Education: Pedagogs’ Pictures

For decades U. S. school superintendents turned out overstuffed annual reports. Their tons of fat brown volumes, unread even by the teachers, gathered dust in official archives. Two years ago superintendents made two discoveries: 1) a report that the taxpayers liked would serve political uses, 2) everybody likes the picture of a child more than a statistical table. Result was an epidemic of school picture books that by last week had assumed the proportions of a national movement. Latest of these products to roll from the presses was Your Children and Their Schools, “an informal report to the patrons of the Los Angeles City School District,” with 234 illustrations, mostly of young children.

Your Children and Their Schools is Superintendent Vierling Kersey’s introduction to Los Angelenos, whose schools he is this year supervising for the first time. He took a “visual education” teacher out of classes to make the photographs, appointed a junior high-school principal as editor. Ten thousand copies costing $10,800 were distributed free to civic leaders, libraries, universities, clubs, public officials.

In picturizing its report, Los Angeles followed the example of Detroit, Chicago, New Orleans, New York City. Originators of this trend were New York’s Superintendent Harold George Campbell and his secretary, Howard A. Shiebler, 36, part of whose own education was acquired as a newspaper correspondent and co-author of one of George White’s Scandals. Secretary Shiebler decided two years ago that “the law requires the superintendent to make an annual report but does not require that it be dull.” With the Board of Education photographer. Ambrose J. Hickey, he spent six months touring New York City’s vast school system to catch schoolchildren in unguarded moments.

The result, an illustrated book with the general format of FORTUNE, was a great success. Its first printing of 3,000 copies was quickly exhausted, likewise a second printing of 1,000 copies. Today, as Secretary Shiebler is getting his third illustrated report ready for press, his files are laden with 10,000 letters from parents and top-rank educators who admired his first two efforts, and publishers have made offers to print it commercially.

But all the picturized school reports still have one grave defect. They have not been able to find text to match their illustrations. Their words are still the bumbling literary efforts of pedagogs, usually dull, often pompous. Sample from the Los Angeles report:

“Education, teachers and learning are different. Education is a different process today. Schools are as new and improved now compared with what they were 20 years ago as the automobile today is improved over the motor car of 1917.”