the ideal of democracy in its fullest flower. So shall we arrive at that attainable goal — a magnificent America. These premises bring me now to the three specific points that I want to make with you today. The first is, by what means shall we achieve such a goal ? The second is the inescapable necessity of attaining these goals. The third is, what are the agencies that are most natural and logical to bring these means to bear upon the task of such a realization? Wc shall attain this ideal by means of the fullest development of the natural resources of this land, thru added scientific discoveries and their The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 173 broader application that will enable us to utilize these divine endowments to their optimum degree. Our natural resources are not alone the forests, fields, streams, lakes, and oceans that we possess ; nor alone the mines beneath the earth ; nor the free air and sunshine above it. Our natural resources include an alert, alive people who are possessed of a mighty will to progress and adventure. With all the new frontiers that mastery of the air has opened up, all the new frontiers that science is daily revealing, all the new frontiers that rise over the horizon of a broadening social consciousness and a realization that a fully organized and implemented economy can abolish poverty, want, fear of dread diseases, and the haunting specter of dependency in old age — these frontiers deny the puerile and obsolete concepts of a matured society. These challenging vistas are rather the reveille for dedicated lead- ership. They sound the battle charge for the courageous implementation of daring imagination. These challenges are based on the honest premise that social and cultural progress can only come to a people whose integrity de- mands a sound economic base for their every adventure into the areas of human development. Providence has never blessed a program for today that foists a fraud upon the morrow. We have proved that we can produce a flood of goods to satisfy the wants of man at a constantly lowering cost and a consequent broadening market. We have proved that we can develop machinery that gradually re- leases man from slavery to the hoe and the shovel as he exercises mastery over harnessed energy derived from the elements that we have learned to tame. A trained mind functions in lieu of toil and sweat that shortened the body's life and dwarfed the brain and soul of man. We have proved that we can cut down the necessary hours of work that used to run from sun to sun, seven days a week. We can now accomplish more with less than a third of the full cycle of a day and in five-sevenths of the days of the week. We can thus produce an abundance of goods and services and permit sufficient leisure for the emerging soul of man to be able to con- template the cosmos and begin universally to speculate upon the nature of God. The means to do these things comes thru the process of educating our children and our adults to the fullest degree of their aroused and active interest. We must then afford the optimum opportunity for employment of discovered capacities and trained abilities, at salaries and wages adequate to enable these workers to consume the maximum of produced goods and to use the deyeloped services to full degree. There must be in addition sufficient excess of income to provide for culture, leisure, and protection from sickness, unemployment, and old age. The broad social goals that I have just described may seem to many of you far afield from the customary objectives of current business leaders and the aims of captains of industry of old. I want to reassure you by cold inescapable facts and publicly accepted figures that these goals must be those that current business operators seek to attain. You will believe me more readily if I can successfully point out to you here, as the second 174 AMERrcAN Association of School Administrators point I want to make, that these managers of capital and operators of in- dustry and producers of services have no alternative if they intend to survive as job holders and if they hope to preserve the principle of the system of private enterprise. In our postwar world we shall be confronted with a national debt of approximately 300 billion dollars. We shall have to accept an annual federal budget of 20 to 25 billion dollars. We shall of necessity have to maintain an annual national income of 130 to 140 billion dollars. We shall have to keep from 50 to 56 million people constantly employed. We shall be forced to compete here in our own country with products from coun- tries where lower wages prevail. If we will seek foreign markets for our goods, we shall have to increase the quality of our products, lower our prices, and substitute the genius of canny management in combination with skilled labor and the inexpensive use of abundant capital and credit, oper- ating highly powered, modernized machinery, turning out an overwhelm- ing flow of mass production. There is but one basic way in which this seemingly impossible situation can be met. The minds and hands of our total people must be burnished and skilled. Our abilities must be upgraded, not only in our productive capacity of converting raw materials and power into desirable goods and wanted services, but we must increase the cultural appetites of 131 mil- lion people to the end that first they will want an increasingly better way of life, and second that they, wanting, shall be skilled enough to earn the wages and salaries to command the things that upgraded appreciation has made them reach out to obtain. We are reaching that stage in our virile and developing society and economy where our increasing and broadening social objectives are be- coming the essential factors in the strengthening and continuation of a sound and sure economy. We have caught up with the day when better homes, better clothes, better food, wider horizons thru travel, and a greater demand for books and parks and playgrounds, churches, clubs, and culture, become the impelling forces behind the enlargement of factories, the increase in employment, and the rise in the payroll of the industrialists. For the industrialists know that in the absence of broadening markets for increasing varieties of goods and services, the economy following the most wasteful and destructive war that mankind has ever waged cannot long survive, nor can a people support so huge a debt and contribute so great an annual budget. Here, then, the once suspected businessman faces the great task of providing employment of a whole people at wages sufficient to buv the enormous production of a modern nation faced with catastrophe if his acumen in planning production, establishing wage scales, setting prices, and stimulating consumption should fail. And it will fail if the businessman — if business sets out upon this neces- sary task alone. Education is the key to this whole jigsaw puzzle. For unless we can up- grade the capacity of all our people, both the youth and the adult of today, we cannot hope to succeed against the odds we will face tomorrow. The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 175 I come then to the third and major point of my remarks to you today, namely, the agencies by which we can hope to attain the goal of a mag- nificent America. It is obvious that education and business must form an imperative part- nership, to the end that each may play its full and essential, its coordinate and complementary part as the agencies by which we shall exercise the freedoms that we have waged great wars to preserve, and thru which we shall find the full expression and flowering out of a true democracy. I want to discuss two aspects of this partnership with you. The first is the joint approach to a better understanding of each other and the responsibility we must share together as trustees for our nation's welfare ; the second is an approach to the problem of business' finding adequate funds for the full and free function of education at its best, un- trammeled by a lack of funds. Education and business have for long years stood with their backs to each other, little comprehending the function of the other, and little sus- pecting that each held the destiny of the other on its opposite hand. Edu- cation seemed to feel that business was a slothful and all but evil giant from whom could be wrung but pitiful contributions to the training of the minds and skills of the people. Business seemed to regard education as a necessary evil that must be supported as a matter of conscience and a gesture toward, or concession to, respectability of the community. But happily in late years, and fortunately in increasing tempo these latter months, there has been an awakening appreciation that these two great agencies of our society and our economy have dual and complementary functions. There has been a rapidly dawning consciousness that each is becoming increasingly dependent upon the other. And there is a rapidly rising appreciation of the fact that business is not giving the cash support to education that it must have to function efficiently and effectively ; and that education is not turning out students who are adequately fitted to move out into our modern and highly complex society and our modern and highly mechanized industry to perform to their fullest potential efficiency either as producers of goods and services or as consumers of these produced and rendered items. Here we are two great segments of the nation — -education and busi- ness— gradually turning to face each other in full recognition of our estab- lished and imperative, but heretofore unrecognized and unimplemented. partnership. Education has been sending out great waves of youth into industry not wholly prepared or conditioned to step into factory or onto farm, into office or bank or laboratory, newspaper or power plant as a trained and conditioned worker ready to begin to contribute to the creation of wealth and the distribution of goods. Business has as a consequence been impatient that education should be critical of its methods and habits, prin- ciples and practices. Business generally has paid school taxes as an unwel- come but inescapable assessment. But now we are both beginning to see that business is totally dependent for its full expression, its greatest profit, and most reassuring prospect of 176 American Association of School Administrators preservation as private adventure, upon the (luality of mind, the skill, atti- tude, and spirit of the youth that conies marching out of the schoolrooms into the halls of industry and onto the fields of farminj^. What manner of youth and its traininjj; we have today shall determine what manner of industry and society we shall have tomorrow. Education sees that if it shall train the youth of today in school and shall seek to retrain the adults who are already out in the maelstrom of our national activity, business can more readily utilize the minds and skills of interested, alert, and comprehending men and women, ambitious to pro- gress and adventure. Education sees that if this youth, so increased in capacity of production and so stimulated to want to consume the better products of the land, can be paid more for its contribution to wealth crea- tion, it consequently can consume more of these produced goods and services. Education begins to see that business can then stimulate the achievement of broad social objectives as being consistent with and essen- tial to its own success and survival. Education then presents to business the essential fact that only with increased appropriations can education improve its processes of training to mesh into the needs of business. Business likewise sees this need. The problem arises : How can business properly find the money to give to edu- cation to bring about this essential upgrading of the people necessary to the full expression and preservation of the nation ? I have on another occasion described a social development that has brought about an economic revolution, which in turn has given great emphasis to a constantly broadening social development. I mention it here again as an example that affords such promise that we in business and edu- cation may jointly review it with the prospect of some form of adaptation that may again enable us to repeat this self-acting and mutually recipro- cating acceleration of our respective functions in equal or greater terms. The gasoline tax, which averages around six cents in most of the states, built the roads of America into the, most magnificent system of highways in the world. As a consequence it has provided such a stimulus to the production of automobiles that every man, woman, and child in the country can ride in these vehicles at one and the same time. The results are far-reaching and beggar description within the confines of a volume to tell of the social advancement that has resulted from the linking of rural and urban areas ; that has been achieved thru the program of consolidated schools ; and that has created wealth thru the increase of farm to market facilities. The story runs on into the expansion of our economy in the pro- duction of cars and all the accessorv items and connected fields, which in turn have built more roads, produced more social betterment, and more economic expansion. This magic tale has come into reality because leaders visioned the powerful efifect of tieing to and erecting a broad social objective upon a sound economic base. No social program of such vast and successful rami- fications could ever have been developed on a deficit concept. In turn and in rime it might have wrecked the economv and destroyed our society. Instead. The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow 177 because the users of the roads were taxed in the purchase of the j^asoline necessary to drive over them, those who paid this tax found an economy of operation, plus a reduction in cost of purchase of the vehicle and its use and maintenance. There was consequently a constantly rising resort to the program thru an increasing number of cars, using increasing amounts of taxed gasoline, with increasing benefits to the users and to the economy. There came about a virtual and literal revolution in our social scheme of things in a rising and expanding economy in a beneficent spiral. Looking upon this self-supporting and self-accelerating program, edu- cation and business, as they now begin to recognize in each other an imperative partner, may find a way to put education upon a self-supporting basis as are our roads and their wide spreading, beneficent flow across the land. We must find a way to have business pay a use tax for the services of the boys and girls who come to its doors and enter its employ. For it is upon these trained and ambitious people that industry depends for the free flow of business thruout our land, just as the motor cars and trucks speed about the country over the s^^stem of roads that the users pay for with deep and willing gratitude. Here we have an example of an eagerly sought tax that is an amazing investment, whereas once the road tax was a resented assessment. We in business and education must convert a reluctantly met school tax into an eagerly sought investment. Then we shall be able to repeat the history of the road tax program. Again we can cause a social and eco- nomic revolution in a forward surge of our economy, together with a series of great strides in social advancement. If we can tie the sound generative power of American business into the financial support of the social objective of an accelerating and expanding system of adequate education, we shall have developed the means and have harnessed together as a mighty team the agencies that can produce the achievements we all are determined shall be the goals of postwar America. Lest you believe that I have come here to expound and embroider a personal dream that occurs in the quiet hours of night, I shall tell you of the activities we have already set in motion within the Committee on Education of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States. Then I shall suggest the things we hope to do and in which we shall need your assistance. First of all, we have sent out to every one of the 1872 state and local chambers of commerce and trade organizations that constitute the organi- zational membership of the chamber a recommendation of the Board of Directors that each separate organization shall set up a Committee on Education ; that these committees set about reviewing the educational systems of their localities, acquaint the business interests of each com- munity with the local educational facilities, ascertain the needs of the local system, and seek to coordinate that program with the needs of busi- ness; that business and education get together promptly and recognize in each other a complementary and imperative partner, the fulfilment of 178 American Association of School Administrators which partnership is essential to the social progress and economic soundness of every community and the country as a whole ; that every locality begin at the grass roots to see the picture of the potential good that will flow from this closer alliance and cooperative venture between those two natural and logical partners. As for our specific program, wherein we shall greatly need your aid, we want to make a careful study of the direct relationship between educa- tional attainment within separate foreign nations and within our own several states, to determine to what degree there is a relationship to per capita wealth, per capita income, and social well-being. We in business know that if we are to enlist the full support of all businesses in the de- velopment of a system of adequate education in America, we must produce the necessary proof that additional contributions to the support of educa- tion, in whatever manner made, must have implicit in that request a promise of eventual profit. We are setting out upon these studies to ascertain if our premises are correct and to search for a formula that may afford a repetition of the experience in the gas tax saga. Speaking to you as representatives of the school system of America, I as a representative of business offer you the handclasp of fellowship in the common cause of the social advancement of our nation. I bespeak for our two groups of education and business a partnership of endeavor in the expansion of the economy of our people as we jointly face each other in common cause and mutual trust and understanding. If we can develop a program of adequate education in every state of the Union, fully supported by business, we can find an analogy to the program of good roads that run like bright ribbons thruout the land. Education can supply a vast network of solid paths and highways over which our society and economy can travel at high but safe speed. Like the development of automobiles, whereby every man, woman, and child can be transported at one time, so our educational system must provide the roadway and business must provide the vehicle in which every citizen of our nation can at one and the same time progress toward an ever- broadening life and fuller expression of his or her discovered abilities and trained capacities. I dare to express the belief that we may in time afford the means and the agency whereby we shall generate a society and an economy that can best be described as a magnificent America. Part V Whafs Right with the Schools in 1944 THE SCHOOLS AS BUILDERS OF MEN N. L. ENGELHARDT, ASSOCIATE SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, NEW YORK, N. Y. Address at New York Conference The founders of this nation did their work well. They displayed strikingly keen insight into human affairs by leaving the controls of education with the states. Their theories of government led them to believe that the life, strength, and permanence of our nation rested upon the acceptance of local responsibility, the vigor and extent of participation in local affairs, and the wholesomeness engendered in free local institutions. In the local community, the youth must be reared and educated. Here the sanctity of the individual must be safeguarded. Here the firm foundations of fine, strong manhood and womanhood must be laid. Here must be inculcated and practiced the fundamental principles of a free people. Here the unfettered school, work- ing with the home and church, can best play its part. Fortune smiled on this nation as the desirability of this basic policy was acknowledged and its establishment made a reality. The records of many decades have confirmed the wisdom of the policy. In pursuance of this mandate, the school men and women of the nation have worked constructively. Freedom from federal control in education has paid big dividends. It has been the policy of the states to leave to the localities the determination of their educational programs. In America there is no single fixed pattern of curriculum and there are no ministerial edicts. Governmental propa- ganda does not form the basis for instruction and battalions of youth are not herded into mass formation for the use of the state. The locality exer- cises its freedom to develop its educational philosophy, to adapt its cur- riculum, to experiment with methods of teaching, and to expand or change its educational offerings in the light of local understanding. All this is done within a legislative framework fixed by the representatives of the people. Out of this setting have come the American youth of today. To be sure, in their educational progress, certain basic needs have been universally recognized, such as the tools of learning, the attributes of good citizenship, the art of homemaking, the preparation for vocations, the maintenance of health, and the development of high moral character. The fact is, however, that differences rather than uniformity characterize America's schools ; that the spirit of freedom permeates the educational structure; and that com- munities proudly attach their names to their distinctive educational plans. Varied as the educational programs may be, the products of the schools have much in common. They love their country; freedom and independ- [179] 180 American Association of School Administrators ence characterize their actions; they are self-respecting individuals; they have initiative, persistence, and the restless urge to achieve on their ovv^n merits. They respect our institutions, but they seek new and better ways of achieving society's ends. They have learned to work with their fellow men ; they seek to understand the differences among men. They want their own homes; they wish to be productive workers and seek to contribute to the common good. Whether they come from the consolidated school of the western prairies, the one-teacher school of the eastern mountains, the small school of a southern rural community, or the large school of a northern urban center, these boys and girls are all distinctly American. Whether born to poverty or riches, whether farm-reared or city-bred, whether of foreign-born or native stock, Negro or white, Jew, Catholic, or Protestant, they have acquired in our schools those qualities which make for solidarity in our nation. Many forces operate to secure these results. Perhaps the spirit of America is in the air we breathe. One of our boys, blinded at Tunisia, on nearing America's shores once more, remarked, "Let me just breathe its air." All of them want to get home as soon as possible. The American home is unique. Its contribution to the development of American qualities of manhood and womanhood cannot be overstated. The home, the school, and the church have common purposes. They work to encourage wholesome, meaningful, courageous living. They recognize that unhampered development of the individual to the fullness of his worthwhile capacities is essential, and they seek to create an environment wherein the pursuit of happiness may become the privilege of all. These agencies have sought to surround birth, early babyhood, childhood, and maturing youth with the essential protections. They have created the spiritual, moral, intellectual, and recreational en- vironments which breathe the spirit of freedom and advance the principles of brotherhood. They have aroused ambition and stimulated achievement. They have gloried in the nation's social progress, rejoiced in the freely chosen leadership from all walks of life, and have kept the pioneer spirit ever alert. America's youth is born into the riches of such an environment. The worthwhile values of a single year of American childhood outweigh those of a decade in many a childhood in foreign lands. America's pride is in its youth. No effort is too great to maintain for them the rights, privileges, op- portunities, liberties, and obligations that are basic planks in the American charter. Our youth have confidence in their America. In this eventful decade, the youth who have enjoyed the protection, the guidance, the education, and the inspiration of the American way of life have demonstrated clearly that they not only compare favorably with the young manhood and womanhood of any age or any nation, but in many respects, they outrank them all. Their readiness to protect our priceless heritage, their dauntless courage, their daring pioneering, their ready adaptability, their bodily endurance, their intelligent service, and their well-grounded faith in the American way of life are ample rewards to the generations that have prepared them. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 181 The American people exercise their privilege of offering criticism against their institutions. The schools have always come in for their share. During the past decade, much severe criticism has been leveled at the schools on the assumption that their impact upon youth could be segregated from the many other influences. "American youth was being made soft," the charges ran. How absurd in the light of the past twenty-seven months ! As Fletcher Pratt writes in "Caribbean Command,"^ "These young men . . . had but a single focus of interest. There had been nothing resembling them since the seamen of Queen Elizabeth, like whom they were ready to sail to the ends of the earth and to fight the devil on the steps of hell. They did fight down the submarines on the doorsills of the Caribbean." Yes, they were "soft" who ran the submarine and bombing gauntlets to Mur- mansk; who flew with Doolittle over Tokyo; who stormed the beaches at Casablanca ; who brought MacArthur out of the Philippines ; who have faced the tanks and guns of the enemy trained for warfare from birth and forced his surrender at countless points. These "soft" men are those gen- erals and admirals salute as the finest fighters man has ever been privileged to lead. Another charge brought against the schools was that "They misled youth by overemphasis on the doctrines of the Left." The history of enlistment and induction answers this indictment. "They had failed to teach their students grammar and arithmetic." "They had not trained them to respect authority." "The interests of the students determined the curriculum." "The previous generation was taught better in school." "The curriculum was watered." "Athletics were all-important." "Extracurriculum activities sup- planted the proved curriculum legacies." The stress was upon the retention of the traditional in philosophy and psychology, in method and curriculum, in discipline and in human relations. The alert administrator evaluated the criticisms, restudied his fundamental educational philosophy, encouraged extensive lay visitation and discussion, eliminated proved fundamental faults, and continued the necessary adjustments to the changing life and aims of his community. Then came the treacherous Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Not a single day has passed since December 7, 1941, without the press recording the achievements, the perseverance, the intelligent action, the bold daring, or the chivalrous attitudes of our men and women in service. The armed services have required skills and knowledge covering a vast range of activities and have found them available. Essential training to meet special wartime demands was instituted, and our youth were found highly adapta- ble. Initiative, loyalty, obedience to commands, adjustability, personal de- nial, and, indeed, sacrifice of self were the demands of the day and our youth were not found wanting. The men and women in service, hundreds of thousands of whom were only recently in our schools, forced by the very nature of things to make complete readjustments in their lives, met the challenge unflinchingly and successfully. ^ Harper's Magazine for February 1944. 