Education: School on the Dial

A stunt hatched by two radio press-agents last week made a newspaper and broadcasting show of the Chicago public school system, shut from the beginning of the term (TIME, Sept. 13) by an infantile paralysis outbreak. While the city grumblingly paid its 9,000 idle teachers, press and radio mined a circulation bonanza. Five newspapers printed homework outlines and instructions under streamer headlines in editions which the parents of 317,000 elementary-school pupils felt more or less duty bound to buy. Six radio stations broadcast lessons by teachers which provided a new sort of parlor game for many an adult.

Meantime 163,000 junior-college and high-school students were hastily summoned back to classes, but Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, president of the Board of Health, refused to set a date for the younger children’s return. Dr. Morris Fishbein, editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association sneered: “Panic … is frequently reflected in the statements and actions of public officials.” If the statements and actions of public officials showed that they did not know the difference between education and a circulation stunt, the press was more realistic: cartoonists, columnists and inquiring reporters had a field day with new and revised arts of playing hooky from the educational influences of press and radio.