Education: Education Week

The week after Elections, the week of most colleges’ Big Football Game, the week of the National Automobile Show and the last week of woodcock shooting in New England—last week—was American Education Week. For the benefit of 25,000 parent-teacher groups who would inspect their public schools locally during the week, Mrs. Benjamin Franklin Langworthy of The National Congress of Parents & Teachers, wrote an instructive message:

“There are intelligent and offensive methods of school visiting. If you goto school to check on your child’s progress … do not embarrass him by talking about him before others. . . . Going to school to criticize is fraught with danger. … It should never be done on one’s first visit. . . . No matter what our motives are for visiting the school, the canons of good taste should govern the call.”

In Washington, U. S. Commissioner of Education John Ward Studebaker announcedthat since American Education Week, child of the American Legion, the U. S. Office of Education and the National Education Association, was launched in 1920, the number of U. S. teachers has grown from 815,000 to 1,050,000, secondary school enrollments have boomed from 2,413,000 to 6,395,000, college enrollments from 598,000 to 1,179,000.

The Nation’s public school system made the following news during American Education Week:

¶In Chicago, new School Superintendent William Harding Johnson ruled that after Feb. 1 the city’s 500,000 high-school students would do their homework in their classrooms, that mathematics would be removed from the list of required high-school subjects.

¶In Newark, N. J., Mr. & Mrs. Benno Bongart, called into court to explain the truancy of their sons Robert, 11, and William, 12, maintained that Robert and William were learning more at home than they had in suburban West Orange’s Washington Public School. The Bongarts withdrew their boys in April when they heard that the principal beat one of them. At home Mrs. Bongart, a onetime Hunter College student, teaches them from old history and geography texts, prescribes excerpts from magazines and newspapers. Father Bongart, a mechanical engineer, teaches them drawing. Into court to testify that New Jersey teachers were better qualified than the Bongarts, marched the heads of two of the State’s normal schools and West Orange’s elementary education supervisor, Inez Johnson. After a three-day hearing the State rested its case and the Bongarts prepared to refute it.

¶At liberty for the second week, despite the money-raising efforts of local civic organizations, were 12,000 pupils of the bankrupt public school system of Springfield, Ohio (TIME, Nov. 16). Cincinnati, which had likewise voted down a special school levy, faced the choice of shortening its school year by 49 days or eliminating night schools and kindergartens.