182 American Association of School Administrators These young men and women were those for whom educators have, with- out cessation, in jTars past, sought adequate funds for the essentials of an education in our democracy. Their school programs emphasized not only facts but the ability to think about them. Their libraries, classrooms, and laboratories gave opportunity for exploration and broad knowledge. Their teachers acted as guides into the unknown and stimulators of the imagina- tion, as developers of initiative, and as leaders in social understanding. Their schools sought to the best of their abilities and to the limit of their resources to provide significant opportunities for individual growth. The school ac- tivities, such as the drama, music, clubs, extracurriculum work, and hobby shops, encouraged creative living and emphasized the values of personal achievement. The health and physical education programs built this group of men and women to our highest percentage of serviceability. The vast number of shops in American schools gave the elementary and even the advanced training needed for the special mechanical services so essential in this technological war. Last, but perhaps most significant, the democratic processes of the school had leveled race prejudices, and the democratic ad- ministration had demonstrated to our youth the principles for which they now fight and for which so many have already sacrificed their lives. The schools are quite ready to claim their share as builders of these men and women. The products of American schools have, by their examples, set new high standards for American sacrifice, courage, endurance, and persistence. Here can be recorded only a few of the places they have made everlasting parts of our history: Bataan and Corregidor, Guadalcanal and the Coral Sea. Midway and Tarawa, Kwajalein and Attu. Berlin and Hamburg, Stutt- gart and Ploesti, Kasserine Pass and Tunis, Salerno and Cassino and Anzio and Nettuno, with many more to come. The members of the classes of the past decades have, like their stalwart pioneer forefathers, explored new worlds — the hideous swampy jungles of the South Pacific, the shifting waters of treacherous atolls, the impenetrable Burmese mountains, and the bleak, ice-covered reaches of Kiska. They have fought five miles up and fathoms deep. They have flown the Himalayas, which with calm disdain, they call the Hump. They have built bridges of ships, tons and tons of bombs, thousands of landing craft, mountains of am- munition, and miles of guns. They have perfected new means of communica- tion, developed mechanisms beyond common understanding, and constructed airships of unbelievable capacity and power. These men and women, as our enemies in their defeat are discovering, are not afraid to fight nor are they willing to desist until overwhelming vic- tory is achieved. They had hoped for a better world and now they are con- vinced that they themselves must make it so. They believe in individualism and to assure it, they fight en masse. They know that neither color of the skin nor the kind of hair, neither economic status nor religious creed, neither the land of birth nor the social status make the man. They have learned to assay the inner qualities and to value the homely virtues. They acknowledge no barrier to the crefitipn of -i vyorjd ordej- in which wars shall enc}. Thev What's Right with the Schools in 1944 183 have had faith in their educational foundations and they place reliance on the educator to provide them with the supplementary program required for reentry into civil life. Are the schools builders of men? Yes, indeed, and in no limited sense. The world today, unfortunately, emphasizes physical power and the ability to kill. The world tomorrow will call for racial goodwill, democratic under- standing, technological intelligence, economic wisdom, political justice, and creative production. The schools have played their part well in enabling the nation to meet its present crisis. They will continue to make the required readjustments in the rehabilitation of the returning warrior and in the guid- ance and training of youth for that new world which promises to bring so many new problems for solution. The schools will not fail America. By the same token, America must support its schools. Hundreds of letters from New York City boys and girls at the front at- test to the role the school has played in their lives. Every school in the coun- try has been thrilled by similar messages. A teacher's instruction, a principal's guidance, an opportunity afforded, a kindly word, an interest in the indi- vidual, the introduction into new areas of learning, the drama in the audi- torium, the play on the gymnasium floor — these and many others are the points these youth stress as they write from their far-flung stations thruout the world. The names represent every race, every creed, every color. Their families had their origins in all corners of the world. The schools have helped to unite them in one common purpose. It is the quality of manhood that has counted. What a remarkable achievement for America that all these work in harmony toward the safeguarding of our American way of life! The citations, the soldiers' medals, the Purple Hearts, the Silver Stars and Crosses, the Oak Leaf Clusters, the Navy Crosses, the Distinguished Flying Crosses, and the Congressional Medals of Honor won by former high-school students give profound testimony as to what manner of men have come from our schools and our communities. When the record of all American schools is brought together at the close of this war, the schools will not want the full credit but at least they may claim their share as builders of men. SCHOOLS, THE CITADELS OF DEMOCRACY REX PUTNAM, STATE SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION, SALEM, OREG. Address at Seattle Conference The speaker has no illusions. I know that the points to be discussed in this paper are not new to school administrators. All of us have wrestled with pretty much the same problems during the past three years. Basically these problems have been two in number: first, adjustment of all areas of the school program to aid in the nation's defense; and second, adjustment of the school program to aid in prosecution of the war. In this period of adjust- ment, there have been some significant developments in elementary ^nd sec- 184 American Association of School Administrators ondary education and in general school administration, which indicate that our schools are really the citadels of democracy. Some of the evidence of these developments has been buried in a mass of other material and has escaped general attention and consideration ; yet some of it has been per- fectly obvious to all who wished to view it. According to the biggest and newest Webster's dictionary that I can find, a citadel is defined as "A strong fortress; a stronghold; fortification." All these definitions imply a defense structure, set up for the purpose of pro- tection against an enemy, and to provide safety from harm for those behind the fortifications. With such a definition in mind, one might well ask the question: In what ways have our schools, currently and even over a period of years, established themselves as citadels of our American way of life? I believe that the schools, both public and private, and on all levels from the kindergarten thru the college and university, have proved themselves to be the real citadels of democracy in these precarious times, and my only regret is that time does not permit more than brief mention of a few of the facts that lead me to this belief. While there is evidence of the contribution of the school program to the building and maintenance of general morale, no attempt will be made here to discuss this point. The morale of a people is influenced by so many factors that it is quite impossible to measure the effect of but one of these factors upon it. I have a very deep conviction, however, that the schools have given tremendous assistance, especially in this present critical period, to the de- velopment and maintenance of a high type of morale among our people. With this brief statement, I shall pass on to a discussion of other factors which are either measurable or have been observed and reported upon thru reliable sources, and which indicate that the schools have recognized and accepted their full responsibility in both peace and war. Consciousness of the responsibilities, as well as the privileges, of citizen- ship constitutes the backlog which keeps the fires of freedom from becoming extinguished. One of the chief functions of American schools is to utilize their facilities to the utmost for the purpose of supplying youth with the knowledges and skills, attitudes and abilities, which are necessary if they are to discharge aggressively and constructively their responsibilities as American citizens. Other institutions, such as the home, the church, civic bodies of various kinds, the radio, and the press, have no small part to play in this program. The public schools, however, are the legally-organized and publicly-supported institutions developed specifically for this purpose and hence must assume the lion's share of the responsibility. Now we may ask: How well have the schools discharged their stewardship? How effectively have they developed in youth an understanding of the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship in these United States? How convincingly have they presented to youth the necessity for full acceptance of the responsibilities of citizenship and unwavering loyalty to our fundamental ideals? And how well have thev instilled in \outh lo\alties to the ideals of our way of life? What's Right with the Schools in 1944 185 Not so long ago — in fact so short a time ago as the early part of 1941 — there were those who bitterly criticized the schools for the alleged lack of sincere instruction of youth in principles of "Americanism," patriotism, and good citizenship. It was claimed by these critics that American history and civics were being woefully neglected in our schools and that subversive material was being introduced in many of our classrooms. These criticisms came, in many cases, from influential sources and were bolstered by pur- portedly scientific tests that proved very embarrassing to conscientious teachers. They were usually followed by implied comparisons of the educa- tional deficiencies of the youth who attended school during the past decade with those who attended school previous to the thirties or the twenties. The conclusion generally drawn from these comparisons was to the effect that those who went to school since 1930 were not nearly so well informed, not nearly so patriotic, and not nearly such good citizens as were their elders who attended school in the heyday from 1900 to 1930. Such criticism is fre- quently difficult to answer, since there is no measuring stick by which such intangible factors can be objectively determined. Thus the present genera- tion, with little experience back of it, is put entirely on the defensive. Let us examine this situation for just a moment. I believe that only re- cently significant factors have become eflfective which provide insight into the character of modern American youth as contrasted with the American youth of a previous generation. Please let me assure you that I make these comparisons with absolutely no thought of disparaging the accomplishments of the good people of any generation. My sole purpose is to read from the record in order to indicate that our schools have not fallen down in their particular assignment, and that they have done their full share in bringing about highly significant progress in the training of youth in all of the factors that enter into good cjjtizenship. All glory to those who attended school pre- vious to 1930; but certainly equal, if not greater glory, to the present gen- eration of youth. Now, may I furnish some evidence which I believe sub- stantiates the point I am trying to make. In World War I we had a Selective Service Act as we do in World War II. In an article in the American Magazine for September 1942, written by Mark Hynes and titled "100,000 Draft Dodgers," comparisons are made between attempted draft evasion of registrants as between World War I and World War II. This comparative data brings out the very significant fact that 4 J/2 percent of the registrants in 1917-18 attempted evasion; whereas only a fraction of 1 percent of the registrants for World War II had attempted evasion up to the time the article was written. It seems to me that this indicates some improvement in the civic attitudes and loyalties of youth. No critic can face these figures and maintain an unprejudiced posi- tion. The schools would seem to be serving well as the citadels of democracy. There has been no time in the history of our great nation when youth have responded so gallantly and effectively to the defense of their homeland and the destruction of intolerance and despotism as they are now doing — these same youth who attended our schools in recent years. Do any of the critics wish to challenge this statement and attempt to prove their contention? It 186 American Association of School Administrators appears to me that the conditions just cited are, in themselves, sufficient proof that the schools have met their responsibilities in a forthright manner in this phase of their program. Another phase of their responsibilitj^ which the schools have accepted and discharged is raising the degree of literacy in this countrj^ During 1917-18 the criterion for literacy was ability to read and to write, yet 25 percent of the volunteers and draftees of the Army at that time could not meet this standard and were classed as illiterate. In the armed forces of today only 13.5 percent of draftees are classed as illiterates and that when the criterion of literacy is now based upon failure to perform those intellectual accom- plishments associated with completion of the fourth-grade level in the ele- mentary schools. A brief consideration of these figures indicates that vast im- provement in the matter of nationwide literacy has been made in the past twenty-five years. Surely a major part of this improvement can be credited to our schools. So far as educational results in general are concerned, we are confronted with the problem of lacJc of an adequate measuring device with which to compare achievement of generations of youth, but it is interesting to note a statement made by Russell Landstrom which appeared in the Oregonian of September 6, 1942, as part of a news article. Mr. Landstrom is a foreign correspondent who, at the time this article was written, was in England. Among other things, he made this very significant statement: "It is gen- erally agreed that the American soldier of 1942 is better educated, more physically fit and better trained . . . than was the doughboy of 1917-18." This observation from one on the spot and in a position to make comparisons is of significance and should be encouraging to teachers and others who are really interested in the education of youth. Up to this point, two or three of those important phases of education that have to do with conditioning of youth, as it were, for either peacetime or Avartime pursuits, have been discussed briefly ; and telling evidence that the schools have really been citadels of democracy in the training of the younger generation has been presented. Now we have evidence of another type. When we became a nation at war, most peacetime activities were pushed into the background and the schools were confronted with the problem of finding a place in the picture where the most efifective service could be ren- dered without dissipating the fundamental objectives of education in the long-range program. This meant readjustments of all kinds and of an emer- gency nature. Flexibility of curriculums to meet ever new and pressing needs and reorganization of schedules and administrative procedures became necessary. The records show that the schools rose to every occasion and to every necessity. Everyone knows how magnificently the schools have responded to scrap drives, bond and stamp sales, and every other type of activity requested by proper authorities. These activities, all extracurriculum as it were, deserve a complete discussion in themselves but they are mentioned here only in passing because of lack of time and space. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 187 The manner in which registration for the rationing program was organ- ized and Conducted by the schools was an amazing feat of speed and effi- ciency which, I sometimes fear, has not yet been fully appreciated by the general public. Not that the public is not appreciative, but we educators have failed to give this accomplishment the publicity it deserves. In my opinion, it is one of the biggest and most complicated home front jobs that has been done by any governmental agency during the war, and the dispatch and effectiveness with which it was executed is without parallel. It must be re- membered that teachers and school administrators assumed the responsibility of organizing and perfecting the machinery necessary to register every man, woman, and child in this nation and it was done so quickly and smoothly that few even now fully realize what a stupendously large task it was. It is interesting to note, too, that not one breath of criticism concerning the manner and efficiency with which it w\is done has appeared. In this case, the schools truly served as the citadels of democracy in an emergency. No department or activity in the high schools of this nation has been free from major adjustments to meet wartime needs. The physical education programs in the high schools have been adjusted in accordance with the suggestions of the armed forces; and increased offerings in special courses, such as electricity, radio, radio code, mathematics, science, shop work, and aeronautics, all considered essential as preinduction training, have either been added to or woven into the regular high-school curriculum. In Oregon, and I presume the same holds true for other states, approximately 85 percent of the bo3^s graduating from high school last year had one or more year's work in some type of preinduction training in the subjects just mentioned. Major Harold W. Kent, War Department Liaison to the U. S. Office of Education, made this statement before the council of Chief State School Officers at Milwaukee, Wisconsin, December 12, 1943: "I would like to interpolate at this point a word of satisfaction for the showing that sec- ondary-school boys are making, both on the army general classification test and the college qualifying test — our curve is definitely skewing to the right. The emphasis on mathematics, science, and English is bearing fruit. ' Another area of education in which the schools have proved themselves to be citadels of democracy is in the War Production Training program. This program began as a Defense Training program, but after Pearl Harbor was converted into a War Production Training program. As you know, this program is administered on the national level by the U. S. Office of Educa- tion ; on the state level it is administered by the state boards for vocational education, and these state boards pass the responsibility on to local school districts. The local school district administrators, cooperating with the state boards for vocational education and the U. S. Office of Education, have organized and administered this huge program of training men and women in skills that help to produce tremendous amounts of war materials of all types — munitions, ships, airplanes, tanks, guns, and clothing — that are needed to carry on a modern war successfully. In a period of three years, under this program, some 6,000,000 men and women have either been trained to take their places effectively for the first time in those industries producing war 188 American Association of School Administrators materials, or have been upj^raded while on the job. Without this training prof^ram, the necessary expansion of our war production industries would have been impossible. Again, the organizational and executive talent and ability of school teachers and administrators were called upon to help their country in a critical situation and they responded swiftly and efifectively. The schools were the true citadels of democracy in meeting this need. In closing, let me say that I make no claim that the schools are above con- structive criticism or that they are 100 percent perfect in their work. I do make this claim however : The nation's schools are as successful in meeting their objectives and responsibilities both in peace and in war as any other institution in our nation that is guided by human hand or human brain. WHAT IS RIGHT WITH HEALTH AND PHYSICAL EDUCATION JOHN L. BRACKEN, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CLAYTON, MO. Address at Atlanta Conference My right to testify concerning the rightness of modern health and physical education procedures may be questionable. I am from Missouri. An elderly native Missourian emigrated, for some obscure reason, to the Pacific Coast. Shortly thereafter, he was served with a jury summons. With that fine, rugged independence which is fostered in the Ozarks, he didn't give it any house. To his mild surprise a deputy sheriff appeared to ask if he had re- ceived the summons. He admitted it and added the gratuitous information that he wasn't going to pay it any mind. "Why not?" asked the deputy. "I got my reasons," said the ex-Missourian. "In the first place, I'm too old fer such foolishness as lawin'. In the second place, I'm too busy fer triflin'. And in the third place, I ain't eligible. You see, I was born in Mis- souri and I haven't even taken out my first papers yet." It may be fitting for such important school activities as the teaching of health and physical education to be appraised by one who must be showed. Because of my Missouri habit of questioning and searching before admitting even an evident reality, I am able to curb the impulse, natural to a school- master testifying to an accomplishment of his craft, to say "The superintend- ents are in convention ; all's right with health and physical education." Such a statement could come trippingly from the tongue here in this treasured city of Atlanta. What superintendent does not know of the magnificent pioneering work in the field of health which has been accomplished here under the stalwart, nationally infectious leadership of Willis Sutton? At- lanta truly has served the nation in hammering out on the anvils of experi- mental practice the methods by which ignorance of health truths may be dis- pelled and the practice of health made more general. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 189 The rij^htness of health and physical education in schools ma}' be estab- lished on the basis of results which have accrued or now are accruing. Edu- cational activities are part of the continuing democratic process. The schools carry proud traditions of former successes and they bear responsibility for former educational inadequacies and indiscretions. It pretty largely is true today that Americans are the products of the American educational system. Their health and fitness, their health attitudes, knowledges, and practices are indicative of their school experiences; they also set the stage for the de- velopments of our time. In evaluating the rightness of present procedures it also is appropriate to consider such improvements over former practices as may be shown to exist. Curious aspects of the American attitude toward the practice of health and physical education often have been remarked. We rate ourselves an energetic, active nation, but much of our greatest pleasure is derived from observing the exertions of others. When ration stamps are available, .we ride rather than walk. We are prejudiced toward self-medication. Pharmacy shelves are crowded with rapidly moving stocks of profitable proprietary remedies. We yield to the persuasive voices of the radio and to alluring statements in print. Symptoms and cures which are undeniable to a hypo- chondriac, are inviting to a neurasthenic, and eventually may become con- vincing to quite normal persons. Our history is full of fads in self-treatment and diet. Pain-killers are fortune-makers. Spinach has been oversold. Bran has had its day. The battle among antiseptics still is green in our memories. Iron upped the sale of raisins. Reducing diets, cosmetics, and violet rays have been relied upon to give the semblance of health. Currently, vitamins are front, center. One person of three who enter drug stores this year is reported to buy some form of vitamin preparation. Unfortunately, many persons hold the belief that if a small amount of a given vitamin is good, a large amount is better. Vita- mins are administered copiously and indiscriminately to war workers, altho the American Medical Association suggests that the return in eflfi- ciency probably is less than the actual cost of the vitamins. We live in an age which is dominated by science, but thousands of our citizens resort to charlatans and cults in lieu of seeking medical advice and treatment. We are inclined to avoid illness and pain instead of developing health. In local consciousness hospitals loom larger than health departments. Twenty million persons are said to have purchased health insurance in the past fifteen years, and forms of group hospital service are experiencing remarkable growth. Compensation insurance and companj'^-provided medical and hos- pital care are widespread and increasing. Proposals now are under serious consideration for applying health insurance to the majority of our citizens in further implementing our individual and collective security. But treating our own diseases, both fancied and real, following medical fads and whimsies, and fleeing from disease instead of pursuing health tend to obscure the obvious trend of American thought today. This trend, more than in any other generation, is toward the development of health and fit- 190 American Association of School Administrators ness. Health insurance and hospital insurance are developing into instruments for the promotion of constructive health rather than continuing as means for diagnosis and treatment of disease. Demand is increasing for controls over products and services which contribute to health. From spinach in the rough to concentrated vitamins — and on to the hormones and vitagens on which our next fads may center — we grope for health. We are friendlier with the sun, more addicted to fresh air, and greater devotees of sanitation than were preceding generations. Our reliance on medical science and our willingness to submit to medical and surgical ministrations, both preventive and corrective, are sounder than ever before. Comparisons in point of time testify clearly to improved health of our people. Compared with standards of a third of a century ago, the lives of almost a million Americans are saved each year by modern health procedures. Altho heart disease, cancer, brain stroke, diabetes, and other diseases incident to middle life are increasing, the health of young America has improved. Such maladies can strike because the life of youth has been ex- tended so generally that our people now reach the time of life at which these troubles are encountered. The past fifty years have seen life expectancy at birth increased from about thirty-four to about sixty-three years. Progress in increasing the proportion of persons who live from middle life thru more advanced years has not been marked. We have witnessed astounding progress, however, in the reduction of infant mortality and in the reduction of mor- tality among children of school age. The areas most affected by the schools, directly and in teaching which reaches the home, have shown the greatest improvement. For decades to come, arguments will clash concerning the health of two generations as disclosed by physical examinations for military service. There is evidence that inductees are taller and heavier in the Global War than in World War I, and certain statistics point to better health of the later group. Standards of selection vary with the times so that proportions of re- jections become meaningless. Rejections are fewer in 1944 than in 1941, but who will claim that our health has so generally improved within these years ? Later analysis of these figures will be fruitful. Now we can say that all rejection figures are higher than they should be. It is disturbing that recent figures indicate a preponderance of rejections from rural areas. This situa- tion, it may be remarked in passing, places equality of opportunity for edu- cation on a survival basis ; our national safety derives from the health and vigor of all our people. Altho many rejections are caused by physical disqualifications over which the schools can exercise only limited influence, it is a hopeful situation in which major rejection causes proceed from child- hood conditions which definitely are remediable. They lie in the area of the public school. Dental defects and defective eyes, diseased lungs, mental and nervous diseases, and defects of the ears and feet are cases in point. School experiences, corrections which may proceed from school initiative, and general conditions of living which are under the school's influence can What's Right with the Schools in 1944 191 prevent occurrence of many such defects and can correct them when they appear. It may be emphasized that many defects which prevented induction were not first observed when physical examinations for military service were con- ducted. They were evident fifteen or twenty years earlier. Many of the causes of physical disease and handicaps of adults in 1965 can be observed in our schools today. The present rightness of health and physical education in schools depends upon the effectiveness with which these future handicaps are minimized and upon the appropriateness of our measures to develop vigorous health of body and mind. The present practicality of health education is its principal claim to rightness. The child still is father to the man; concern over actual health problems of children points the way to a healthful future. Until war deprived schools of much essential medical service, the school health examination was winning its way to wider, more intelligent appli- cation. This examination, whether made by the school health adviser or the family physician, has become a focal point for effective health teaching and health guidance. It is important that the father or mother be present. Instead of examining children against time, rushing children thru in order that statistics for the entire school population may be completed at the end of the year and that next year's examination may begin at scratch, the examination interval has been extended. Time for follow-up work is pro- vided, with appropriate continuing attention to exceptional cases. Uncounte'd thousands of corrections and adjustments have resulted. Dental and visual corrections are common ; hernias have been detected and operated; damaged hearts and lungs have been discovered and individuals protected and set on the way to recovery. Notable in the field of diagnosis and correction is the dental health area. Dental health and dental hygiene set us off from most other peoples of the world. The saturation point is far from reached, but America has been made toothbrush-conscious and dentists are consulted regularly by increas- ing numbers. Just now we appear to be at the threshhold of new discoveries whose application will make dental cripples exceptional in oncoming genera- tions. We are moving from the field of dental repair into the wider area of dental development and protection. These health examinations have opened consideration of general as well as specific defects. Before the war, one third of our population was said to exist on a substandard diet. The exigencies of war usually serve to intensify such conditions, but there is evidence that America's nutritional status is better under rationing than before such restrictions were imposed. Attention has been focused on the selection of foods and the conservation of their values. The "Basic 7" list has made its mark. Nutrition classes, in many cases fostered by the schools, have given needed knowledge to persons willing perhaps for the first time in their lives to accept it. The wartime diets of workers and of children sometimes left to forage for themselves have bene- fited from the instruction which the school provides. 