Education: Teaching by Typing

Of all the tedious subjects taught in grammar school, few are duller or more irksome than penmanship. Nevertheless it has always been taught on the presumption that good legible hand writing can be learned in no other way. Last week this theory was flouted (as at a psychologists’ meeting was flouted the more modern theory that punishment is bad for children—see p. 22) by Dr. Ralph Haefner of Columbia University in a book* based upon studies by Dr. Benjamin De Kalbe Wood of Columbia and Dr. Frank Nugent Freeman of the University of Chicago. For two years these pedagogs experimented with 2,000 typewriters, 14,000 school children and 400 school teachers. Most newsworthy result: that children who do their written class work both by hand and by typewriter show more improvement in handwriting than children who do not use typewriters. “One explanation,” says Dr. Haefner, “is that the typewriter instilled into the children who used it a strong urge to write, which had to be satisfied by a larger use of other writing tools when they did not have access to the classroom typewriters.”

Doheny Bust

Between the University of Southern California and the family of famed Oilman Edward Laurence (“Teapot Dome”) Doheny there has been close financial and sentimental association. Busy prospecting for gold in his youth, Oilman Doheny had no time to go beyond high school. But his son Edward Laurence Jr. (“Ned”) went to U. S. C., was graduated in 1916. After serving as lieutenant in the U. S. Navy, he became a member of the University alumni council, later a University trustee. In February 1929 “Ned” Doheny, 36, was shot by his mad secretary, Robert Plunkett, who then killed himself. A great Doheny friend was Warren Bradley Bovard, 47, comptroller and vice president of U. S. C., son of its President Emeritus. In December 1930, Comptroller Bovard killed himself, left a note: “Goodbye, Blanie [his wife], I am going to look for Ned.”

A bust of “Ned” Doheny, in naval uniform, is now on view in a brand new brick & limestone Romanesque building on the Southern California campus. The clan Doheny assembled to see the building dedicated last week on the first day of the U. S. C. year. It was the Edward L. Doheny Junior Memorial Library, built with $1,100,000 donated from their many millions by Mr. & Mrs. Doheny Senior, Mrs. Leigh Battson, who is “Ned” Doheny’s widow, and his children Lucy Estelle, Edward III, William Henry, Patrick Anson, Timothy Michael. After many a speech, U. S. C.’s President von Kleinsmid accepted the keys to the great bronze doors of the Library, largest yet to be cast in the West. Then the visitors inspected coppered, acoustic-plastered ceilings and rubber-tiled floors; the main reading room, 131 ft. by 48 ft., with stained glass windows; the Treasure Room for rare books, wherein are murals depicting the history of printing, and “Ned” Doheny’s bust.

Archambeau Bust

Since 1906, one George Archambeau, 61, has been janitor in the Harvard School of Architecture in the old Fogg Museum Building. Among his duties has been dusting the statues in the Fogg entrance hall, which include that of William Crowninshield Endicott, Secretary of War under Grover Cleveland, sculptured by John Wilson of the School of Architecture. Janitor Archambeau has long been an intimate of the school’s instructors and students, a patient listener-in on all sorts of architectural talk. For the past year he played pinochle every Sunday night with Instructor Wilson. Last week, as George Archambeau went about his dusting, he gave a proud extra flick to a new bust in the Fogg entrance hall. It was himself, modeled during pinochle evenings, now set up vis-a-vis to William Crowninshield Endicott.

*The Typewriter in the Primary and Intermediate Grades (Macmillan).