Education: Resurrected Platitude

Even country schoolteachers have outgrown the platitude: “Be good, and maybe you’ll grow up to be president.” But last week in Iowa, the platitude was given such new life and validity that its vogue may well return at once.

When President Hoover’s train pulled into West Liberty, Iowa (see p. II). Secret Service men lifted Mrs. Mollie Brown Carran, 73, aboard. “How are you, Herbert?” she asked proudly as they posed for photographers. She had been his first schoolteacher. She listened to a band of moppets singing “Iowa,” saw the President accept a gift of corn. Sitting beside Mrs.

Hoover she reminisced for newshawks.

“Very attentive, very obedient, very grateful for what was done for him. . . .

I recall I’d been having quite a little trouble with the boys the year he went to me (in the third grade)—not with him but with some of the bigger boys, and I asked the president of the school board to talk with them.

“He told them they should not make trouble in school, but grow up to be good.

And I remember he ended with, ‘there may be a President of the United States among you!’ “But that Herbert Hoover ever would be President certainly never entered my thoughts.”