192 American Association of School Administrators Another form of practical education in health is the prevention of com- municahle disease. Today no cominunit\ need entertain smallpox or diph- theria unless it so desires. The schools have assisted in makinji; vaccination and immunization general. In case of diseases for which there is no specific preventive, isolation and quarantine have heen enforced. In many instances at least a bej2;innin^ has been made in convincing parents that children with what appear to be common colds should rest at home until recovered. Health fjuidance and follow-up work have lessened the tragic effects of so-called childhood diseases by insuring proper care for the juvenile patients. School training in home nursing has made its mark. The record of school age youth stands out in stark relief in the accident prevention field. Schoolboy patrols and driver-training classes evidence ways in which schools transfer responsibility to the shoulders of children them- selves. A sharp diminution of the accident record has resulted. With this control has developed a remarkable increase in first-aid knowledge and skill. Recently the American Red Cross First J id Text-Book reached the best- seller lists and for a time may have been the most widely used textbook in America. Schoolteachers by the thousand taught adult patrons by the tens of thousands. Across the country first-aid courses now are so located in school curriculums that every child receives this instruction. No more profound change has come over our schools than that in actual health teaching. In my distant day health education w^as a matter of conning phrases and memorizing facts. I could trace the circulation of the blood as glibly as any other student, but rny understanding was clouded.- In the riga- marole which I learned was "the vena cava, ascending and descending." I knew the words but no one ever brought me to understand that they meant the large veins which collect the blood from the lower and upper parts of the body. My childish imagination pictured a complicated escalator or re- volving arrangement which gave more evidence of interest than of under- standing. A lady of my generation has told me that she underwent a similar course and derived from it a single tangible benefit: She could remember the last three figures in her automobile -license because they were identical with the number of bones in the human body. On further conversation I learned that her memory had played her false. The number which she remembered had no relation to the number of bones in the human frame. But that made no difference ; the information was maximally helpful. Modern health teaching makes use of factual material, but it is solid, understandable information which is basic to the intelligent practice of health. Health clowns and fairies have gone their tinsel ways. Interest in health education derives from its connection with living. Health is neither a humdrum nor a snap course; it is vitally effective. A cogent reason for the practical effectiveness of modern health education is the facility with which the schools have related themselves to other groups and organizations which foster health. Thru the initiative, cooperation, and coordination of likeminded forces, progress has been made. The schools have not hesitated to draw on the fields of medical and dental science for physicians, dentists, laboratory workers, and technicians; the school nurse What's Right with the Schools in 1944 193 still is an unsung heroine of the health of little children. Liaison has been effected with other f^overnmental ajjencies. School superintendents, tradi- tionally members of library boards, now serve as members of active health groups and are members of advisory health councils. Health officials are drawn into influential connections with the schools. Confusion as to author- ity largely is replaced by integration of effort. The health of children and the health of the community are served by the agency best fitted to render the needed service on the spot. Powerful community organizations are helped to render maximum service. Parents, as family representatives and in groups, are found to be most helpfully cooperative. A second reason for this effectiveness lies in the internal organization of the schools for health. A surprising number of detailed health curriculums, on both local and state levels, have been developed in quite recent years. Objectives are clarified and broken down to factual situations for different age groups and grade levels. Materials of instruction are described and made available. The records indicate increased attention to health teaching in the preparation of elementary-school teachers, and there is at least a tendency for persons in charge of health education on the secondary level to have special preparation within their field. The assignment of health classes as tag-end subjects to round out schedules of high-school teachers specializing in other subjects is coming into disrepute. In the elementary schools health is a respected subject, and in secondary schools it is losing the character of a rainy day subject or a stop-gap when the gA^mnasium or playing field is not available. Area directors of health are helpful in holding health activities at a high level of efficiency. In school systems without directors, school councils of persons whose interests include the health field are able to make schools health conscious. Modern school buildings and equipment and the program of school activities are designed to protect and develop the health of children. In our generation, physical education ha^ developed from an exercise period to an important phase of education. From its former preoccupation with muscular activity, circulation, respiration, and other bodily functions, physical education has come to center attention on the effect of physical ac- tivities on the entire personalities of children and youth. Physical education has numerous health implications and interrelations; it also contributes to many of the objectives of education. At its best, physical education determines and considers individual require- ments. Health examinations are required before participation in strenuous activities. Gymnastic and corrective exercises and calisthenics are nicely balanced against free activity, group games, and organized play. Attainable standards in physical education are individualized and competition is lim- ited to groups which are properly matched. Interschool competition still holds the spotlight in physical education ac- tivities. Years ago Bob Zuppke uttered his famous dictum that football has the same relation to physical education that bullfighting has to agriculture ; but Tommy Harmon and his teammates across the nation seem to be doing 194 American Association of School Administrators all right! Interschool competition uses the most skilful players, but the third team and the seventh team have been developed in intramural athletics which grow naturally from the general physical education program. High schools take pride in the universal participation of students in planned programs of sport. Emphasis is on appropriate development for each individual. The new physical education program has a distinct carry-over value. Too often star athletes have found their active days at an end when they turned in their suits after their final college game. Now sports which thrive, in spite of the term "minor" which is applied to them, carry on thru adult life. Golf, bowling, swimming, tennis, handball, riding, and dancing are cases in point. These activities are high in recreational value. They bring the sanity of physical balance as they develop opportunities for continuing personal relationships in group activities. They occupy time which, for youth, is critical. Communities with the soundest programs of physical education and recreation have least to fear from war conditions which affect surging, restless youth. Adolescents who are interested and active in such programs definitely are not problem material. Physical education has responded effectively to the demand that high- school boys be prepared for the rigors of basic training. The violent break between civil and military life has been minimized. Nutrition, rest, sleep, and correction of physical defects first have been promoted ; with these basic requirements met, rugged activities have been undertaken. The 1944 selectee, fresh from the junior commando course at high school, can take it. Ambitious youth who attempt double schedules have posed a difficult problem. Carrying full high-school work and doubling on a war-plant shift may be disastrous. Basic fatigue may result. In some instances such a pro- gram should not be undertaken. In any instance, there must be a proper balance of work and recreation, with adequate nutrition and rest. Health advisers, physical education activities, and recreational programs have served well in this difficult situation. As health and physical education became concerned with individuals as well as groups, the development of mental hygiene was inevitable. The growing child must adjust with his own changing self. Home conditions, school situations, and the maze of the future demand a continuing chain of adjustments. Atypical children require special treatment. Normal children require treatment which is individualized expertly. Fulsome attentions from home, school, and other organized agencies may smother adaptive ability and dull initiative. Recently an army officer observed that, given his selection of a company, he would limit that selection to former newsboys. Bringing children to face reality and to cope with its practical, pressing problems is an objective of the entire school ; it is a major concern of health, physical education, and recreation. What, then, is right with health and physical education? The attitude and the health of the present generation are improved. In our school pro- cedures we provide better organization and better instruction ; we make wider and more effective use of scientific developments and community re- sources. Health and physical education bring practical forces to bear on What's Right with the Schools in 1944 195 individual children as their conditions and their lives demand it. They spear- head our educational advance. The history of health and physical education in schools is encouraging; the present is sensitively adaptive and demonstrably effective ; the future is bright with promise. WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THE SCHOOLS KENNETH MC FARLAND, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, TOPEKA, KANS. Address at Kansas City Conference A year ago last spring I went down to my home town of Caney, Kansas, to deliver the commencement address. There is something flattering about being invited back to your home town to do the commencement speech. You forget for the moment that people do not go to commencements to hear the speakers — they go to see the children graduate. The record shows that in commencements where no speaker is used, the crowds are actually larger. However, I overlooked all such disconcerting thoughts as I sat there that evening on the stage of the same auditorium where I had graduated from high school. I got to thinking about the fine-looking class that was seated down in front of the platform, and found myself comparing their oppor- tunities in that community with the opportunities I had enjoyed as a high-school student in that same town. I recalled that the various oil com- panies in that community had always provided me with employment every day during the summer months and every Saturday during the school years. I always had sufficient spending money and had more clothes to wear than I have ever had since. Now what had been the situation with this splendid group which was graduating that night? The members of that class were eighteen years of age. That means they were born in 1924. They were five years old on that terrible Tuesday in 1929 when the great gong sounded in the New York Stock Exchange and the crash was on. Of course they were not thinking in terms of economics when they were five. That means they had never seen a normal economic year that they could remember. That means that in all their lives they had never seen a time when they had even a reasonably good chance of getting a pretty good job. You and I know that was the situation that prevailed all over America in the decade preceding the lend-lease boom of 1941. The youth coming out of our high schools and colleges had never seen a day in all their lives when they could get jobs that were worth having and that they really wanted. Yes, that is the way it was until 1941 when the lend-lease activity started. Then for the first time youth saw a day when there were jobs for everybody — that is, everybody excepting them. The government gave them jobs at $21 per month at the same time the boom was getting under way. 196 American Association of School Administrators Let me give you an example that will tell the story of thousands. This is a true illustration ; there is no use fabricating illustrations and marshaling straw men when true exhibits abound on every hand. Let us take the case of Charles Ellis. This young man graduated from Wichita High School East and the University of Wichita. He went thru those institutions during the depression period and had a perfectly hectic time getting enough money to keep his body and soul together. He not only had to pay his own way entirely, but he had to help some at home. Charles Ellis had just one ambition in life. He wanted to get a college degree and teach dramatics in a secondary school that was big enough to permit him to teach dramatics only. He got his degree at the height of the depression, but he could not get a job teaching dramatics all day. He could not get a job teaching anything. There were no jobs for inexperienced people. And Charles Ellis — with his fine talent, his superior training, and his college degree — delivered ice in Wichita for a year and a half. Finally, he got a job at Walton, Kansas, in a small high school where he taught dramatics one period and something else all the rest of the time. The year before last, Charles Ellis came to our system. At last he was in a school where he could concentrate exclusively on his dramatics. For the first time in all his life, Charles Ellis had a job that he wanted. In March of that year he was drafted. He did not get to finish the term. I remember when he came into my office to tell me about it. He sat down in the chair at the side of my desk and said, "Well, my number is up." Then he told me these things I have told you and some other things. He said, "I would like to get married, but I can't. I don't know when I ever can now. I guess I was just born at the wrong time. But," Charles Ellis said, "I'm glad to go. I really am. I believe in democracy. Democracy hasn't done much for me yet, but I believe in it. I believe it is the only form of government under which an ordinary fellow like myself would even have a chance. And I know we must win this war. We must either win it or the rats will rule for a thousand years. I understand all that, and I'm glad to go." Now, how about some of the older fellows who had good jobs all thru the lush 1920's, and because of seniority held on to all the good jobs thru the 1930's? What did they do when the current boom started in 1940 and 1941 ? A great many of them took jobs — not at $21 a month, but at $21 per day. Many of them cried and complained because they could not get more, and a great number of them called the young people "softies." They said, "We have raised a generation of pansies. Now the day of reckoning is here. This is the pay-off. What is going to happen to us?" This same sentiment was echoed and reechoed by many of our magazine writers and newspaper columnists. An example of the latter is that eminent military strategist, Dorothy Thompson. Now let me tell you about these softies we have raised in our homes and our schools. They are an inch taller and ten pounds heavier to the man than were their fathers who went into the armed services in World War I — the record shows that. These softies are driving dive bombers thru the air What's Right with the Schools in 1944 197 at four hundred miles an hour. These softies are facing infernos of fire on decks of American battleships such as our countrymen have never faced before. We have had more casualties in the United States Navy in this war already than we had in all the naval engagements in which our country , has participated in all of its previous history combined. In every other branch of the service, young Americans are facing situations which call for gal- lantry and courage such as Americans have never had to produce before. They are all over the world today defending democracy on faith — it takes faith to believe in something which you have not seen work. And I have a right to ask, Why are they doing it? Why zvill the geiieration for ivhich democracy did the least be so willing to do the most for democracy? I would not raise a question of that magnitude if I did not have an answer. Truly there is but one answer. That is a question I could safely debate in the town square with any man, and win. It does not take much of a lawyer to win a case if all the evidence is on his side. The reason why the genera- tion for which democracy has done the least, is willing to do the most for democracy will be found in this fact: All thru the depression period, when the door to every other opportunity was not only closed to the youth but was slammed shut in his face, the American public kept one door open. Some of the people wanted to lock that door too, but it was ever kept ajar. All during that depression era, the American people continued to provide eight, ten, twelve, sixteen years of public education. And it was the American school system, with its balanced program of health and activities, which almost alone prevented the depression generation from degenerating into a vagabond generation that would not have believed in anything and would not have defended anything! There is the first and most important thing that is right with the schools in every community in this land. A second significant aspect of the services the schools are rendering their communities in this year of 1944 will be found in the educational system's great contribution to home front stability and to the general morale. Ever since Pearl Harbor there has been a great outpouring of bromides and platitudes on the importance of the home front. In the last analysis we all know that to attempt a comparison between the sacrifices of the average civilian and those of the average serviceman is like trying to compare nothing with everything. Nevertheless, military and civilian authorities seem to agree that this war will be lost by the side whose home front cracks first. In view of this sobering truth, it should be recognized that the schools are making a mighty contribution in the fact that they constitute what is prob- ably the greatest single steadying force to be found in the American com- munity. The average child of today has seen most of his world come crashing down around his ears. His brothers, his sisters, and perhaps his father, have left the home circle to embark for points which he never dreamed existed a year or two ago. His mother may be frantically trying to hold the home together while she carries other heavy responsibilities in connection with the war effort. Nearly everything the child had assumed was fixed and final has proved to be shifting and uncertain. But as the earth trembles and the 198 American Association of School Administrators seas boil, he can still see his school standing like a rock in the deluge. To be sure the school has undergone many changes too, but to the average child it represents almost his last link with reason and reality. For at least six hours out of the twenty-four he can live in a world that still makes sense. In this world he can still work today and plan for tomorrow. How, can we ever measure the mighty contribution to morale which the schools are making by standing steady — steady like the tick of a clock in a thunder- storm ! I do not believe it is my task in this brief discourse to dwell upon the individual activities and services which the school systems of the nation are carrying on for their respective communities in these critical days. Of course, we are all selling bonds and stamps. Of course, we are conducting numerous kinds of special drives. Of course, we are doing preinduction training of different types and making a thousand and one adjustments to the needs of the hour. But underneath all these activities, I think I can see the emergence of certain hopeful trends. In the first place, the problems of the day are bringing forth more honest- to-goodness guidance on the part of teachers than they have ever previously thought possible or necessary. In the elementary schools we have been forced to realize that whereas the method of teaching reading may be the same as it was yesterday, the child who is learning to read is not the same. The second grader comes to school in the morning and announces, "My Daddy went to war yesterday and Mama cried all night last night. We were afraid to turn out the lights." Hopeless indeed is the teacher who does not recognize that such a situation calls for something more than the technic of subject- matter presentation. We have talked for many years of dealing with the whole child ; we are now confronted with stark necessity. In the secondary schools the general unrest among the students is un- precedented. The contemplation of military service, the competition of job opportunities, and the wartime spirit of eat-drink-and-be-merry have com- bined to present teachers with the most formidable challenge in the history of public education. Even the faculty's most rigid disciples of textbooks and outlines are being forced to do some guidance. The youth simply demand opportunities to talk about the great problems that are most vital to them. Teachers are learning that they cannot merely borrow a student's brain for a class period at a time and pour varying amounts of unrelated data into it while it is so detached from his total personality. Another encouraging byproduct of our united war activity is a further breaking down of the barriers between the school and the community. The crisis of war has caused thousands of American educators to take off their cellophane wrappers and come out where the people live. Fewer communities have their population divided between teachers and people. School per- sonnel is doubling between the classroom and war jobs. Teachers are sought out for special instruction to war workers and servicemen. School adminis- trators take over positions of community leadership on an increasingly wider scale. Said a chamber of commerce president in a sizable Kansas community, "We're ready to admit in this town that we can't do anything without the What's Right with the Schools in 1944 199 help of the school organization." It is well for the schools to remember the old rule for always having a job: "Make the boss think he cannot get along without you." This is a wonderful opportunity to convince the public that it cannot get along without the schools. And finally the schools are rendering a magnificent service in keeping alive the fundamental traditions of our American democracy, which offers the soundest basis for a successful postwar world. Perhaps the most abused word in our language during the past ten or fifteen years has been the word "democracy." The schools have been almost the only institution to remember that our democracy was originally intended to guarantee equality of oppor- tunity. Too many American politicians, organizations, and individual citi- zens began demanding equality of results. The schools personify democracy in offering every child an opportunity to gain the preparation which is the prerequisite to results. We can render no greater service than to keep this concept ever before our people. Last fall in our city we divided eighteen hundred high-school students into six groups of three hundred each, and it was my privilege to meet with each of these groups for one hour. In each of those meetings I would talk to the students for thirty minutes and then they would talk to me for thirty minutes. They were free to make any suggestions for the good of the schools or to ask any questions they wished. We gained some very practical and worthwhile suggestions. I have often thought we school administrators would do better if we spent more time asking students and teachers what they think, and less time telling them w^hat we think. The one question the most students asked in that series of meetings was this : "How can we prepare for this postwar world when we cannot pos- sibly know what kind of a world it will be?" And I was glad that I could truthfully say to them, "You do not have to know the exact specifications of that world in order to prepare for it. Because whatever kind of a world it is, ft will be a world in which people who are well trained, pleasing, personable, efficient, resourceful, industrious, loyal, and of good characfer will succeed if there is any success at all to be had. And whatever kind of a world it turns out to be, it is certain to be a place where people who are crude, ignorant, unskilled, uncooperative, and dishonest will fail. And, in the last analysis, that is all you really need to know now." I believe one of the rightest things our schools are doing in this year of 1944, is keeping before our youth the all-important fact that our victory over the powers of darkness which have been enshrouding this planet in the past decade will mean that this old world will continue to be a place where the homely virtues, the fundamental precepts of our American de- mocracy, will still pay dividends to him who honors them. The turn in the fortunes of war as it leads on to victory will give our present generation of youth its first conclusive evidence that right is not forever on the scaffold and wrong is not forever on the throne. 200 American Association of School Administrators PRESERVING THE AMERICAN HERITAGE EDGAR G. DOUDNA, SECRETARY AND DIRECTOR OF TEACHER TRAINING, STATE BOARD OF REGENTS OF NORMAL SCHOOLS, MADISON, WIS. Address at Chicago Conference Preserving the American heritage in twenty-five minutes is an overwhehn- ing assignment. Not even a political stuffed shirt could in this time repeat all of the platitudes which explain the basic principles of the American way. Possibly a social studies class in an ultraprogressive school might do it. Recently one young lady from the seventh grade reported to her admiring parents that "this week we finished inflation, next wTek we begin postwar planning." I shall be more restrained and attempt to discuss but one aspect — and a much neglected aspect — of the development, preservation, and trans- mission of the American heritage. Since Pearl Harbor there has been much searching of the heart and re- examination of history to discover the meaning of America and how we got this way. A flood of books about democracy, its meaning and its duties, crowd closely those dealing with the war and the postwar world. Many of them are inspirational and hortatory, informing us that "It's Later Than You Think," "Yesterday Is Dead," and "Tomorrow Is America's." They tell us that now is "A Time for Greatness" and that we must "Have Faith for the Future." This attitude is a wholesome change from the intellectual arrogance and moral cynicism of the period between the two world wars. Then the not-so- intelligentsia, who shouted their "perpetual impatience with contemporary America," pretty well dominated the academic world ; at least they were the most vocal. They developed a revisionist history of World War I to show us how gullible we had been to follow an imperialistic and sentimental president who was pulling England's chestnuts out of the fire. They stressed the wickedness of the Versailles Treaty, which they said was a vindictive settlement put over by four wicked old men on a betrayed but not defeated people. Germany was not an aggressor, but the victim of the other great nations who were afraid of her growing economic power. They exposed the propaganda of the "merchants of death," the intrigues of war-mongers, and our political and diplomatic ineptitude. They rewrote the biographies of our national heroes in terms of Freudian complexes and Marxian economics, and the process of debunking made our idols seem pretty shoddy. On convention platforms — even this one — and in paprika sprinkled pamph- lets, eminent educators challenged the teachers to make a new social order — as if they could, would, or even felt that they should. Of the constitution and its makers they said: "It is not too much to say that every assumption about the world of God, of matter, of man, and of the fathers, is as dead as their breath . . . yet to this antiquated makeshift, constructed by shrewd but callous men, we Americans must swear allegiance." Fortunately for us we could not escape history. One of its inexorable laws is that nothing which is really progressive can break with the past. Three What's Right with the Schools in 1944 201 centuries on this continent has developed an American tradition based upon the best of the old world, modified by its impact on a constantly movinj^ frontier. This heritage, preserved in home, church, and school, kept the people from surrendering to the intellectual and moral pessimism of the times and from falling for the propaganda of those who were fearful of all propaganda, except their own. Their fundamental common sense, which I suppose is a subconscious reaction of what they felt and believed, told them that not all of the lights had gone out. They still believed in the star of their destiny and followed its kindly light without too much concern for the distant scene. They might be intellectually limited, but they had an awareness that the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were sound and must be preserved. The common sense of the common man told him that while there was much wrong in the world, he must not surrender his faith in the wisdom and integrity of the founding fathers. This may have been a cultural lag, but that inertia, that stolid and magnificent resistance to the prophets of doom, was due in no small measure to the influence of the common school and the uncelebrated common-school teacher, the forgotten and neglected stabilizers of the American heritage. The conservation of this inheritance always was, is now, and will be the real business of the school. The forces which have held us together, which cemented the colonies, states, regions, and nation, were those intangibles commonly called spiritual. They never ceased to operate in the home, the church, and the school. Here was a sort of unconscious tuition which held the nation steady in those periods when most of the external evidences made it seem to be sweeping blindly on to destruction. It is easy to write in derision of the insanities, stupidities, and infantile enthusiasms of any period and make a pretty damaging case against the common people. Such a period can be called the Mauve Decade, the Mad Forties, the Gay Nineties, the Era of Glorious Nonsense, or any smart caption which exposes the weaknesses of a period. But it's only part of the truth, interesting but out of focus. Running deep, and true, and sure were the currents which, rising to the surface, threw off a mist which made another kind of writer see only rain- bows and halos. So he sang: God's in His heaven, All's right with the world. Such a false and easy optimism of automatic and mechanical social prog- ress, of reform, of Utopia, is quite as much out of perspective as the picture of total depravity and abysmal ignorance. Luckily the plainer and simpler virtues survived both the dreamers of a never-never land, and those who jeered and made merry with the lunacies of the so-called human race. The genesis of the American tradition is found in the character of the explorer, the pathfinder, the frontiersman, and the settler. They were not simple people who fell into nice categories and simple patterns. Neither were their motives and drives unmixed. Economic, cultural, religious, political, educational, and social strands were all woven into the pattern of the Ameri- 202 American Association of School Administrators can dream. In 1781, in his interesting Letters from an American Farmer, St. John Crevecoeur asks "Who is this American?" and concludes that "Americans are the western pilgrims, who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour and industry which began long since in the east; they Avill finish the great circle." The one strand in the complex pattern that we shall consider is education. One of the earliest chroniclers of the Middlewest, Mrs. John Kinzie, prophesied schools would "with Christianity make the wilderness blossom as the rose." The genesis of America was due to education. For example, Columbus and Raleigh were highly educated men, and no greater scholars than the Jesuit missionaries who traversed the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys ever explored lands where wilderness was king. Their reports, The Jesuit Relations, are monuments of scholarship, energy, and faith. The first settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth have been made immortal by Captain John Smith and William Bradford who wrote intensively of the beginnings of America. The leaders in Massachusetts were highly educated ; more than half of the clergy were graduates of the best universities of England and Scotland. Never did their enthusiasm for the kingdom of the mind lag fai behind their zeal for building upon earth the kingdom of Heaven. The members of the Continental Congress, a much underestimated group of men, were the intellectual peers of any legislative body that ever met anywhere at any time. Of the fifty-five members who signed the Declaration of Independence, twenty-seven were college graduates arid twenty more had an education which was fully and fairly equivalent to four years of college. This college and university training was in the classical tradition based on the mastery of Latin and Greek. It meant the reading and studying of the greatest books of the ages dealing wMth problems of government. The im- mortal document which they produced and which Thomas Jefferson formu- lated is a distillation of the best political philosophy of the Western World — • Greek, Roman, French, Scotch, English. Eleven years later another group in convention at Philadelphia made the Constitution. In 1835 the Frenchman, De Tocqueville, wrote that this con- vention "contained the choicest talents and noblest hearts that ever assembled in America." Twenty-nine members of this convention were graduates of colleges and universities, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Pennsyl- vania, William and Mary, Oxford, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. Their de- liberations were those of men of learning, character, intelligence, and in- tegrity. The "father of the Constitution" was little Jimmie Madison, who had studied at Princeton with that intellectual and political giant. President John Witherspoon. Not only had he studied all of the great political docu- ments of history, but he was at home in literature, theolog\', and philosophy, and as one of his contemporaries puts it, "he had a very handsome wit." The impact of these men has never been lost to us, not even in the years when it was fashionable to regard them as economic determinists seeking only to perpetuate their class interests. Lord Bryce said in the American Commonwealth that "the Constitution deserves the veneration with which the American has been accustomed to What's Right with the Schools in 1944 203 regard it." This veneration of the Constitution and respect for the founding fathers was not an automatic growth. Everyone who has read anything about the critical years between Yorktown and Washington's inauguration knows how desperate was the struggle for ratification, and at times how hopeless seemed the dream that a nation could be formed from thirteen separate states. Many economic and political forces were at work which might ultimately have brought about the union, but at least three salient influences were determinative. The first was the series of newspaper articles by Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay, later collected into the volume of eighty-five papers which we know as The Federalist. These clear, cogent, forceful expositions and com- mentaries on the Constitution had enormous influence. They reached the common man thru secondary sources. The Federalist, the Declaration, and the Constitution are the three basic documents of our heritage. Only slightly less important is the Ordinance of 1787, passed in the dying hours of the old Continental Congress. This Ordinance for the gov- ernment of the great Northwest Territory was a second influence for unity. Never before had a group of states with divisive interests held such an empire. As you know, five great states and part of another were formed from this territory. The Ordinance itself is a document which deserves much more study than it has received, for it outlined a unique system of territorial government, it contained a bill of rights, it forbade slavery, and it had that great pronouncement about education which has never ceased to be effective. The third influence was the common school and its textbooks and teachers. They made a literate people who felt and believed that theirs was a heritage of freedom, opportunity, and responsibility. Some of the impulse for schools came from the people themselves — a people who were generally shrewd, sagacious, hopeful, practical, and conservatively progressive. When Jefferson and Franklin and Washington declared the necessity for schools and for universal education, they were understood, for if they were not of the people, they spoke to them and for them. Anyone could thrill when Jeffer- son proclaimed his "eternal hostility to every form of tyranny over the mind of man" and proposed a system of free universal public schools. Five years before The Federalist was written and four years before the Constitution was formed and the Ordinance of 1787 was enacted there was issued the first edition of a book which next to the Bible was the most widely used and most influential book ever circulated in America — Webster's Blue Backed Speller. It was prepared by a young schoolmaster who said, "For my part, I frankly acknowledge I have too much pride to stand indebted to Great Britain for books to teach our children the letters of the alphabet." So Noah Webster prepared his Grammatical histitute of the English Lan gtiage—wh'xch we speak of as the speller — in three parts. Part One was designed to simplify and unify the language and to make it easy of acquisition for Americans and foreigners. He hoped it would root out improprieties and vulgarisms brought from Europe and break up dialect'^ by simplifying accurate pronunciation. Part Two was devoted to moral 204 American Association of School Administrators and religious instruction by "inspiring youth with a contempt of the unmanly vices of mankind, and a love of virtue, patriotism, and religion." The third part was eventually devoted to patriotic instruction. In the preface the author said, "It is the business of Americans to select the wisdom of all nations, as the basis of her constitutions — to avoid their errors — to prevent the introduction of foreign vices and corruption, and check the career of her own — to promote virtue and patriotism — to embel- lish and improve the sciences — to diffuse a uniformity and purity of lan- guage— to add superior dignity to this infant Empire and to human nature." This little book of 119 pages, which the contract with the printer re- quired to be sent out with blue paper covers — hence the name — sold out in nine months. Edition after edition was prepared, each carefully revised. In 1794 a catechism on the Federal Constitution was added and the influ- ence of The Federalist went out to every school district and hamlet. In 1850, when the population was about 23,000,000, sales ran to over a million and this rate continued until the educational revolution was well under way. Some school districts used it for more than a century. Over a hundred million copies were sold. It went into almost every pioneer home ; it fol- lowed into the school ; it made possible our American English — a unifying force hardly to be overestimated. No other nation has ever acquired such a linguistic unity, and thru that language an understanding of its heritage. Even the War between the States didn't break these bonds. Following Webster came Morse with his geography, Goodrich with his- tory, Colburn with arithmetic, Murray with grammars, and the immortal McGuffey with his readers. Even Hawthorne tried his hand at a textbook. The impact that these books had upon our life is immeasurable. In a sense they were the curriculum of the common school. The educational awakening which produced Horace Mann and Henry Barnard had been prepared for by the growth of district schools, the dis- tribution of textbooks, and the work of the schoolmaster and school ma'am. By 1846 — which Devoto terms the Year of Decision — the foundations of the nation had been made so secure that even four years of war could not undo it. The direct and indirect instruction and discipline of the school, the textbook writer, and the schoolteacher had accomplished much that Jefferson and Franklin had hoped for, but not all. The traditions — and by 1846 much was traditional — had found perma- nent expression in documents, speeches, books, poems, and songs. From these a large part of the reading material of the common school w^as com- piled. The copy books of the penmanship classes were filled with maxims, mottoes, adages, proverbs, and precepts and were thus the repository of most of those moral and spiritual experiences and formulas which had become part of the social heritage. They had the: Fundamental laws: Which are the key to decency — Those rusty rules that give To age and youth the guiding truth By which all free men Jive. , What's Right with the Schools in 1944 205 Here then were the materials upon which the common school teacher based her teaching and which the pupils studied and memorized — often with little appreciation or understandino;. But in after years men and women recalled them, quoted them, and acted upon them. In no small measure they had much to do in determining the social consciousness and conscience, for they pervaded the thinking of the men and women who were building the new states of the Great Valley and the prairies, and who were looking westwar^l across the mountains to the Pacific. A collateral influence in the development of schools and the preservation of the American heritage was the constant infiltration of ex-teachers into the public life outside of the schoolroom. Until very recently teaching was a transient and temporary job, an economic expedient offering a little ready money to young people on their way to some permanent occupation, or a means of earning enough to continue their education. It was often the only opportunity for young women on their way to the matrimonial market. Many used it as "a steppingstone to something lower." The most casual study of American biography reveals an amazing num- ber of prominent men and women who taught school while studying for a profession — law, medicine, engineering, journalism — or trying to accu- mulate a little capital for a business venture. And literally millions of American mothers were once schoolteachers. They had very little profes- sional training as we know it, but they were generally the better pupils, with a zeal for learning, an affinity for books, and a good deal of ambition. When they left teaching, they carried over a belief in schools and a desire to extend and improve them. Many such teachers achieved direct or indirect fame, but the majority re- mained, of course, relatively obscure. Nathan Hale walked from the school- room, to the army, to martyrdom, to fame. Others depended upon the memory of their pupils for their immortality. Such was George Haskell, the schoolmaster of Whittier's Snowbound. This "brisk wielder of the birch and rule" was a young Dartmouth student turned schoolmaster for a season. He became a physician who went west to Rockford, Illinois, helped found a college for women, and later returned to the East where he was active in the establishment of industrial schools for boys. Thousands of such men and women carried the torch for the promotion of education. More than this they were leaders in supporting libraries, lyceums, forums,' and every cultural enterprise which would make better communities and a better nation. Today they are serving in all sorts of capacities without compensation and often at considerable personal sacrifice. Sometimes an ex-teacher on a board of education is too officious, but for every one of this kind there are thousands who serve with no thought except to make the schools like those they dreamed of before they left the schoolroom for more remunerative callings. It may be that we have underemphasized this influence and have been too ready to quarrel with requirements so easy that unprepared boys and girls could change over vacation from pupil to teacher. There were compensating social values, actual and potential, in this experi- 206 American Association of School Administrators ence. I hope someone will study the unique contribution of ex-teachers to the American heritage. As I indicated in the beginning, there was some danger for the quarter of a century before December 7, 1941, that our heritage was being squan- dered, neglected, or lost. The conduct of the young men who constitute our armed forces on the land, the sea, and in the air has revealed to us how much they had that we did not believe them to possess. Every day come fresh revelations of their courage, audacity, initiative, .resourcefulness, decency, and honor. They are in a real sense reeducating us by revealing the untapped powers, the vision, the courage that lie within us all. The home, the church, and the school were more effective than we had reason to believe they were. Their indirect teaching had counteracted the books, the speeches, and the super-intellectualism that did its best to divert us from the American way by trying to carry over the impersonal and objective methods of physical science into the areas where it is imperative to be personal, subjective, and simple. The prudential never yet won the final victory over the moral, and moral judgments lie at the bottom of our social relationships, however much we may emphasize the economic motive. We shall need to be on our guard that these same forces and same leaders who for a quarter of a century did their best — honestly but mistakenly — to do us in, do not again mislead us. For the most part little men, with partial knowledge, small understanding, but with academic assurance and arrogance, were spokesmen for the period. That sort of leadership has had its day. A decent humility would seem to make them aware of how wrong they were and how fitting would be their retirement from the front lines . It is as true now as in Jefferson's day that the Four Freedoms are de- pendent upon the Three R's — that the American heritage is based upon the decency and intelligence of the common man who knows how to make his mass judgments effective. This cannot be trusted to accidents of history or to the underground transmission of the basic principles which are embodied in our political documents and their great interpreters in poetry, song, drama, fiction, and biography. Education for democracy must be explicit, inclusive, and greatly simple. Our children must learn our history with more insight, imagination, and feeling than is required to answer objective tests of factual material, valuable and necessary as facts are. Thru right teaching they may come to understand something of man's capacity for greatness as well as his more evident shortcomings. They must learn more of the mechanisms of society and how to make it function with reasonable success. This means the study of history, of government, of literature, of everything which will help make them know better how to interpret facts, and especially those com- monplaces with social meanings and implications. It must help them learn how to clear their minds for making decisions which daily they will have to make. Such instruction will be based upon materials somewhere between "the hundred best books" and the pep books w^hich purport to teach how to influence people and sell them bills of goods. We must aim at the stars hut keep our feet on the ground. In short, it forms the total pattern of What's Right with the Schools in 1944 207 education, and is not limited to a group of subjects in a category labeled "social studies." Every subject and activity which leads to rationality and integrity and to accepting responsibility for moral judgments is included in the school's program of revealing, understanding, and preserving the American heritage. This is no simple job to be attained by administering capsules of educational vitamins. It will require effort, sympathy, dis- cipline, and disappointment. Our position today is not unlike that of the Maccabees when they recovered Jerusalem and restored the temple, and revived the laws of their fathers. They saw that they must teach a new generation the story of their past so they attempted to condense five books into one, saying: "For considering the multitude of books and the difficulty that they find that desire to undertake the narrations of histories because of the multitude of matter, we have taken care for those indeed that are willing to read ; and for the studious, that they might more easily commit to memory; and that all that read might receive profit." And as to ourselves indeed, in undertaking this work of abridging, we have taken in hand no easy task, j^ea, rather "a business full of watching and sweat." WHAT'S RIGHT WITH THE EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM IN 1944 AGNES SAMUELSON, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, IOWA STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, DES MOINES, IOWA Address at Kansas City Conference The transformation of our nation from a peacetime to a wartime basis has been made in record time. The products of our schools have been able to adjust themselves to the emergency with unprecedented speed and efficiency. The response of the American public to the threat to democracy is to out-produce and to out-fight the enemies of freedom. Witness the war production on the home front and the mobilization of our armed forces on the military front. These Herculean achievements stagger the imagina- tion. They demonstrate that democratic people have the competency and morale necessary for fighting a total war. They write new chapters in the story of democracy. On these living pages are found the overall answers to the question as to what is right with our schools yesterday and today. We are now supplying the bulk of the material for the global battle fronts. To do this our people by the millions have transformed their activ- ities. They have learned new jobs and are doing them with greater skill than other nations which have spent years in preparation. Farmers have doubled their food production quotas; millions of workers have found their places in the assembly lines. Civilian defense, bond drives, scrap and other collections, rationing, and other mass movements have been put into operation. This conversion to production and other war activities has 208 American Association of School Administrators taken months, not years, to achieve. An illiterate people could not have accomplished this feat. Over ten million of those noble souls who are hammering out the allied victory for freedom wear the uniform of our country. Thousands upon thousands of them left the schools and colleges just a few years ago, or a few months ago, or even a few hours ago. Now they are engaged in warfare. Along with our unconquerable allies they are fighting the forces of aggression which would wipe out the gains of history, scuttle human rights, and return civilization to the jungle. They are pushing back the Philistines and making it possible for humanity to resume its trek toward the land of Canaan. The technical training of these men and women in our armed forces has been carried out with the speed for which the Army and Navy are acclaimed. No military stafif could have trained them in the science of modern warfare had they lacked that background of education which gives them the capacity to learn. This attainment is made possible thru the mental acumen and the adaptability which are developed in youth in their public- school experiences. Our fighting forces have other qualities which are just as essential as any amounts of specified training w-hich they may or may not have had ; their faith in the democratic way of life, their love of freedom, and their ingenuity. Military officials have commented upon the cleanness of char- acter and keenness of intellect of youth entering the armed forces. The individuality, initiative, and inventiveness of our fighting troops are in sharp contrast as to the memorized rules and goosestepping methods of our enemies. The difference lies in the social concepts of the educational systems from whence they come. The fidelity of our warriors to humanity and their spirit in combat did not just happen. They are the direct result of our educational program. The American school is the highest expression of the democracy they are fighting to preserve. They are exemplifying on the battlefield the knowledge, loyalty, and discipline taught in the schools of free people. The remarks of an American correspondent who saw the all-day attack on Pearl Harbor and watched the people of Honolulu are also in point. Joseph C. Harsch of the Chrisfia/i Science Monitor, who had also served in Berlin, had this to say: I can testify today that the Americans can take it. Here is a city with more potential dissension in it than any on the mainland. This is an extremely mixed population of divergent antecedents. Onr thnig all have in common is American public-school training. I am beginning to think that the American public school is a far more political force than the Hitler youth organization. For this city, which might have been rent into angry factions, took it better than Berlin. Without the crucial contribution of our educational institutions we could not have trained our huge armies in the technicalities of modern warfare and made the most of their disciplined intelligence, resiliency, and resource- fulness. We could not have mobilized our whole economy in support of What's Right with the Schools in 1944 209 the war effort and secured the hi^h level of performance in fields, factories, and offices. We could not have provided outlets for youth's will-to-help thru preinduction and postinduction courses and war activities. We could not have trained adults and youth in civilian defense, nutrition, canning, agriculture, conservation, and other war-related areas. We could not have developed the morale which is the very essence of victory. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. The schools manned their battle stations in 1942 and 1943 when they sold more- than three hundred million dollars worth of war stamps and bonds; collected millions of tons of scrap ; turned in thousands of tons of waste paper and fats ; sponsored over one million school and home victory gardens; made six hundred thou- sand precisely scaled aircraft models; canned countless quarts of home- grown vegetables and fruits ; stepped-up instruction in physical fitness, health, vocational and industrial education, science, mathematics, home economics, agriculture, global geography, safety, inter-American under- standings; introduced preinduction and postinduction courses; devoted mil- lions of hours to rationing ; followed the issues and developments of the war; and gave new emphasis to citizenship. It may be that some of these activities belong in the area of community service, but they are part and parcel of the educational program. This reference to the wartime record of our schools and colleges is not intended to discount in any way the achievements of others or to claim undue credit for education. Winning the war is the synchronized task of all forces and individuals, military and civilian ; there are no sidelines in total war. It is given to point out the fact, often overlooked, that educa- tion nourishes and sustains all other public services and makes their ac- complishments possible ; that the contributions of our schools and colleges to the victory are not mere footnotes to the history of this war. They are large print. Such is the prolog to the 1944 program of our schools. What is right with the educational program in 1944? This superlative record of specialized wartime adjustments as exemplified in the rapid conversion of the program to emergency needs is answer enough to this question. Schools are serving as instruments of victory, are furnishing the underpinning for the com- petence of our people, and are building the morale which keeps us on the beam. The question as to whether these achievements can continue in high gear in view of the mounting handicaps is now before us. It should be pointed out that certain losses in the schools have not been offset by cor- responding gains. Future program performance is jeopardized by the rapid turnover of personnel, teacher shortages, lowered teaching standards, in- adequate salaries, unavoidable interruptions, excessive out-of-school de- mands upon teachers, heavy teaching loads, lack of equipment and supplies, withdrawal of pupils, transportation conditions, competition for funds and personnel, and other factors. Teacher education enrolments have de- clined 60 percent of their prewar figures. The total number of teachers 210 American Association of School Administrators leaving the schools this year is likely to reach 80,000. How will this gap be closed? Ways and means must be found whereby schools may continue their crucial contributions to the war effort thru programs matched to the war emergency. Many things bespeak the unremitting efforts of our schools to make the winning of the war and the implementing of the peace their first order of business. Many specifics show that the schools are entirely worthy of public confidence and support as bulwarks of democracy and citadels of citizenship. The items listed herewith are not final or complete; they are offered as springboards for discussion of what is right with the educational program in 1944. 1. The coiiversioji of the program to meet the emergency needs of our country and of youth entering the armed forces The discussion of this point need not be prolonged or further elaborated. SulKce it to say that the account of the contributions of the programs to the war effort will be one of the significant chapters in the history of this war. This record should find its place in the hearts of the people as well as the archives. It is a story in itself in every community. While fresh in mind and in performance, the facts should be compiled and preserved for future refer- ence in the permanent records of every school. 2. Persistent efforts to uphold basic instruction for the oncoming chil- dren who will not participate in this war but who will have the task of ?naking the peace work The school program is doing double duty as it holds the line for the children coming up as well as inaugurates specialized emergency courses for youth and adults. Children cannot wait. They do not grow up twice. Their education is not a luxury which can be dispensed with in time of trouble without serious injury to the future. It is an imperative in war and peace. They will live in the world which is being forged out of the furnace of this war. They will not write the peace but they will put it into effect. They will be air-minded. A trip to London by air will be like a trip to Kansas City for us by the Rocket. It is well for this earth-bound generation to remember that and to foresee the implications of that and other inevitable changes. The schools are endeavoring to hold fast to basic elements in the pro- gram. The mission of the elementary grades is the growth and development of children. To that end their task remains the same — that of providing the solid foundation needed to solve the problems of war and peace. The funda- mental emphasis upon the cultivation of skills, attitudes, insights, ideals, habits, and appreciations continues. At the same time, the adaptations to the emergency and the changes in emphasis due to peacetime needs are taking form. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 211 3. Definite concern for broadening/ the educational program to meet the needs of groups ivhich by and large are not noiv being adequately served The emergency has accented the need for extending educational services to 3'oung children, 3'outh in and out of school, and adults who wish to learn new skills or supplement their education. Reconstruction will add other groups to be served including returning veterans and war workers. In the interests of equalizing educational opportunities for all our people, library, recreation, welfare, and other services should be provided or increased. Effective education for all is an imperative in the people's peace. Britain has already mapped out a broad program of educational expansion. Our educators are not off the beam when they point out the changes which should be made in the educational program in order that the promises of democracy may be fulfilled. Many of these changes are long overdue. 4. Intensive interpretation of the needs of the program to the end that schools may continue to serve as instruments of victory and agencies of reconstruction Educators are becoming more and more aware of the necessity of capital- izing the achievements and interpreting the needs of the schools. The story of education in war and peace is good material for the screen and the radio. All it needs is an interpreter to give it color and human interest. Civilian defense, rationing, and other war activities are bringing the people to the schoolhouse and the teachers to the communities. This exchange of services in the common cause is helping to bring about better understandings and closer relationships. In spite of the part taken by education in the drama of this war, there is chatter about scores in certain history tests, for example. The answer is that the alumni of our schools are making new history on land, on the sea, and in the air. There is the accusation that the sinister motive of the supporters of federal aid for education is to foist the socialistic form of government upon our republic rather than to equalize educational oppor- tunity for children. The answer is the service flags in our educational institutions with their stars for students and faculty members who are serving the colors. Some of these men and women will not return ; their stars have turned to gold. They have given their life blood to save democ- racy. "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" is their epitaph. There is the allegation that education has lost its starch ; that schools have become flabby; that youth has grown soft and irresponsible, undis- ciplined, and indisposed toward work. The answer is that these same young people are now carrying out special missions in the burning sands of the desert, the stinging cold of the Arctic, the hardships of the jungle, and the dangers of the hilltops. They are experiencing fox holes, prison camps, bombs, fleas, hunger, shells, disease, and death. They are receiving citations for distinguished action over and beyond the line of dutv. 212 American Association of School Administrators There is the assertion that schools are not equipped and school authorities are too academic-minded to administer, in their own local communities, new educational services to youn^ children, youth, adults, returninjf vet- erans, and war workers. On the basis of that assumption, schoolboards are by-passed and noneducational agencies are set up to handle these aspects of the educational program. The answer is that our American schools were established for the purpose of assuring educational advantages to all and are the channels thru which tax funds appropriated for enlarging the scope of the educational program should function. One of the encouraging signs is that professional associations, parent- teacher associations, and other interested groups are developing interpreta- tive programs on current problems and their implications for the future. To the degree that they spotlight crucial needs, give meaning to statistics, drive the facts home in five-cent words, and arouse lay and professional action on behalf of education, they are casting their bread upon the waters. Returns should follow in terms of the public interest which will make it expedient for politicians to sponsor legislation for the betterment of schools. 5. Increased attention to planning the. postwar program of education Educators are also mindful of the problems implicit in the peace. Some uf these problems are already on the doorsteps of the schools. The effects jf the war upon the school program, upon school personnel, upon school finances, and upon the school structure are acute right now. They will be even more serious in the postwar period. What new problems will demobilization bring? What modifications should be made in the program to provide for the education of returning veterans and war workers? What changes should be made in converting the program from war to peace? What areas will need greater emphasis? What shall be done about guidance and work experience? How can the teaching profession be rebuilt ? How can the machinery of support and structure be made more effective? The functioning of the program depends upon personnel and finance. These are no pigmy prob- lems. The adjustments of the program to peacetime needs hang upon these answers. These and other issues loom large. Hundreds of communities and com- missions are at work on them. Literature on the subject is increasing. Educators are looking ahead to the program needs of tomorrow. 6. Greater synchronization of the zvork of professional organizations thru the NEA War and Peace Fund Campaign The success already achieved in this undertaking indicates that the pro- fession is alert to its problems. It is focusing attention upon need of strengthening our educational associations in terms of the tasks facing them and of integrating their programs along common objectives. H these organ- izations are to exert the leadership expected of them, they must be equipped to do so. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 213 The outcomes will be more than financial in scope. The funds collected have already made it possible to provide new services over and beyond the regular program. They have brought the issue of solidarity squarely before the profession and made thousands of educators more sensitive to their professional obligations. The results will be reflected in greater organized effort in reaching professional goals. The Blueprint is an example of inten- sive planning on the part of one state teachers association to secure the machinery and support needed to make its program come alive. ^ 7. Devoted service to the improvement of the educational program on the part of teachers who are making their contribution to victory thru teaching To voice a word of tribute to those faithful souls who man the schools as their battle stations is not to disparage the services of those who have returned as reserves in the emergency. It is not to detract one iota from the gratitude due our comrades who are defending on the battlefield the very principles for which education stands. What better way is there to repay the debt we owe those who are serving the colors than to build living monuments in the form of better schools for their children? That's the mission of the un-uniformed workers in our schools. The schools must go on, if the fruits of victory are to be realized by the oncoming generation. Teaching is not trivial. It is patriotic service in war and in peace. "They also serve who stay at home and teach" may be said of those who feel that their best contributions can be made by helping to prepare children for living under the skies of freedom. They deserve the accolade and the orchids, but a raise in salary in terms of living costs, would be more to the point. Beside the general and the statesman stands the teacher defending and preserving and improving the American way of life. That is the greatest thing that is right with our educational program in 1944. THE SCHOOLS AS PRESERVERS OF OUR CULTURAL HERITAGE JULIUS E. WARREN, STATE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, BOSTON, MASS. Address at New York Conference Over a considerable period of years I have been more concerned with the problem of where are we going in education than with the question where have ive been. As I have approached this general theme, "What's Right with the Schools in 1944," I have found myself tending to think in the area of what can be right, if we have the vision, the understanding, and the support of the American people in our program of education. As we face directly into this aspect of the theme, "The Schools as Pre- servers of Our Cultural Heritage," we must go deeply into the very 1 Iowa State Teachers Association. The Blueprint. Des Moines, Iowa: the Association (415 Shops Bldg.). 214 American Association of School Administrators foundation of education itself, the foundation from which we, who teach, derive our reason for bein^ and by which the results of our efforts must be measured. A multitude of superficial things can be rijjht with the schools, yet the basic education offered there can be bad. Only if the foundation is right, only if the form, the substance, and the method of education spring directly from the American culture, transmit it effectively', and contribute to the improvement of that culture, has education a right to a clean bill of health. Twenty minutes is a short time in which to discuss any one of these foundations, especially when one considers how diverse is the thing we call the American culture. I shall be able to raise and discuss only a few questions. Is there any evidence that the schools have transmitted the American cul- ture to the present generation? Let's look at the record. The men now at war are the pupils that were. The culture studied only yesterday in the classrooms of America is now defended in foreign fields by the generation to whom it was transmitted. In fact, the culture got across so clearly that we now see 12,000,000 men rise to arms in its defense and a civil population of 120,000,000, heterogeneous in ethnic and cultural backgrounds, rise united to its support. So united are we in essential loyalty to that culture that the millions who conform to the necessities of the present at-war living condi- tions go quietly about this business and are ignored in the newspaper stories of America while the occasional delinquent is played high in the headlines. Who transmitted the American culture to the degree it is now possessed by the people of this country? The home, the church, the school are the chief moulders of behavior. To say that the home did it alone is to be un- mindful of great numbers of homes that are simply dormitories. The "tree that grew in Brooklyn" is hardy but rare. To say that the churches did it alone is to be careless with the facts of church attendance. The one common element of cultural experience shared by everyone in this now united nation is attendanpe at school. As we look at the present status of these institutions and the changes they have undergone since the last war, who is to say that education's contribution is least among them ? What is the culture the schools have sought to preserve? The wisdom of American law makes our position clear. Education is a function of the state, not of the local community, not of the federal government. Tradition- ally, the one adjective most frequently applied to schools is the word "com- mon." The common schools have found a place in our language along with common law, commonwealth, and common sense. Taking our authority from the state, as we do, our schools have become what the people are. The schools reflect with high fidelity the culture by "which they are surrounded and from which their teachers and pupils are drawn. Where the school's environment is characterized by initiative, independence, resourcefulness, the drive to explore frontiers either geographic or intellectual, the demand that citizens attain a high degree of social competence, a respect for technology, a desire for economic well-being, the willingness to accept moral responsibility, a belief in the worth of the individual — these things you will find in their schools. Similarly, if the schoolhouse is surrounded by social tensions and conflicts, by the pulling and hauling of political groups, by people depressed What's Right with the Schools in 1944 215 economically or spiritually — these things, too, you will find in their schools. Because we, the schools, are they, the people, we necessarily partake of their strengths and confess to their weaknesses. The schools of the several states have done a real job of preserving and amplifying the broad, general aspects of the American culture that make us strong as a nation — the seeking of truth, the desire for progress, the respect for knowledge, and faith in the goodness of one's neighbor. But the school's ability and readiness to take part in, and go forward with, a chang- ing culture, raises a serious question : Are the schools actively and efficiently improving the American culture? Here again there is great variation. The New York State Educational Conference Board survey has demonstrated that schools expending $150 per pupil per year are, as a group, effectively refining, pruning, perfecting the culture as they transmit it to the learner. The average learner exhibits a high level of competence in using the fundamental tools of the culture and an increasing amount of time is devoted to the building of moral, social, and intellectual attitudes of a higher order than generally prevails in the society from which the child comes. The application of scientific methods of teaching has made it possible to reduce the time devoted tradi- tionally to the so-called fundamentals, thereby freeing time for the school to conduct pupil activities from which the child will learn, thru actual participation, valuable lessons in democratic living. Schools of this sort are not only preserving the culture, they are improving, developing, and refining the culture its graduates will seek to perpetuate when they are adults. On the other hand, those communities which are buying or are able to buy only $40, $50, $60 worth of education for each child each year cannot contribute very largely to the improvement of the American way of life. Too often, schools thus impoverished lack the vigor to dis- charge their responsibility to improve the very environment to which they, themselves, have fallen victim. Study upon study has shown that in educa- tion, as in other human enterprise, you get about what you pay for. Until the states and their constituent communities resolve to level up the quality of education by providing adequately for its support, some of our schools will not only fail to improve the contemporary culture entrusted to them, but will continue to transmit to the next generation some of the now out-moded elements of the culture of the last generation. In my own state, there are instances where one community is expending less than half as much for education per pupil as its next door neighbor. Whether the child receives a $75 education or $150 one depends on which side of the town line his home happens to be located. In comparison with its taxable wealth, however, the community spending half as much is exerting much greater effort than its neighbor. These and similar situations chal- lenge us all to lend our support to measures designed to equalize educa- tional opportunities. As long as education remains a function of the state, the state, in the interests of its own perpetuation, cannot entrust entirely the support of education to the happenstance of community wealth and alertness. This is not to state that our problems are solved when each community 216 American Association of School Administrators finds itself in a position to purchase adequate education for its 'children. It is my belief that an even greater challenge than getting the cash is getting the consent, because if you can get the consent, you can get the cash. The program of the schools is necessarily and properly circumscribed by what adult citizens of the community think a school should be and do. The public's notion of what the objectives of education should be is prac- tically synonymous with our own. But frequently, the objectives Avhich we and the public accept for our schools cannot be attained by the tools the public prescribes for our use. The average parent wants education to do for his child what education did for him — only more so. Yet, when he describes a program of education by which this would be brought about for the future generation, he looks backward on his own youth rather than forward to his child's future. He places great faith in the tools and methods that accomplished results in his own case. He wishes that the modern school would "get down to business." He forgets that in his boyhood the experiences of the home, the church, and community life itself left less for the school to do in the way of providing desirable social experience. The interaction of a closely-knit family, church, and neighborhood life combined with the facts learned at school were gen- erally sufficient to produce socially, economically, and morally competent adults. Today, and for the future, this is not the case. The school must now provide much more than fact and skill learning. This critical parent has lost sight of the fact that his boy, whom he expects us to educate, is living already in a culture which is a much more demanding one than he, himself, experienced. Fundamental ways of living in America have changed during one generation, and each change has made new demands upon the process of education. This is illustrated by the vast changes which have taken place in the field of communication. Prior to the development of the radio, the individual was relatively isolated from the country as a whole. If the school equipped him with infor- mations and skills productive of economic well-being for himself, the indi- vidual could take care of the other aspects of his total security. Whatever might threaten him physically, intellectually, or emotionally was most likely to come from some one or some group close at hand and well within his personal association and control. His interest in being his neighbor's keeper arose frequently from the fact that his neighbor was the one most likely to intrude upon him. Only remotely was he forced to concern himself with events which were state or national in scope. Today this situation is reversed ; one is more likely to be anxious and better informed about w^hat happened this morning on the island of Truk, 6000 miles distant, than what hap- pened last night in one's own home town. And in urban living, as it exists today, one may know more intimately the problems that confront the nation than the personal problems of the man next door. This reversal in the natural order of things, this anomaly in human rela- tions, whereby our problems seem almost to increase in importance as the square of their distance from us, has increased the complexity of the job the What's Right with the Schools in 1944 217 schools must do. Further, it has caused the out-moding of the tools by which we accomplish our task. In a democracy, people must learn to work together and learn to live together. The ability to work together harmoniously for common ends is not an inherent trait — it must be learned. It can best be learned by the trial and error of actual practice. Yet often the public looks with suspicion, in fact, is frequently reluctant to give consent to classroom activities designed to achieve these ends, which are so important if this nation is to live with and within itself. This is not the problem of the individual alone within our society; it is the problem of groups, minorities, and majorities as well. The problem of helping the diverse racial and cultural elements of our nation to live harmoniously and usefully together is even more complex than is the adjustment of the individual. And yet, if the schools are to lay claim to being the preservers of the American culture, they must do more than they have yet been able to do in eliminating suspicion, friction, and tension among our peoples of widely differing national backgrounds and traditions. The difficulties of accomplishing this task are obvious. Children of immediate foreign backgrounds must be denationalized to a certain extent. They must be equipped with the English language as the basic tool of communication, they must be educated to loyalty to the United States thru an understanding of its problems, and they must acquire attitudes with respect to other persons which will cause them to be constructive, con- tributing citizens in a democracy. So far, so good. But where should this "commonizing" function of education stop? If the common school should bring about the total denationalization of immigrant peoples to the point where the remnants of their folkways, their culture, even their religion become obliterated thru disuse, we shall have deprived this nation of its new sources of strength. The American culture is weakened when the second generation learns to be ashamed of the first. Adult society has proved itself so inept in dealing with this problem that already the melting pot is boiling in many parts of this nation. I suggest that if hope for progress exists any- where, it is in the classrooms of America with the young people of today. Our school children know that you can eat spaghetti and still be an American. There are many other things happening in education today that are mak- ing America strong. For one thing, the schools are getting more democratic from top to bottom. The Prussian system of school administration, where the only one responsible for doing any thinking was the superintendent of schools, is being replaced by the thinking of the whole school system, includ- ing the children. The materials we use reflect the richness of methods of communicating ideas now available to us. Schools are teaching youth to seek and experience truth in the social sciences as well as in the natural sciences. The learner is coming increasingly to have a part in the decisions that affect him in order that he may learn the process from the experience. More and more of the classrooms of America are becoming active, happy, profitable places for children. You ask what's right with the schools in 1944? Can anything be right with this groping giant? Look at the contradictions in it. It is massive in 218 American Association of School Administrators structure, yet sensitive to the needs of a child ; a perfecter of life, yet led by imperfect people; disciple of society, yet disciplinarian of it. I can reply with only a simple question. Where is there a human enterprise from whose daily tasks spring such hope for mankind, such promise that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shall someday be the heritage of the common man? THE SCHOOLS AS PROMOTERS OF COOPERATION IN THE EDUCATIONAL ENTERPRISE RICHARD BARNES KENNAN, EXECUTIVE SECRETARY, MAINE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, AUGUSTA, MAINE Address at Neiu York Conference The free, tax-supported, public schools of America of¥er, in my humble opinion, the one greatest opportunity for national understanding, unity, and cooperation thus far developed by the mind of man. In public education we find a common denominator that enters all churches, all political parties, all racial differences, all economic, intellectual, and social groups. Generally speaking, free, tax-supported, public schools are the one place where all citizens can meet on a common level, for at least the early years of life, study together the common problems of living at peace together, and learn to cooperate for the common good. You have heard several speakers on this program tell of the great cooper- ation the schools have given in national and community welfare in recent years. The school cooperation has been such that the teachers have become an unrecognized, but a very real part of the armed forces of this country; they became a part of the Army at the moment when the Army requested the schools to conduct the important preinduction work. And preinduction work goes far beyond the mathematics, science, and physical fitness programs of juniors and seniors in high school. It includes the work from kinder- garten to commencement, the long, detailed program of developing the initiative, the intelligence, the fitness, the knowledge, the ability, the Ameri- can boy's "know how" that has made him the best of all modern fighting men. But you know well the countless ways that our schools have rightly co- operated in the war effort. Let's look for a brief few minutes at other ways in which our schools have been sources of important cooperative effort. One of the great divisive factors among men is the matter of race. Few men agree on a common understanding of the meaning of race. Hitler has his Nordics; but experts tell us that there is no pure Nordic race. We speak of the black race,, the red, the yellow, and the white; but specialists are not agreed on accurate distinctions even between those groups. Many of us conclude that the principal distinction comes down to my superior race, whatever it is, and all the other inferior ones. In the public schools, red and yellow, Jew and Nordic, African and Caucasian sit together, study What's Right with the Schools in 1944 219 together, learn together ; and in the good schools they find that there are greater degrees of differences within races than there are between individuals of different races, and that the one great hope of mankind is cooperation and understanding between races. True it is that there are some areas where complete racial equality in the public schools has not as yet been achieved ; but it is coming slowly and surely as understanding and intelligence and cooperation make it feasible in such areas. Let's look at another great divisional force — sectarian religion. Some of the most tragic unhappiness I have ever witnessed has been in communities where one religious group has gained a dominating position. I am not refer- ring to any single church, for I have seen it work more than one way ; it almost appears that when any sectarian group gains control it becomes in- tolerant of other religious groups and like the Pilgrim fathers as described by a little girl, "People who came to America to worship God as they pleased and make others do the same." In good public schools, Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, Buddhist and Christian sit down to work together, learn each other's virtues, and come to realize that the others are not strange, hateful creatures but fellow men yearning for peace and friendship and a proper place in the world. Just the act of the mingling of boys and girls of various religious faiths would be an important enough contribution to community and national cooperation to make adequate sup- port of the public schools worthwhile. However, recognizing the great need for a deeper and more significant religious basis for living in a world that has become so largely mechanical and technical, the schools of many com- munities have offered direct cooperation with the local churches and have made it possible for boys and girls to get religious instruction, during regu- lar school time, and by the representative of the church of their choice. These cooperative moves of the public schools with the churches are most important, for peace and freedom and friendliness and tolerance are dependent upon a firm spiritual basis as well as on working together in a common setting toward mutually desirable objectives. I stress the important part that the public schools play in winning racial and religious cooperation because recent conversations with businessmen and laboring men about the country have convinced me that the war excite- ment is tending to heighten racial and religious animosities. These increased prejudices are most apparent among the less well-educated people and in poor areas where schools are not properly supported. The real leaders of all races and all creeds recognize that to the extent that public education is weakened in this country, racial and religious intolerance will be strength- ened ; and such intelligent leaders are cooperating in the battle for increased local, state, and federal support for the public schools. The work of the schools as promoters of cooperation, however, goes far bej'ond the great issues of war, race, and religion ; it enters into most phases of our national life. The modern school has , broken down the barrier between town and gown — between classroom and community. The work of the school has been adjusted to modern times — to modern ideas — to modern needs. The school has achieved its advance in practical, efficient, 220 American Association of School Administrators up-to-date service only thru the fine cooperation of many groups of laymen and schoolmen. The schools have cooperated with industry. I remember back in the early 1930's when A. B. Anderson, director of vocational education in Wilming- ton, Delaware, held a series of conferences of industrialists and school peo- ple aimed at making vocational training in schools more effective. The meet- ings were of historic significance to me, for out of them came the clear indication that many of us school people were wrong in thinking that indus- try wanted young people trained in specific skills and taught to handle machines identical with those in the factories. Such training was too expen- sive and almost impossible to keep up to date. The industrialists wanted boys trained in such skills as ability to read a slide rule or micrometer; they wanted the lads to have opportunity to prove that they had good manual dexterity and mechanical ability; they wanted to be assured that the boys could read and understand written instructions and could be counted upon to carry them out carefully and expeditiously. Such training did not require the complex, expensive shop equipment previously anticipated, and it made it possible for the schools to give more nearly adequate preparation to the students planning to enter industrial occupations. Such school and industrial meetings have been held in other parts of the country and have resulted in excellent cooperation and improved school service. The schools have proved they can train in specific technical skills as well as the more generalized ones, moreover. As the most outstanding example we have only to look to the 10,000,000 men quickly and efficiently trained by the schools for war industries. Business and education have become increasingly cooperative. Out of con- ferences with businessmen developed the relatively new and valuable courses in distributive education in which thousands of young people have been prepared to be efficient clerks and salesmen. As a result of discussions, the courses of study in such subjects as English, spelling, and arithmetic have been modified, brought up to date and more in line with modern business requirements. The public high-school commercial departments have been particularly afiFected by this cooperative efiFort of business and education. A father recently told me of the practice in dictation in the school his daughter is attending, where businessmen come to the stenography classes and dictate under conditions approximating actual business situations. "You know," he said, "I think it's a good thing for the girls in the advanced stenography course to take dictation from men who talk at dififerent rates of speed, at different voice pitches, standing, sitting, walking around the room, jingling keys in their pockets. They should have very little difficulty fitting into regular business offices." The schools have cooperated with labor groups as well. Educators realize that a very large portion of their students are the sons and daughters of laboring men. Nursery schools have been opened to free the wives of labor- ing men for home duties or to supplement the family income. Emphasis has been given to practical courses so that the children of laboring men will go out of school prepared to make a living. Many modifications of school What's Right with the Schools in 1944 221 practice have come out of conferences between representatives of the schools and of labor groups. Within the last year representatives of the A. F. of L., the C. I. O., and the NEA have sat down together to discuss how public education can be strengthened during the war and postwar period. Recently I visited an agricultural shop in a high school remote from ade- quate commercial machine and mechanical services. The boys were all hard at work repairing and reconditioning the equipment of farmers in the neigh- borhood. Labor was given free for the experience; the only cost to the farmers was for required repair parts. This is only one small example of the cooperation of the schools with the farmers. Agriculture teachers give important service to rural communities in such matters as soil, crop, and herd improvement. Courses in high-school agriculture are adapted to local needs and conditions. In every way practicable the schools are gladly co- operating with the farmers to make agriculture a more profitable and efficient undertaking, and to make rural community life richer and more enjoyable. Think for a moment of the many ways that the schools have cooperated with parents — with the homes. Courses are now given in family living in some schools. Home economics courses were developed to aid in more efficient and enjoyable home life, not only for the pupil grown to adulthood and a home of her own, but for immediate application in her parents' home. As the result of parent-teacher conferences and the request of parents, some schools have even attempted to aid the parents in giving sex education to pupils. Family budgeting has been taught in arithmetic classes. Home repairs have been taught in the manual training classes. Home decoration has been taught in the art classes. In hundreds of ways, ^and usually as a result of teacher-parent conferences, the schools have cooperated to make their work more valuable to the homes. Not the least of the cooperative efforts of the schools today are the "Bar None Ranches," the Hi-Y's, Junior League Craft Clubs, and other adolescent activity centers which the schools have spon- sored to help keep young people off the streets and out of trouble after dark — in other words to help reduce juvenile delinquency or parent neglect, whichever you call it. If time permitted, we could consider a long and detailed list of ways the schools have cooperated with various groups in our American heterogeneity. We could discuss how the public schools have cooperated with the doctors and health authorities in improving community health conditions. We could talk about how the schools have cooperated with social agencies in improving recreational and social conditions in neighborhoods. We could point out how schools have cooperated with garden clubs and civic authorities in improving the beauty of communities, with the police in safety instruction, with the banks in thrift instruction, with the nutritionists in school lunch activities and vitamin instruction. The schools have cooperated in the preservation of our basic racial culture. The list goes on and on. There is hardly an important, worthwhile activity with which the public schools are not co- operating for the improvement of man's condition, the betterment of com- munity living — in fact, for the advancement of the common good. 222 American Association of School Administrators A fortnight ago I stood before a group of important educators and con- fessed my grave concern with the position that professionally-minded edu- cators are in today. There is so much to be done and so little time in which to do it. We stand at a crisis ; perhaps the greatest crisis of our nation. The war crisis on the battle front appears to have passed its most dangerous point, and, altho the war is still far from won, things seem to be turning more and more in favor of the United Nations. The war against ignorance, intoler- ance, and inertia in this country is not faring so well. Since the days of Horace Mann, and long before, we have toiled upward in a battle toward world leadership. That leadership has been based on the development of the best educated citizenry among the nations. We have believed the com- mon man capable of good self-government provided he is well educated and truly informed. We have proved that an educated citizenry can develop a high culture, with more complex needs and, therefore, more business and industry. Other nations have looked on our good life with covetous eyes and recognized the significance of our general educational s^'stem. Many have adapted it to their own plans — the Nazis used a system of general edu- cation to develop a generation of strong, cruel j'oung people obsessed with a belief in their national superiority. But I am not awed by the educational activities of our enemies; rather am I disturbed by the contrast of our recent educational retrogression with the educational progress of our friends among the nations. The appropria- tions for education in this country have not kept up with the general rise in prices. Compared with 1940, the support for education is less than 90 percent of what it was then. Look to England, to South Africa, to Mexico, to China, and see how grejftly they have increased their investments in edu- cation during the war years. In America we are encouraging carefully prepared teachers to enter the WAC, WAVES, and SPARS ; and we are drafting the men who are responsible for important preinduction work; in England they are telling teachers to stay on their jobs, for their training is far more important to the boys and girls in school and to the future of the country than it is in the armed forces. Look to Russia that has moved from an illiterate country of the last war to a comparatively literate country today, with much of the advance made since Germany invaded Poland ; and then look to our nation with hundreds of schools closed and thousands of children denied school facilities. In one town alone in my state last week, almost in the shadow of the State House, three one-room schools were closed and seventy-two children were without teachers ; and it is estimated that this very day there are a thousand youngsters without school facilities in Maine — several hundred thousand in America ! While other nations are moving ahead, we are dropping back. Unless there is a drastic change in the attitude of special interest groups, taxpayers, legislators, "town fathers," right away, I fear the likelihood that America will lose her position of edu- cational leadership to other nations, and with loss of educational leadership will go loss of many other types of world leadership, including industrial and commercial leadership. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 223 A few years ago, in a little bicycle shop, a man developed a gasoline buggy. For years the production of gasoline buggies was limited to places approxi- mating bicycle shops in size and facilities, and the vehicles were so few and so expensive that they were not available to the common man. Yet within the lifetime of that bicycle shop inventor, great assembly line plants have come into being, automobiles have been produced by the millions, the cost has been reduced again and again, America has become an automobile country with every man a chauffeur. And this great development within this one man's lifetime has shaken our whole country — indeed, the whole civilized world — for it is the American assembly line with its amazing mass produc- tion of excellent materials that is enabling the soldiers of the United Nations to turn the tide of battle on all the war fronts. For many centuries education has been a "bicycle shop" activity, carried on with inadequate equipment, and available to only a relatively few people. Our great Horace Mann pointed the way from the little "shop" to a more efficient, general education for all people. His program, too, is shaking the world from Moscow to Manila, from New York City to Ponkapogue. Just as the American system of mass production in industry has affected the indus- tries of the world, so the American plan of education is affecting the training of youth the world over. There are many people today who look back with longing to the relative simplicity and peace of the "horse and buggy days." There are many people today who still would like to keep education as it was when grandpa went to school. But there is no turning back in either industry or education if America is to hold its position of world leadership. Let industry go back to the "bicycle shops," and wealth and power and commerce will soon be in the hands of other nations. Let education in America continue to lose ground as it has in the last few years, and the loss may not be as quickly evi- dent, for a car may be assembled in a few days, but it takes years to develop a man; just as certainly, tho, America will lose her position of preeminence, in world affairs. There are still too many "bicycle shop" schools in this country — small, poorly equipped, inadequately staffed ; there are still too many "bicycle shop" school people in our profession — lacking the vision of the potentialities of public education; there are still too many "bicycle shop" communities round about us — satisfied to be only partially literate and slightly educated. We must wake up, modernize, strengthen our schools, progress — or prepare to fall back, retreat, and eventually be subjugated. We must say now to business and industry, "Education has cooperated with you in a thousand ways." We must say to laborers and farmers, "The schools have cooperated with you in every way practicable." We must say to parents, to property owners, to government agencies, to the churches, to all racial groups, to all important groups in our country, "The schools have welcomed opportunities to cooperate with each of you as basic groups in our American way of life. We have cooperated gladly, and largely to your advantage. But cooperation requires the action of more than one party. 224 American Association of School Administrators Now the public schools are in critical need of cooperation from you." We need the strong support of all groups — church, industry', labor, ethnological, social, and economic groups, to bring the schools out of the "bicycle shop" era and into the airplane era. We need the moral support and encouragement of all of them in developing and strengthening friendly relationships and understandings between the children of all the American people and in building thru these relationships and understandings a greater national unity, and the tolerance and goodwill so essential to our mutual welfare, now and in the future. We need their social and political cooperation to gain greatly increased local, state, and national support for the public schools so that our program may be expanded and improved to give our boys and girls at least as good educational opportunities as those being planned for the youth of other nations. The schools have gladly cooperated with all worthy national, state, and local groups. Now the schools turn to those same groups and ask their cooperation in return, not for the sake of about 1,000,000 public-school teachers who are among the "white collar" group hardest hit financially by the war; nor even for the sake of the 27,000,000 boys and girls who happen to be in school this year, or even perhaps 1,000,000 youngsters who are faced with closed schoolhouse doors right now. We ask cooperation from church and state, press and public, labor and laymen, from all groups to the end that this nation under God shall have an educational reawakening, that our country shall maintain and advance its position of economic, social, and educational leadership, and that adequate free education of all the people, by the people, and for all the people shall be a fact, and not just a theory, thruout our great America ! SCHOOL CITADELS OF DEMOCRACY CLAUDE V. COURTER, SUPERINTENDENT OF SCHOOLS, CINCINNATI, OHIO Address at Chicago Conference If there is one fact in the world today which is more important than any other, it is the fact of the strength of America. It is the fact that the strength of our country has been adequate to save modern civilization from ruin — adequate to preserve for the world once again its institutions of freedom and democracy which have been bought so dearly and have been so long in the making. Without the strength which is called America to contend with, it might have been that the dark tide of totalitarianism had all but engulfed the free world and its free institutions, and swept to our very portals. But the weight of weapons needed to stem this awful tide of destruction was forged in America in time, and the additional millions of fighting men needed to tame it were trained and equipped in America in time. And when the historian has finally recorded the events of these days and has described the miracle of the evacuation at Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, when "so What's Right with the Schools in 1944 225 many owed so much to so few," the infamy of Pearl Harbor, the heroic defense of Bataan and Corregidor, of Hong Kong and Singapore, of Sevas- topol, Stalingrad, and Leningrad, and then has recorded the final grand offensive of Allied might which overwhelmed the minions of Italian fascism, smashed the "impregnable" fortress which was Nazi Europe and the far- flung bastions of the Japanese "Empire," and stamped out, let us hope forever, the bestiality that barbarism and paganism have always engendered, and which thru the centuries has been the evil enemy of freedom and democ- racy; the record of these critical days will be concluded with the simple statement — the strength of America turned the tide. Thus will be recorded the most significant single fact of these days. It is because of this fact that we.can now plan with thankfulness and with confidence a greater future for democracy in our own country, and in the world. Few there are of us who until recently have even dimly appreciated the potentiality of the strength that is inherent in our resources and in our way of life. It has taken a world conflagration, which threatened to consume the very foundations of our life together as free men, to cause us to marshal our full strength. The results have been astounding. We have amazed the world, and even ourselves, in achievements which stagger the imagination. We have discovered that when we have a compelling objective, and unity, our productive capacity and genius know no bounds. We are beginning to take stock of ourselves as a people, and to ask some vital questions. We are asking, "What of the future?" "What shall it profit us to spend our tremendous strength to win the war if, in the period which follows, we prove inadequate to preserve and further strengthen the way of life for which our young men, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them, will have laid down their lives?" We are asking, "If we can spend so lavishly and produce so prodigiously for war, for the products which are consumed and have utility only in battle, only to slay and destroy, can we not employ these same resources and energies with equal effectiveness for the pursuits of peace, for the goods and services that are consumed in the furthering of human welfare, of human happiness, of human satisfactions, and content- ment?" We are asking, "Is not this what we must do?" "Is not this the only way we can insure the peace in our own country and in the world of which we are a part ; the only way we can forever put to rout the destructive forces of disunity and distrust, of discontent and despair, which constitute the real menace to our security?" We are concluding that it is, that command of the future is in our grasp, that we have the strength and the capacity to make it what we will, and that to insure the peace for which we now fight, we need only the determined will and the way; and what is most hopeful, we are seeing with increasing clarity that we have the way, if we will but choose to use it. We are seeing, gradually but surely, that the way is thru the processes of education. Education has contributed greatly to the marshalling of our great strength to achieve the victory of which now we are assured, but perhaps its greater contribution lies ahead in the achievement of a lasting peace. It maj'^ very well be that the historian, who records that the great strength of America 226 American Association of School Administrators again saved to the world its institutions of democracy, can complete his record only when he records that a great part of the strength of America came from its schools ; that these institutions, during the final conflict between totalitarianism and democracy, became veritable bulwarks of strength to the nation ; that their dynamic support of the war effort hastened the victory; that they served the nation in many vital waj's — in the rationing of necessities, in the training of civilians for home defense, in salvage cam- paigns, in the sale of war stamps and bonds, in the work of the Junior Red Cross, in the training of millions of men and women for war industries, in their preinduction courses for youth, and in the vitality of their instructional program ; that these programs made them veritable citadels of democracy ; and that in the postwar world, the schools of America did not lose thjeir new character, but, as citadels of democracy in the period following the great war, they imbued democracy with such meaning and power that it carried to all parts of the world. And thus began a long era of universal peace. Such can be and may be the verdict of history. School citadels of democracy — this is a striking phrase. It is both a sum- mation and a challenge. It is a summation of more than two years of dynamic purpose, of all-out effort to direct the full power of the great resources of the schools to the preservation of democracy, first, thru victory, and then thru the winning of the peace. There can be no better summation of the work of the schools of America since Pearl Harbor than the simple state- ment, "they became citadels of democracy." Such a characterization of the role of the schools of America in our recent national life also describes the nature of the challenge the future holds for them. It is only as citadels of democracy that they can continue to meet the needs of the nation in the days that are ahead. The days ahead will be as exacting and demanding of the schools of the nation as the days thru which we are now passing. They will demand of our schools a purpose as compel- ling, a program as vigorous, achievements as noteworthy, and service as comprehensive as any that our schools have thus far been called upon to render. Some of these challenges are now evident. A few of them, even now before victory is won, can be profitably examined. First, these school citadels of democracy are challenged to formulate and accept a clear-cut statement of their function and purpose in the postwar world. The babble of voices giving cry to purposes many and varied, which have confused and enervated public education in America in recent decades, must be harmonized and give expression to a single all-embracing purpose stated in such clear and simple terms that every American may know what his schools are for, and the schools in turn may gather and direct their full strength to the achievement of such a purpose. Not j^et have Americans gen- erally come to understand the almost complete dependence of democracy upon education — that it is only as defenders and practitioners of democracy that our citizens can successfully attack domestic problems and world prob- lems and live together at peace with themselves and the rest of the world, and that it is only thru education that they can inherit democracy, under- stand its meaning, make it effective, and give it reality. Must not this then What's Right with the Schools in 1944 227 be the clearly understood purpose of education in our democracy? If we can accept the utterances of the critics of the products of our schools in recent years as having meaning, there are signs that our citizens are increas- ingly looking to their schools for this result, that their perspective is enlarg- ing, that they are expecting more from their schools today than they have in the past, and that they will demand more in the future. Altho Americans have always believed that a literate and informed elec- torate is necessary to insure good government, most Americans have looked upon education principally as the right of the individual. Altho equality of educational opportunity has always been one of the principal tenets of our democratic faith, too often it has meant equality of start without handi- cap in the race of life. The quality of educational opportunity has not seemed too important, if all the contenders in the race had equal access to whatever the benefits of education might be. It has taken two world wars and recurring depressions, topped by the great depression, tq bring to our people a dawning appreciation and understanding that, with the final closing of our physical frontiers and the disappearance of free land, the privileges of the men and women of our democracy can no longer be the enjoyment of their natural rights in vigorous competition with one another for the good things of life, but from necessity, must be the business of so building their lives together that their natural rights as individuals are preserved, and their security in a mutually interdependent society is assured. Thus free education, for an increasing number of thoughtful Americans, has assumed a new meaning. They are realizing that free education is no longer merely an opportunity to which individuals are entitled in the furtherance of per- sonal plans. They are seeing that it is rather a dj^namic force, that it can and should be charged with the responsibility of giving democracy meaning and direction in our ever changing and evolving civilization, and that it must at the same time develop the power of our society to provide for all men the satisfactions, the security, and the happiness to which their worth as individuals in our society entitles them. Our school citadels of democracy are today gradually accepting this purpose and are discharging with increas- ing effectiveness the responsibilities that such a purpose incurs. The second great challenge that confronts our school citadels of democ- racy is to so teach young Americans that they conceive democracy to be not a way of living that is fixed and absolute, but a growing, expanding, developing process, an ideal that is never quite reached, because it grows as man's vision enlarges, and that citizenship, therefore, can never be static, can never know a status quo. The broad stream of American tradition which our youth inherit does not empty into a reservoir to be tapped at will by any generation that is content merely to quafif its benefits, else it become acrid and unsatisfying. To be life-giving, and to be enjoyed, Amer- ican tradition must flow steadily on thru ever widening and deepening channels, nurturing in its flow broader vistas of social and economic justice, sustaining on its way a fuller growth of educational opportunity, supporting in its course steadily improving standards of living, furnishing in its broad expanse greater security for those who want to work, and giving always 228 American Association of School Administrators rich sustenance to the expansion of political and religious freedom. The broadening and deepening of these channels is the obligation that each generation of our citizens must transmit to the generation which follows. School citadels of democracy are not content, therefore, to merely transmit the social heritage, important as that is. They regard as a greater obligation the preparation of youth to improve and enlarge their heritage. They believe that the channels for the flow of American tradition can only be deepened and broadened by the development in our national life of demo- cratic aggressiveness. We have been aggressive as individuals in our business, industrial, and professional lives, in the pursuit of happiness, and in the establishment of our rights, but we have not been equally aggressive in our national life in giving virility and dynamic force to the democratic concept. Too many of us have wanted to be left alone to enjoy our rights. When in some com- munities 50 percent of our citizens do not exercise their right of sufiErage because the studying of issues, registering, and voting are too much trouble, it is certain that, considering the magnitude of today's issues, the time has come when passive democracy will no longer suffice. We need in our country today to express our citizenship, not only as law-abiding individuals who perform our duty as voters and pass judgment on the issues of the day, but also as citizens who participate actively in the affairs of our communities and our nation, and who forward thru personal effort, measures which are aimed at the promotion of the common good. We need to exercise our social intelligence, not only in our understanding of social problems, but also in .terms of willingness to spend our energies to do something about them. It is to the development of this kind of dynamic citizenship and aggressive democracy that school citadels of democracy bend their efforts. The third challenge to our school citadels of democracy is the continued maintenance, thru education, of national unity. If our nation is to win thru the difficult postwar period, preserve democracy, and give it power to satisfy the worthy desires and needs of our people, there must be a peace- time unity, certainly, that Is the equal at least of our wartime unity. Our nation must have a peacetime substitute for the dynamic unity of wartime, a moral equivalent of war. What shall It be? It can, of course, only be a concept of democracy that Is so clear, so deeply appreciated and understood, and so firmly established in public opinion that it becomes thruout the nation the moral cement of peacetime unity. Such a concept of democracy must have as its core the universal acceptance of the supremacy of the general welfare as the measure of the worth of all governmental and social policy. Such a concept of democracy will find Its expression in universal indigna- tion at the betrayal of public trust, in public hostility to legislation that Is affected and controlled by pressure groups, and in outraged public opinion over whatever savors of special privilege. School citadels of democracy will continue, therefore, to open their doors to adults, to plan forums, to conduct town meetings for both youth and adults, and otherwise make their facilities available for the discussions of issues that affect the public interest or the general welfare. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 229 A fourth challenge to our school citadels of democracy is the mainte- nance and further development of the physical strength of the nation repre- sented in its great industrial power, and in the productivity, courage, deter- mination, and creativeness of its manpower. Our industrial power is tremendous. It lies in our natural and material resources, in the vast capacity and productive genius of American industry, in our far-flung facilities of transportation and communication, in the extent of electrical and mechanical power at our fingertips, in the solidity and soundness of our financial institutions, and in our great research laboratories. In school citadels of democracy it is the task of education to prepare men to manage and use these great resources of our industrial civilization to the end that they may best serve the needs of all our people and may contribute to their enjoyment of life, liberty, and happiness. More than two centuries of pioneering have bred a race of men in our country to whom nothing is impossible — men of courage and vision, men who are not appalled by difficulties, but who conquer them, and men who dream great dreams. Public education must preserve and strengthen this priceless heritage, and at the same time give its recipients high purpose and a sense of responsi- bility for the general welfare. Altho the final security of our nation in the future as in the past must rest squarely upon the bedrock of a sturdy, self-reliant, and intelligent citizenship, this alone is not enough. It is quite possible that during the next few difficult decades our future may be determined as greatly by the economic intelligence and efficiency of our citizens as by the quality of our citizenship. In fact, it is quite possible that our history ultimately may be written in terms of the efficient use our nation has made of its resources in satisfying the needs of our people. It Is only thru intelligent planning and thru the increased productivity of our citizens that we can hope to pay the national debt, maintain and expand social gains, improve education, and raise steadily the standards of living of large masses of our people. The widespread possession of work skills by our citizens, proper attitudes toward work, and versatility in adjusting to new processes, are indispen- sable possessions of future citizens which education must increasingly provide. The steady improvement of vocational education in our school citadels of democracy Is therefore an Imperative. A fifth challenge to our school citadels of democracy Is improvement in health teaching and practice. The strength of the nation is being depleted thru unnecessary sickness, ill health, and physical disability. This is an appalling waste of human resources. Modern civilization has made life too easy for most Americans. We do not walk when we can ride. We press buttons and turn switches to get most of our menial work done. Must there not be bred Into the national life some compensating element if, as a people, we are to maintain the ruggedness of body and spirit v^^hich built the nation we live In today? Is It not, therefore, essential to the future security of the nation that In our homes, in our schools, on our plaj'grounds, 230 American Association of School Administrators and thruout the orp;anized recreational activities of adult life, there be developed such pride in physical fitness and strongly pulsing health, that physical hardiness shall be a national characteristic of the American people? If so, the promotion of public health and the wider maintenance of free clinics for the correction of physical defects must be a foremost policy in every state and in every community, and public education in our school citadels of democracy must greatly increase its emphasis upon, and more intelligently direct its program in, this field of education. Such is the nature of the work that goes on in our school citadels of democracy, and the nature of some of the challenges, by no means all, that confront them in the difficult years of the nation's future. The keys to a future of "peace among ourselves and with all nations" are education and democracy. In a future of peace and goodwill, education and democracy will be inextricably bound together, each the servant of the other, each giving the other meaning and strength, and each with potentialities of limitless power. It is to be the function of the schools in the future to bring about a fusion of these two great forces. At no time in the history of the nation has there been a greater challenge to public education. Our nation is a giant among the nations in its innate strength and power, but it cannot live by its physical strength alone. It has been addicted to periods of serious illness. Recurrent depressions, each more serious than the last, have repeatedly sapped its strength, and its return to full health and vigor has each time been more difficult. These periods of illness can be prevented by the application of the great ideals of democracy to the concrete details of our life together as free men. We must understand that if our great experiment with "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" should fail, it will not be because of lack of natural resources and physical strength with which to satisfy our needs, but rather, it will be because, as a people, we failed to develop a national conscience and a social morality sufficiently adequate to sustain the way of life to which we sub- scribed ; it will be because we were willing to give lip service to our way of life, but were unwilling to sacrifice personal comfort or the hope of financial gain to make it work ; it will be because the personal as well as the group goals of our citizens were unworthy and in too many cases their contribution to the general welfare negligible. School Citadels of Democracy, then, are not only institutions that defend and preserve democracy by transmitting the social heritage ; they are also institutions that give democracy meaning and power, and that train future citizens to be worthy of their heritage and capable of improving it. They are institutions with a mission, and a vital function. They may appropriately be called custodians of the nation's ideals and traditions, guardians of the nation's destiny, and architects of the nation's future. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 231 THE SCHOOLS AS CITADELS OF DEMOCRACY GEORGE D. STODDARD, STATE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION, ALBANY, N. Y. Address at New York Conference I The mere recapitulation of all the programs and enterprises superimposed upon a full curriculum of basic studies is impressive. Surely, it would seem that the schools have done enough. But the schools cannot stop with all these accomplishments, for man still lacks understanding and the good society is only partially achieved. We must now help youth to look within himself, and to look about, seeking the constant sources of human satisfaction, lacking which, men will again be at each other's throats. Upon a successful exploration of new territory, will be found to depend the integrity of relations that cut across the boundaries of race, religion, and government. We have no solution to ofiFer, but we can clarify the ends sought. As school people, we have faith in the combined power of motivation, methodology, and goodwill — all freely exercised. To charge directly into the matter, I shall say flatly that the school is right in attempting to find middle ground between man as a self-centered creature of impulse and man as an amorphous unit of society. A sole reliance upon either extreme is held to be disastrous. The undisciplined mind is a prey to superficiality and pathological in- volvement. It tends to get off base and stay there, finally giving up the game altogether as too complicated. The first symptom is an attempt to escape reality. The final outcome may be either a life below any level con- sidered decent for a worker and a citizen, or, not infrequently, a plague of mental inventions that scare other people and send their originators to mental institutions. An aftermath of the war will be an increase in such troubles, brought about, in part, by the bitter unreality and terror of a world that was never discussed in the schoolbooks. An emotional intensity normal for fighting and killing is hard to drain away in peacetime pursuits. Cessation from strain will not be enough ; relatives, friends, school people, and employers will need to unite in a sustained effort to restore a health-giving faith in man and his works. The question is, having destroyed for a good cause, can we rebuild for an equally good cause — and with sufficient intensity of purpose and power really to sanctify life? Men who have sensed the disturbing beauty of jungle and open sea, and men moved by subtle harmonies of function and structure handed down thru centuries, will take another look at Main Street and the motor slums. I do not share the confidence of some advertisers that men will always want exactly what they left behind, and in this I find a measure of optimism. Such a doctrine applied to objects, cars, planes, and packaging would be 232 American Association of School Administrators regarded as a retreat from progress. Why is it so magical when related to homes, schools, streets, parks, libraries, and the incipient stages of the fine arts? When applied to politics, the nostalgic argument becomes a boomerang, for the majority of veterans will have been reared under the New Deal. If the America that we must preserve unchanged is that fine, friendly, folksy feeling that Roosevelt is ruling the roost, then we are indeed con- fronted with strange bedfellows! Clearly we must distinguish between values that change in the slow tempo of social evolution and those that respond to impulse and fashion. Women, I suppose, always wear attractive hats, but their i(iea of what is attractive is somewhat volatile. If a woman does not care whether or not the hat becomes her, she is to that extent peculiar ; if women, as a whole, no longer cared, they would not, of course, be peculiar, but they would be profoundly different. To understand them, we should have to start all over again. We shall need a fresh start if we are to understand the boys and girls who will have returned from the war or the war plants. They will have grown up, not only thru their intensified experiences, but in their firsthand discovery of devotion and heroism. They will know some things that the rest of us will read about ; and these two worlds of discourse, both real but different, somehow must be brought into a sound mutual relationship. This is a problem in reeducation that will tap our deepest resources in psychological insight and civic preparedness. Not pity, but love- and friendship ; not charity, but real work related to aptitude and ambition ; not curriculum fragments, but a balanced educa- tional structure of strength and dignity; not mine-run politics, but forth- right statesmanship, if only in memory of the dead and the almost-dead — all these are the qualities everywhere in demand. As educators we must bend ourselves to the pressing needs of youth — to the splicing of lines shattered by war or war-related mischance. At secondary and post-secondary levels we should provide youth with whatever youth must have, so long as their needs combine personal and social values. Ignorance, illiteracy, and job inadequacy are alike repugnant to mature youth and a mature society. In any era, it is a test of cultural genius to have things right and do things well, perhaps not all the time nor in all fields of endeavor. This principle has held for Greeks, Romans, Goths, Britons, Americans, and Russians. We could not get interested in the Russians until we discovered that they did some things superbly well. Discoveries like this, at times record- ing wealth where we ourselves are poor, as in the unmechanized arts and crafts, will go far to establish a basis for postwar contact and friendship. What we can do with our own hands and heads, is of crucial importance in a world of advanced technology. Our services to each other, as in child welfare, education, medicine, government, art, and religion, take on new meaning. As never before, they represent the rich unfragmented life. Inter- nal strength will follow communication with nature, and with nature as What's Right with the Schools in 1944 233 modified and controlled by man. Any form of isolationism in this realm will keep man from his heritage and make of him a strange creature among his fellows. II A turn toward the oversocialized extreme to which I referred is feared more by political and industrial leaders than by students of education and sociology. Simply stated, this doctrine reduces the individual to a cog-like status, serving the needs of a superstate or a theoretical society. It postu- lates a serfdom that is deeply despised by every free-thinking, free-moving citizen in a democratic society. We are protected against it in America by the circumstances of the birth of the nation and thru its rebirth in the destruction of slavery. Educators and religious leaders are justly proud of their long record in placing the concept of liberty before the youth of the country. The Sermon on the Mount, the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution, and the Gettysburg Address take highest rank in expressing this noble doctrine of freedom in language available to all. It is not enough, however, to confine exalted passages to the great occa- sion ; it is necessary to discover their meaning at home. In a good family the individual is not lost, but found ; he is sustained by a deep-down feeling of security and belongingness. Invisible walls of sympathy and common purpose afford the utmost in protection. A like rapport has bound together many a community, large and small, and today we seek it for a nation and for an alliance of nations. As we widen the circle, we rightly restrict the items and purposes ; as fallible human beings our emotions are not indefinitely extensible, altho the range of intellectual cooperation may be. We avoid insincerity and sentimental- ism by good works among those who live close by. If we feed the far hungry, we expect to feed the near hungry ; if we rebuild a Louvain, we look to our own schools and libraries as well. We know the restrictions upon freedom. Our laws help to keep one free- dom from impinging upon another, thereby safeguarding the whole struc- ture. How much individuality and individualism? How much yielding to a common society? These are the eternal questions. They cannot be answered at all, without recourse to personal intentions. If everybody joins a cause freely and enthusiastically, freedom is maintained. Altho each one seems to be doing the same thing and submerging individual differences, there is a surge of common power and a lift to the personality. The brotherhood of man is at once a restriction and a release. We like it for ourselves, especially when in trouble. In allowing it full play, we realize our deepest understand- ing of the self. The hazard in regarding man as a social creature who is tied to others and of necessity devoted to strong leadership, lies in his vulnerability to the forces of evil. Like planes and explosives, man as cooperator may be turned massively against others, against the defenders of decency and humanity, his group-engendered power now a terrible phenomenon. Nevertheless, in 234 American Association of School Administrators times of danger, a man and his government, local, state and federal, can scarcely maintain a standoffish relationship. Rather we must develop a divi- sion of labor that will define and guarantee rights in exchange for the acceptance of responsibilities. The contract is, and must be, bilateral. My assignment here today is one of citadels and general ideas. I have counted upon my distinguished predecessors to extol the schools and to stay upon the hard ground of services rendered. It will be enough to say again that our schools in wartime are unfolding a history that will long engage the earnest attention of social scientists. Mistakes have been made, it is true, and some deficiencies have been carried beyond all defensible limits. But I can think of no important instance in which these conditions have been accepted complacently or into which has crept the slightest touch of malice or cynicism. America believes in its schools, and the schools, from the tiny tots whose mothers are in war work to the brave, excited boys of the senior class, believe in America. Our victories are being won in every village, town, and city. No school claims a monopoly of talent, preparedness, or patriotism. To be in and a part of the American school, is to share in the march of great events. In these days of perilous uncertainty, the young who fight will soon lead. They will afford a measure of America's grand experiment in universal education. We know these young persons, as only parents and teachers can know them. They carry our complete confidence and admiration. We gain strength and hope from their example. If there is to be enduring glory for the schools, it will be found in the ways and deeds of youth. In life, and in death, they are reaching the heights. ♦ IN LOOKING FORWARD J. B. EDMONSON, DEAN, SCHOOL OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, ANN ARBOR, MICH. Address at Kansas City Conference The tremendous changes demanded by a great war have a profound influence on schools and other educational agencies. During the first World War educational institutions faced discouraging conditions. Many teachers left the profession, enrolments decreased, and some schools were temporarily closed. There were also troublesome problems of juvenile delinquency. Following that war there was a notable increase in the enrolments of schools and colleges. Much of the present emphasis on guidance, physical education, vocational work, and extracurriculum activities developed in the period following the first World War. Since that time, the teaching profession has made notable progress in teacher preparation, tenure, retirement policies, and salaries. Much of the growth of local, state, and national professional organizations has also occurred in the period since the first World War. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 235 Tomorrow, peace will reign again. The war-ravaged and weary peoples of the world will then face a task more gigantic than their war effort; human beings will have to be rehabilitated in body, mind, and spirit; the physical face of much of the earth will have to be rebuilt; the institutions of society will have to be rede- signed. The effort required to build is infinitely greater than that required to destroy. The magnitude of these reconstruction tasks will demand all the vision, determina- tion, and energy we can muster.^ In the years ahead we cannot place our reliance on educational planning that represents minimum effort. We must realize that the changing educa- tional situation requires comprehensive, forward-looking plans that rep- resent an all-out effort based on bold and shrewd strateg}^ Teachers, admin- istrative officials, and parents should therefore devote much thought to the question, "What is ahead in education?" To promote such discussion this outline has been prepared summarizing the writer's predictions regarding the trends, the struggles, and some changes likely to characterize the years ahead. I. // is predicted that future planning will be made in terms of past educational successes. In the years ahead we will strive to conserve previous successes of American education such as those implied in the following statements: 1. Our schools have served millions of young people who under a less democratic educational system would have been eliminated from school before the age of fifteen years. 2. Schools have given needed care not available in most homes to those children who are socially, physically, or mentally handicapped, and have furnished the children from the less favored income families with numerous services not available in their homes. 3. Our generous educational policies have tended to break down class barriers, since education at all levels is a common privilege rather than the prerogative of the children of privileged classes. 4. Our American education has given genius its chance and has thus conserved creative ability which might otherwise have been lost. 5. The schools have aided in the Americanization of our foreign- born population and have thus helped to avoid conditions that have caused serious troubles in other countries made up of numerous mi- nority racial groups. 6. American schools have cultivated genuine support for democ- racy by stressing tolerance instead of prejudice, understanding instead of blind obedience, investigation instead of thoughtless acceptance, and cooperation for the common good instead of the selfish advance- ment of the individual. 7. Our educational agencies have developed common ideals, inter- ests, and understandings among the American people, especially the youth, and have thus promoted national unity and strength. 1 Stanford University, School of Education Faculty. Education in Wartime and After. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1943. p. 419. 236 American Association of School Administrators II. It is predicted that future planning will take adequate account of shortcomings in American education. Our educational system has been suffering from such weaknesses as are implied in the following statements: 1. Educational agencies such as schools and colleges have never been as adequately financed as their increasing responsibilities and programs would warrant. 2. In most states there are large numbers of school districts that are too small to provide an adequate program of education, especially at the high-school level. 3. Secondary education has not been made effectively free to all boys and girls, many of whom have been forced to drop out for financial reasons. 4. The college preparatory objective has so dominated the thinking of high-school teachers that adequate planning for the noncollege group of students has been retarded. 5. The higher prestige claimed by the academic subjects has placed vocational courses and health instruction at a distinct disadvantage. 6. In some schools the individual pupil has received so little special consideration that failures, lack of mastery of essentials, and poor school adjustment have become common, with resulting problems of juvenile delinquency. 7. The health program of the schools has not achieved marked success in the development of desirable health habits or the elimination of physical handicaps. 8. Schools have not developed adequate plans for providing work experiences for young people. 9. Educational procedures and practices in schools have been so thoroly standardized that adjustments to new needs have been slow and difficult. III. In the years ahead, the American people zvill demand that educa- tional agencies assume increased responsibilities for boys and girls until the age of nineteen or until youth is absorbed in adult activities. It is predicted that, to meet this demand, changes such as the following will occur: 1. States will enact legislation requiring boys and girls to be en- rolled at least part time in some public or private educational institu- tion or enrolled with a guidance service until the age of nineteen. 2. The development of larger administrative units for education will be promoted in order to insure more comprehensive instructional programs. 3. The school or some other agency will provide extensive programs of guidance for all youth, including those out of school. 4. The school will aid the community in developing plans for the coordination of the efforts of organizations interested in the problems of youth. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 237 5. Educational agencies will seek to make education more effec- tively free to all young people for a period of fourteen years, with provision for scholarships or remunerative employment to provide tuitions, textbooks, transportation, and even clothing and food in instances of real need. 6. Increased consideration will be given to the educational needs of neglected minority groups, such as the Negro, and depressed economic groups. 7. The instructional program will be increasingly concerned with such community problems as poverty, housing, safety, sanitation, and health. 8. Programs of training for varied occupational fields will be made more generally available to youth in school and out of school, and plans will be formulated for capitalizing on the work experiences of youth, with credit toward certificates for such experiences. 9. The favorable recognition given the high-school diploma by the armed forces will lead in the postwar period to an insistent demand that more young people be given an opportunity to graduate from high school. 10. Supplementary drill in reading and arithmetic will be provided for all high-school students who fail to satisfy minimum requirements in these basic subjects. 11. War demands have modified the content of instruction in sci- ence, foreign languages, mathematics, and the social studies, and some of these changes will persist in the postwar period. 12. New instructional materials relating to other nations and com- mon world problems will be introduced. 13. The schools will change those policies that cause a pupil to feel that he must finish a high-school course "with his class" and emphasize policies that would cause a pupil to feel that he should continue in school as long as he does not have a more profitable use for his time. 14. The board of education will assume increased responsibility for planning and administering the educational services of a community, including many services not provided thru the schools. IV. Jfith the increase in the school's respofisibilities the competition be- tween the school and other governmental agencies for funds for the more adequate support of services will become more intense. It is predicted that as a result of this development: 1. School authorities will be continuously confronted with the in- tense competition between youth and age for governmental services, including health, employment, education, and pensions. 2. Public opinion will demand that the schools develop a marked degree of cooperation with other agencies engaged in educational work, such as libraries, camps, recreational agencies, health services, and guidance clinics. 238 American Association of School Administrators 3. Industrj' and labor are likely to be more aggressive in their effort to influence educational programs. 4. The men and women who return from the armed services will constitute a powerful pressure group likely to be concerned with edu- cation in such areas as health and physical fitness, vocational education, science and mathematics, civic education, and education for interna- tional understanding. 5. The federal government will doubtless exercise an increased con- trol of education at all levels, especially in programs involving youth. 6. While the federal government will expend increased funds for the support of educational services, it will not appropriate federal money for the operating expenses of the usual school program, except in emergencies. 7. The federal government will relieve schools of certain educa- tional services by providing these at federal expense and under federal control. V. The school will be more frequently involved in bitter conflicts be- tween local, state, and national pressure groups. It is predicted, therefore, that: 1. The control of schools by the state governments will continue to increase, especially in the matters of finance, the curriculum, school buildings, and teacher welfare. 2. The school will be faced with the determined efforts of certain organizations of taxpayers to make citizens so tax-conscious that all expenditures for public education will be viewed with strong suspicion. 3. The less favored economic groups will become more aggressive in efforts to use the school to furnish desired services for themselves and their children. 4. Increased efforts will be exerted by minority interest groups in economic, occupational, patriotic, political, and religious fields to modify instruction in terms of such minority viewpoints. 5. The school will have to face the indictment of some radical ele- ments that the school and the teachers are extremely conservative as well as the charge of some of the more conservative elements that the same school and the same teachers are extremely radical. 6. There will be increased competition for teaching positions from those returning from the armed forces and patriotic pressure groups will become active in the support of former members of the armed services who seek teaching or administrative positions. VI. // is predicted that, in the struggles ahead, increased attention will be given to social interpretation or public relations. 1 . Educators will decrease their emphasis on the minor shortcomings of schools and will place greater emphasis on the numerous successes of educational agencies. What's Right with the Schools in 1944 239 2. Teachers, school authorities, pupils, and parents will develop a greater willingness to accept changes in education as the inevitable consequence of changes in our social, economic, and political life. 3. Teachers will acquire more expertness in the interpretation of the school to its community. 4. The viewpoint will be more generally stressed that education is not a drain on our national income, but is rather a national invest- ment in terms of preparation for participation in our social, political, and economic life. 5. Teachers, from nursery schools thru the higher institutions, will be forced by outside pressures to recognize the urgent necessity of cultivating more effective unity within the profession. VII. How can members of the teaching profession prepare to meet the problems of the years ahead? 1. By giving the public a better understanding of the aims and scope of public education as well as a more adequate appreciation of the successes and failures of educational programs. 2. By seeking significant agreements among teachers regarding the basic purposes that should control the content and method of education. 3. By frank discussion of the viewpoints and recommendations in such books as the one by Dorothy Canfield Fisher entitled Our Young Folks'^ and the forthcoming report of the Educational Policies Com- mission relating to postwar education. 4. By promoting discussion among teachers and parents designed to reveal answers to such questions as the following: (a) What needs of elementary-school children are not well satisfied by present edu- cational programs? (b) What needs of children at the secondary- school level are not well satisfied by present programs of education ? (c) What deficiencies in community life could be removed, at least in part, by more adequate programs of education? (d) What instruc- tional procedures developed in the armed forces or in industry would improve our schools? 5. By securing a better understanding of the educational views of such organized groups as labor, industry, agriculture, business, and patriotic groups. 6. By cultivating a greater willingness on the part of teachers and parents to accept change in education as a desirable characteristic of a democratic society. Dorothy Canfield Fisher says, "Another valid reason for taking thought about youth now, in the midst of the tornado, is the capacity of human beings to forget what they have been forced to learn under the whip-lash of necessity. As soon as the pressure of that necessity is lightened, we slump and slide drowsily down the slope of mental inertia, back to where we were." ^ 1 Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Our Young Folks. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943. 2 Ibid. 240 American Association of School Administrator^ 7. By promoting a greater degree of unity of purpose and effort within the teaching profession in order to facilitate cooperation with lay organizations, to furnish the resources required for needed studies, and to provide the necessary strength to resist undesirable pressures. irhat Is Ahead in Education? The prospect for the future in the writer's opinion may be summarized in such terms as (a) increased enrolments, (b) longer periods of schooling, (c) more emphasis on guidance, (d) enriched instructional programs, (e) more cooperative undertakings with community agencies, (f) more varied occupational training, (g) more competition for public funds, (h) increased activity of pressure groups, (i) more state and federal control, (j) heavier responsibility on professional organizations of teachers, (k) heavier demands on educational leadership. Official Records Also at the Conferences DISCUSSION GROUPS Two sessions at each regional conference were allotted to discussion groups. The topics of these meetings, which were usually twelve in number, were keyed to the interests of the region to be served. The chairman of each group meeting was responsible for organizing the program. Many members have reported that these discussions were unusually helpful. PAST-PRESIDENT'S KEY An impressive feature of the Kansas City conference was the presentation of a well-earned past-president's key to Superintendent Worth McClure. In brief but effective fashion. Superintendent John L. Bracken, in behalf of the Executive Committee, touched upon Superintendent McClure's dis- tinguished record as a leader in American education. HONORARY LIFE MEMBERSHIP The American Association of School Administrators has been very con- servative in granting honorary life memberships. Only fourteen persons have been so honored in the last twenty years. A fifteenth was added to this select group at the Chicago conference, when an honorary life membership was presented to Past-President Milton C. Potter. For twenty-nine years Mr. Potter served the public schools of Milwaukee, where one of the coun- try's great school systems was developed under his wise guidance. AMERICAN EDUCATION AWARD Since 1928 the Associated Exhibitors have presented the American Edu- cation Award each year to a person who has made an outstanding contribu- tion in the broad field of education. Captain Eddie Rickenbacker was selected to receive the 1943 award but due to the cancellation of the St. Louis convention, the presentation was postponed. At a dinner meeting in New York on February 23, President Elliott C. Spratt of the Associated Exhibitors presented the award, and Captain Rickenbacker accepted in an address emphasizing the need for developing in our youth an appreciation of spiritual values. At Chicago a week later. President Spratt presented the American Edu- cation Award for 1944 to Superintendent Emeritus Frank Cody of Detroit. In his words of acceptance, Mr. Cody referred to education in the spirit of life and punctuated his remarks with typical Cody stories. [241] 242 American Association of School Administrators MUSIC That music in the public schools has reached a hij^h place of achievement was well demonstrated at the regional conferences. Seattle set the stage with fine vocal music thru its Roosevelt a Cappella Choir and again thru the Lincoln Chanters in their presentation "America Sings." Atlanta's offering was varied — a boys' high-school band, an all-girl orchestra of some two hundred pieces, a massed chorus of very young children singing songs of far countries, and a Negro high-school glee club in a program of spirituals. Kansas City's chorus of 2000 children singing from the balcony of the vast arena of the Municipal Auditorium will long be remembered for its sweet- ness of voice and the inspiration it carried. The stirring music of high-school bands was also heard at Kansas City as were the songs of an all-girl chorus of five hundred voices, an all-boy chorus, and a citywide high-school chorus of mixed voices. It is interesting to note the type of music on the programs of the several conferences. Included were the chorales of Bach and the great music of Handel and Strauss, together with folk songs which have come down thru the years, and the dynamic music of modern composers. The bands, orchestras, and choral groups of the conferences brought to the listeners not only the joy of music but the realization as well that the public schools are creating in the children an appreciation and love for an art which can bring them a richer and fuller life — music. INFORMAL RESOLUTION Adopted by the regional conferences of the American Association of School Administrators at Chicago, Illinois, March 1, 1944, and at Kansas City, Missouri, March 10, 1944 Whereas, Education is essential to the establishment of permanent peace, and Whereas, The Educational Policies Commission has set forth basic principles for the establishment of permanent peace and has urged the ac- tive participation of educational leaders at the Peace Table, Therefore, be it resolved. That this regional conference of the American Association of School Administrators hereby pledges wholehearted support to the advancement of the peace program of the Educational Policies Com- mission, and Be it further resolved, That we commend wholeheartedly the transfer for this purpose of the sum of $50,000 which has been made from the War and Peace Fund to the Educational Policies Commission, and Be it further resolved, That this conference urge the Executive Com- mittee of the Association to move promptly and vigorously in promoting, by whatever means may be appropriate, the proposal to include educational leaders In the group which will assemble about the Peace Table. Official Records 243 CONFERENCE PROGRAMS Seattle January 10-12. 1944 First General Session The People's Schools: A National View Presiding, Samuel E. Fleming, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Seattle, Wash. Morale in Education in 1944 L. John Nuttall, Jr., Superintendent of Schools, Salt Lake City, Utah Education for Citizenship in a Reorganized World Frederick M. Hunter, Chancellor, State System of Higher Education, University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon Second General Session The People's Schools: An International View Presiding, J. A. Reeves, Superintendent of Schools, Everett, Wash. ; Presi- dent, Department of Administration, Washington Education Association To Bind Up the Wounds in the Schools of All Nations William F. Russell, Dean, Teachers College, Columbia University Education and the People's Peace William G. Carr, Secretary, Educational Policies Commission ; Associate Secretary, National Education Association, Washington, D. C. Third General Session Free Schools for a Free People Presiding, J. F. Cramer, Superintendent of Schools, Eugene, Oregon Financing Education in the Postwar Economy John K. Norton, Director, Division of Organization and Administration of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Protecting Home Rule in American Education Mrs. Pearl A. Wanamaker, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Olympia, Wash. Fourth General Session The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow Presiding, Lee Paul Seig, President, University of Washington, Seattle, Wash. Today's Challenge to American Schools Sherwood D. Shankland, Executive Secretary, American Association of School Administrators, Washington, D. C. Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs W. Howard Pillsbury, Superintendent of Schools, Schenectady, N. Y. The Schools of Britain Carry On Worth McClure, Superintendent of Schools, Seattle, Wash. ; President, American Association of School Administrators Fifth General Session What's Right with the Schools in 1944 Presiding, Mrs. Pearl A. Wanamaker, State Superintendent of Public In- struction, Olympia, Wash. Schools, the Citadels of Democracy Rex Putnam, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Salem, Oregon Training Workers for War Industries O. B. Badger, Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Portland, Oregon Preserving America's Intellectual and Spiritual Heritage Honorable Arthur B. Langlie, Governor of Washington, Olympia, Wash. MONDAY Jan. 10 2:15 P. M. Olympic Hotel MONDAY Jan. 10 8:00 P. M. First Presbyterian Church TUESDAY Jan. 11 9:30 A. M. Olympic Hotel TUESDAY Jan. 11 8:00 P. M. First Presbyterian Church WEDNESDAY Jan. 12 2:15 P. M. Olympic Hotel 244 American Association of School Administrators TUESDAY Feb. 15 2:15 P. M. O'Keefe Junior High School Atlanta February 15-17, 1944 First General Session The People's Schools in War and Peace Presiding, Worth McClure, Superintendent of Schools, Seattle, Wash.; Presi- dent, American Association of School Administrators The Teachers of America Serve a Nation at War Mrs. Edith B. Joynes, Principal, Gatewood School, Norfolk, Va. ; Presi- dent, National Education Association The Military Training Program of the Army Service Forces Brigadier General Walter L. Weible, Director of Military Training, Army Service Forces, Washington, D. C. Education and the People's Peace William G. Carr, Secretary, Educational Policies Commission : Associate Secretary, National Education Association, Washington, D. C. Second General Session The People's Schools at Home and Abroad Presiding, Willis A. Sutton, Secretary, Georgia Education Association, Atlanta, Ga. ; Superintendent Emeritus, Atlanta Public Schools The Schools of Britain Carry On Worth McClure, President of the Association The Future of Education in the South Honorable Ellis Arnall, Governor of Georgia Third General Session Free Schools for a Free People Presiding, W. Frank Warren, Superintendent of Schools, Durham, N. C. ; Second Vice-President of the Association Financing American Education in the Postwar Economy Paul R. Mort, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York. N. Y. Morale for a Free World Carroll R. Reed, First Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Washington, D. C. ; Chairman, 1944 Yearbook Commission on Education for Morale Universal and Free Public Education Clyde A. Erwin, State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Raleigh, N. C. Fourth General Session The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrozu Presiding, C. B. Glenn, Birmingham, Ala. ; Past President of the Association Today's Challenge to American Schools A. C. Flora, Superintendent of Schools, Columbia, S. C. Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs Willard E. Givens, Executive Secretary, National Education Association Fifth General Session What's Right zuith the Schools in 1944 Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association Training Workers for War Industries Thomas Quigley, Director, U. S. Employment Service of Georgia Health and Physical Education John L. Bracken, Superintendent of Schools, Clayton, AIo. ; Chairman, Commission on Health in Schools, American Association of School Administrators School Citadels of Democracy William H. Kilpatrick, Professor Emeritus, Philosophy of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Safeguarding the Intellectual Foundations of America John W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education TUESDAY Feb. 15 8:00 P. M. Municipal Auditorium WEDNESDAY Feb. 16 9:30 A. M. Ansley Hotel WEDNESDAY Feb. 16 8:00 P. M. Municipal Auditorium THURSDAY Feb. 17 2:15 P. M. Ansley Hotel Official Records 245 TUESDAY Feb. 22 2:15 P. M. Hotel Pennsylvania WEDNESDAY Feb. 23 9:30 A. M. Hotel Pennsylvania Ne7v York February 22-24, 1944 First General Session The People's Schools: A National View Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association Morale for a Free World Carroll R. Reed, First Assistant Superintendent of Schools, Washington, D. C. ; Chairman, 1944 Yearbook Commission on Education for Morale To Bind Up the Wounds in the Schools of All Nations William F. Russell, Dean, Teachers College, Columbia University Safeguarding the Intellectual Foundations of America John W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education Second General Session The People's Schools: An International Viezv Presiding, Homer W. Anderson, Acting Superintendent of Schools, Newton, Mass. ; First Vice-President of the Association The Convention Exhibit Elliott C. Spratt, President, Associated Exhibitors of the NEA The Schools of Britain Carry On \\^orth McClure, President of the Association Education and the People's Peace Alexander J. Stoddard, Superintendent of Schools, Philadelphia, Pa. ; Chairman, Educational Policies Commission Third General Session The People's Schools: Today and Tomorroiv Presiding, James L. Hanley, Superintendent of Schools, Providence, R. I. Today's Challenge to American Schools A. C. Flora, Superintendent of Schools, Columbia, S. C. Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs Willis A. Sutton, Secretary, Georgia Education Association, Atlanta, Ga. ; Superintendent Emeritus, Atlanta Public Schools Fourth General Session Free Schools for a Free People Presiding, John H. Bosshart, State Commissioner of Education, Trenton, N. J. Financing Education in the Postwar Economy Alonzo G. Grace. State Commissioner of Education, Hartford, Conn. The Outlook for Education John E. Wade, Superintendent of Schools, New York, N. Y. Protecting Home Rule in American Education W. Howard Pillsbury, Superintendent of Schools, Schenectady, N. Y. Fifth General Session What's Right zmth the Schools in 1944 Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association The Schools as : Builders of Men N. L. Engelhardt, Associate Superintendent of Schools, New York. N. Y. ' Sources of Strength in Time of War David E. Weglein, Superintendent of Schools, Baltimore, Md. Promoters of Cooperation in the Educational Enterprise Richard B. Kennan, Executive Secretary, Maine Teachers Associa- tion, Augusta, Maine Preservers of Our Cultural Heritage Julius E. Warren, State Commissioner of Education, Boston, Mass. Citadels of Democracy George D. Stoddard, New York State Commissioner of Education WEDNESDAY Feb. 23 2:15 P. M. Hotel Pennsylvania THURSDAY Feb. 24 9:30 A. M. Hotel Pennsylvania THURSDAY Feb. 24 2:15 P. M. Hotel New Yorker 246 American Association of School Administrators Chicago MONDAY Feb. 28 2:15 P. M. Palmer House TUESDAY Feb. 29 9:30 A. M. Palmer House TUESDAY Feb. 29 2:15 P. M. Palmer House TUESDAY Feb. 29 2:15 P. M. Hotel Morrison WEDNESDAY March 1 9:30 A. M. Palmer House WEDNESDAY March 1 2:15 P. M. Palmer House February 28- March 1, 1944 First General Session The People's ScJiools: A National View Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association Morale for a Free World John E. Anderson, Director, Institute of Child Welfare, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. ; Member, 1944 Yearbook Commission Education for Civic Competence Francis L. Bacon, Superintendent, Evanston Township High School, Evanston, 111. Second General Session The People's Schools: An International View Presiding, William J. Hamilton, Superintendent of Schools, Oak Park, 111. The Convention Exhibit Elliott C. Spratt, President, Associated Exhibitors of the NEA The Schools of Britain Carry On Worth McClure, President of the Association Education and the People's Peace Alexander J. Stoddard, Superintendent of Schools, Philadelphia, Pa. ; Chairman, Educational Policies Commission Third General Session — Section A The People's Schools: Some Practical Aspects Presiding. Worth McClure, President of the Association Education and Business Thomas C. Boushall, President, The Morris Plan Bank of Virginia, Richmond, Va. ; Chairman, Committee on Education, Chamber of Com- merce of the United States Protecting Home Rule in American Education DeWitt S. Morgan, Superintendent of Schools, Indianapolis, Ind. (Deceased February 27, 1944) Third General Session — Section B Presiding, E. W. Jacobsen, President, University of Louisville, Louisville, Ky. To Bind Up the Wounds in the Schools of All Nations William F. Russell, Dean, Teachers College, Columbia University Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs Willard E. Givens, Executive Secretary, National Education Association Fourth General Session The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association Today's Challenge to American Schools Wilbur W. White, Dean, Graduate School, Western Reserve University Readjusting the School Service to Postwar Needs Charles H. Lake, Superintendent of Schools, Cleveland, Ohio Presentation of Honorary Life Membership to Milton C. Potter Fifth General Session What's Right zvith the Schools in 1944 Presiding. Worth McClure, President of the Association School Citadels of Democracy Claude V. Courter, Superintendent of Schools, Cincinnati, Ohio Health and Physical Education William H. Johnson, Superintendent of Schools, Chicago, 111. Preserving the American Heritage Edgar G. Doudna, Secretary and Director of Teacher Training, State Board of Regents of Normal Schools, Madison, Wis. Official Records 247 Kansas City March 8-10, 1944 First General Session Free Schools for a Free People Presiding, Herold C. Hunt, Superintendent of Schools, Kansas City, Mo. The Teachers of America Serve a Nation at War Mrs. Edith B. Joynes, Principal, Gatewood School, Norfolk, Va. ; President, National Education Association Financing Education in the Postwar Economy John K. Norton, Director, Division of Organization and Administration of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, N. Y. Second General Session The People's Schools: A National View Presiding, Worth McClure, Superintendent of Schools, Seattle, Wash. ; President, American Association of School Administrators Morale for a Free World Elbert K. Fretwell, Chief Executive, Boy Scouts of America, New York, N. Y. Safeguarding the Intellectual Foundations of America John W. Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education, Wash- ington, D. C. Third General Session The People's Schools: Today and Tomorrow Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association Today's Challenge to American Schools Sherwood D. Shankland, Executive Secretary, American Association of School Administrators, Washington, D. C. Some Suggested War and Peace Musts for Education Herbert B. Bruner, Superintendent of Schools, Oklahoma City, Okla. WEDNESDAY March 8 2:15 P. M. Music Hall Municipal Auditorium WEDNESDAY March 8 8:00 P. M. Music Hall Municipal Auditorium THURSDAY March 9 9:30 A. M. Music Hall Municipal Auditorium THURSDAY March 9 8:00 P. M. Fourth General Session The People's Schools: An International View Presiding, John L. Bracken, Superintendent of Schools, Clayton, Mp. ; Mem- ^^"^. ber. Executive Committee, American Association of School "Adminis- Municipal trators The Schools of Britain Carry On Worth McClure, President of the Association Education and the People's Peace Alexander J. Stoddard, Superintendent of Schools, Philadelphia, Pa. Auditorium Fifth General Session What's Right with the Schools in 1944 Presiding, Worth McClure, President of the Association What's Right with the Schools in 1944 In the Educational Program Agnes Samuelson, Executive Secretary, Iowa State Teachers As- sociation, Des Moines, Iowa In Community Service Kenneth McFarland, Superintendent of Schools, Topeka, Kansas In Looking Forward J. B. Edmonson, Dean, School of Education, University of Michi- gan, Ann Arbor, Mich. FRIDAY March 10 2:15 P. M. Music Hall Municipal Auditorium votes votes received received 336 221 474 407 445 458 559 530 400 598 248 American Association of School Administrators REPORT OF THE BOARD OF TELLERS Washington, D. C, January 8, 1944 Results of the Final Preferential Ballot for the Office of President of the American Association of School Administrators a Department of the National Education Association of the United States We herebj' certify that the results of the final preferential ballot for the office of president of the American Association of School Administrators for the year beginning March 15, 1944, as provided in Article V, Section 1, of the Constitution, are as follows: First choice Second choice Third choice Nominee votes received 1. N. L. Engelhardt 1053 2. Henry H. Hill 295 3. Herold C. Hunt 321 4. Charles H. Lake 291 5. De Witt S. Morgan ^ ...... ., 254 The total number of ballots cast in this final election was 2229, of which 15 ballots were invalid. By applying the formula for counting the ballots in accordance with the instructions of the Atlantic City convention in 1938, as recorded on page 189 of the Official Report of that convention, the totals are as follows: N. l. engelhardt 1053 first choice votes x 3 3159 336 second choice votes x 2 672 221 third choice votes x 1 221 Total 4052 HENRY H. HILL HEROLD C. HUNT 295 first choice votes x 3 885 321 first choice votes x 3 963 474 second choice votes x 2 948 445 second choice votes x 2 890 407 third choice votes x 1 407 458 third choice votes x 1 458 Total 2240 Total 2311 CHARLES H. LAKE DE WITT S. MORGAN 291 first choice votes x 3 873 254 first choice votes x 3 762 559 second choice votes x2 1118 400 second choice votes x 2 800 530 third choice votes x 1 530 598 third choice votes x 1 598 Total 2521 Total 2160 In accordance with the above results, we hereby officially certify and announce the election of N. L. Engelhardt as president of the American Association of School Administrators for the 3^ear beginning March 15, 1944. Respectfully submitted, Paul Loser, Chairman W. H. Lemmel Harvey A. Smith Official Records 249 REPORT OF THE AUDITING COMMITTEE Washington, D. C, February 5, 1944 Dr. Worth McClure, President American Association of School Administrators Seattle, Washington Dear Dr. McClure: The Auditing Committee of the American Association of School Admin- istrators, a Department of the National Education Association of the United States, submits to you the following report. The committee has gone over all records in the office of the Department and has checked all vouchers and all cancelled checks and has made a care- ful examination of all of the special accounts and funds of the Department. The audit includes all vouchers for expenses, records of bank deposits and withdrawals, and the accounts of the permanent funds of the American Association of School Administrators. A check of the membership records was made for the purpose of noting the receipts in this Department. This committee examined and checked on the books the list of securities certified by the Executive Secretary and the Business Manager of the National Education Association, a complete list of which is printed on page 342 of the 1944 Yearbook of the American Association of School Administrators. General Fund The distribution of receipts and expenditures was as follows : Total receipts for 1943 $37,883.03 Balance January 1, 1943 17,710.47 Grand total $55,593.50 Total expenditures 46,582.46 Balance on hand December 31, 1943 $ 9,011.04 Attention is called to the fact that the receipts for 1943 were $21,445.95 less than for the year 1942. Cancellation of the annual convention resulted in complete loss of revenues from exhibits and a material loss in memberships. Receipts and expenditures by classification are reported on page 341 of the 1944 Yearbook. Permanent Fund Assets on hand January 1, 1943 $31,639.55 Receipts — life memberships 280.00 Assets as of December 31, 1943 $3l'919.55 The income from the permanent fund during the year was $1,180.79, which was used, as is required, for educational research. The committee desires to express its appreciation for the cooperation and helpfulness of the Executive Secretary, of his office assistants, and of the Assistant Treasurer and Business Manager of the National Education Association. Respectfully submitted, J. H. Binford, Chairman Ray E. Cheney Evan E. Jones 250 American Association of School Administrators The American Association of School Administrators Officers 1943-44 President, Worth McClure Superintendent of Schools Seattle, Wash. First Vicepresident, Homer W. Anderson Acting Superintendent of Schools Newton, Mass Second Vicepresident, W. Frank Warren Superintendent of Schools Durham, N. C. Executive Secretary, Sherwood D. Shankland 1201 Sixteenth Street, Northwest Washington 6. D. C. Executive Committee Henry H. Hill, Superintendent of Schools Pittsburgh, Pa. Charles H. Lake, Superintendent of Schools Cleveland, Ohio W. Howard Pillsbury, Superintendent of Schools Schenectady, N. Y. John L. Br.\cken, Superintendent of Schools Clayton. Mo. The President, First and Second Vicepresidents, ex officio. Commission on Education for Morale — 1944 Yearbook Carroll R. Reed^ Chairman, First Assistant Superintendent of Schools Washington, D. C. John E. Anderson, Director, Institute of Child Welfare. University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Minn. Winifred E. Bain, President, Wheelock College Boston, Mass. Frank S. Freeman, Professor of Education and Psychology, Cornell University Ithaca, N. Y. Roy W. Hatch, Formerly Head, Department of the Social Studies, New Jersey State Teachers College Montclair, N. J. Laura E. Keillar, Principal, Atwater Elementary School, Shorewood Milwaukee, Wis. J. Cayce Morrison, Assistant Commissioner for Research, State Education Department Albany. N. Y. Ralph Barton Perry, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University Cambridge, Mass. J. W. Ramsey, Superintendent of Schools Fort Smith. Ark. James M. Spinning, Superintendent of Schools Rochester, N. Y. 1945 Yearbook Commission WiLLARD E. Goslin, Chairman, Superintendent of Schools Webster Groves, Mo. L. FRAZEif Banks, Superintendent of Schools Birmingham, Ala. Paul L. Cressman, Director, Bureau of Instruction, State Department of Public Instruction Harrisburg, Pa. Newton Edwards, Department of Education, University of Chicago Chicago, 111. Philip H. Falk, Superintendent of Schools Madison. Wis. Alonzo G. Grace, State Commissioner of Education Hartford, Conn. Arnold E. Joyal, Acting Dean, College of Education, University of Maryland College Park. Md. Emerson H. Landis, Superintendent of Schools Dayton, Ohio J.-^Y B. Nash, Professor of Education, New York University New York, N. Y. Alfred D. Simpson, Professor of Education, Graduate School of Education, Harvard University Cambridge, Mass. Official Records 251 The American Association of School Administrators Officers 1944-45 President, N. L. Engelhardt Associate Superintendent of New York City Schools, 110 Livingston Street Brooklyn 2, N. Y. First Vicepresident, Worth McClure Superintendent of Schools Seattle, Wash. Second Vicepresident, W. Frank Warren Superintendent of Schools Durham, N. C. Executive Secretary, Sherwood D. Shankland 1201 Sixteenth Street, Northwest Washington 6, D. C. Executive Coininittee Charles H. Lake, Superintendent of Schools Cleveland, Ohio (Term expires March 15, 1945) W. Howard Pillsbury, Superintendent of Schools Schenectady, N. Y. (Term expires March 15, 1946) John L. Bracken, Superintendent of Schools Clayton, Mo. (Term expires March 15, 1947) Henry H. Hill, Superintendent of Schools Pittsburgh, Pa. (Term expires March 15, 1948) The President, First and Second Vicepresidents, ex officio. INDEX Adult education (Pillsbury), 105; (Wade), 136 Also at the conferences, 241 American Education Award, Presenta- tion of, 241 Army Service Forces, The military train- ing program of the (Weible), 82 Army training program (Weible), 82 Arnall, Ellis, 154 Atlanta conference program, 244 Auditing Committee, Report of, 249 B Bacon, Francis L., 88 Boushall, Thomas C, 172 Bracken, John L., 188 Britain carry on. The schools of (Mc- Clure), 5 Bruner, Herbert B., 125 Business, Education and (Boushall), 172 Carr, William G., 29 Chicago conference program, 246 Citizenship in a reorganized world, Edu- cation for (Hunter), 49 Citizenship training (Putnam), 184 See also Civic education Civic competence, Education for (Ba- con), 88 Civic education (Bacon), 88; (Joynes), 81; (Putnam), 184; (Studebaker), 57 Cody, Frank, Presentation of American Education Award to, 241 Community service. The schools and (McFarland), 195 Cooperation in the educational enter- prise, The schools as promoters of (Kennan), 218 Courter, Claude V., 224 Cultural heritage, The schools as pre- servers of our (Warren), 213 D Demobilized service men and women, Education and training of (Bruner), 127; (Hunter), 51 Democracy, School citadels of (Courter), 224; (Putnam), 183; (Stoddard), 231 Discussion groups, 241 Doudna, Edgar G., 200 Edmonson, J, B., 234 Education, The outlook for (Edmon- son), 234; (Wade), 133 Education, Universal and free public (Erwin), 112 Educational enterprise, The schools as promoters of cooperation in the (Ken- nan), 218 Educational program in 1944, What's right with the (Samuelson), 207 Engelhardt, N. L., 179 England, Education in (McClure), 5 Erwin, Clyde A., 112 Exhibitors, Greetings from the president of the Associated (Spratt), 144 Federal aid for education (Flora), 152; (Hunter), 53; (Norton), 98; (Pills- bury), 105; (Wanamaker), 117 Financing education in the postwar econ- omy (Grace), 100; (Norton), 91 Flora, A. C, 145 Forward, In looking (Edmonson), 234 Givens, Willard E., 138 Grace, Alonzo G., 100 Great Britain, Education in (McClure), 5 H Health and physical education. What is right with (Bracken), 188 Heritage, Preserving the American (Doudna), 200 Home rule in American education. Pro- tecting (Erwin), 112; (Pillsbury), 105; (Wanamaker), 117 Honorary life membership to Milton C. Potter, Presentation of, 241 Hunter, Frederick M., 49 Intellectual foundations of America, Safeguarding the (Studebaker), 55 International educational relationships in the postwar period (Carr), 29; (Hunter), 49; (Russell), 37; (Stod- dard), 17 International office of education. Estab- lishment of an (Carr), 29; (Hunter), 50; (Stoddard), 17 J Joynes, Edith B., 75 K Kansas City conference program, 247 Kennan, Richard B., 218 Mc McClure, Worth, 5 McFarland, Kenneth, 195 [253] 254 American Association of School Administrators M Materials, Minds and (Spratt), 144 Morale for a free world (Reed), 63 Morale in education in 1944 (Nuttall), 71 Music, 242 N New York conference program, 245 Norton, John K., 91 Nuttall, L. John, Jr., 71 O Officers 1943-44, 250; 1944-45, 251 Official Records, 241 Past-president's key, Presentation of, 241 Peace, Education and the people's (Carr), 29; (Stoddard), 17 Peace musts for education, Some sug- gested war and (Bruner), 125 Physical education. What is right with health and (Bracken), 188 Pillsbury, W. Howard, 105 Planning, Educational (Edmonson), 234 Postwar economy. Financing education in the (Grace), 100; (Norton), 91 Postwar educational readjustment (Studebaker), 58 Postwar needs, Readjusting the school service to (Givens), 138; (Sutton), 161 Postwar period, International educa- tional relationships in the (Carr), 29; (Hunter), 49; (Russell), 37; (Stod- dard), 17 Potter, Milton C, Presentation of hon- orary life membership to, 241 Preparation of teachers (Joynes), 78 Programs of conferences, 243 Public relations (Edmonson), 238 Putnam, Rex, 183 R Readjusting the school service to post- war needs (Givens), 138; (Sutton), 161 Reed, Carroll R., 63 Rehabilitation of service men and women (Bruner), 127 Resolution, Informal, 242 Rickenbacker, Capt. Eddie, Presentation of American Education Award to, 241 Russell, William F., 37 Samuelson, Agnes, 207 Schools as builders of men, The (Engel- hardt), 179 Schools, Today's challenge to American (Flora), 145 Schools, What's right with the (McFar- land), 195 Seattle conference program, 243 South, The future of education in the (Arnall), 154 Spratt, Elliott C, 144 Stoddard, Alexander J., 17 Stoddard, George D., 231 Studebaker, John W., 55 Sutton, Willis A., 161 Teachers of America serve a nation at war. The (Joynes), 75 Tellers, Report of Board of, 248 Training program of the Army Service Forces, The military (Weible), 82 (Bruner), 127; V Vocational education (Pillsbury), 105 W Wade, John E., 133 Wanamaker, Pearl A., 117 Warren, Julius E., 213 Weible, Walter L., 82 Wounds in the schools of all nations. To bind up the (Russell), 37 Yearbook commissions, 1944 and 1945, 250 Date Due MA^ 13*51 \ 3 1262 04042 1066 85 \