Education: Every Classroom a Citadel

U.S. educators heard tough talk from their Government this week. Gathered in Washington for a four-day Institute on Education and the War, 600 leaders of the nation’s schools and colleges were directed to train their pupils in military fundamentals from grade school to college. Manpowerman Paul V. McNutt curtly told them: “There is no excuse for any young man or woman to be in college preparing for any profession not directly useful to the war effort.”

Lieut. General Brehon B. Somervell told them the war might be won or lost in the schools. The Army, he said, is dangerously short of technically trained men. Example: though the Army needs 4,689 trained radio operators in every 300,000 men inducted, it is getting only 135. In an army of 4,000,000 there is a shortage of 139,160 auto mechanics, a total shortage of 838,040 specialists.

Said Somervell: “Let us be realistic. Every able-bodied boy is destined at the appointed age for the armed services. It is the job of the schools and colleges to provide the opportunity for every youth to equip himself for a place in winning the war. You must do this regardless of cost, time, inconvenience, the temporary sidetracking of nonwar objectives, or even the temporary scrapping of peacetime courses. . . . Every classroom is a citadel.”

As Navy men, OPA’s Leon Henderson, WPB’s William Batt, OCD’s James Landis and many another took their turns, the schools’ job grew. From young (37) Brigadier General Lawrence S. Kuter they learned that the Army Air Forces relied on them to help train 2,000,000 flyers and ground men. They were exhorted to train 5,000,000 more industrial workers, to teach the U.S. people how to stop inflation, sell war bonds, enlist the nation’s 30,000,000 school kids to collect scrap. They were even asked by WPB to contribute their typewriters.

The Government provided some blueprints: a 90-hour pre-induction course in high schools and colleges to train the specialists the Army needs; preflight aviation courses for high-school boys; hard drill in every school on mathematics and physics. But college presidents got no answer to their biggest question: how much longer would they be able to keep their students and keep open their colleges?

At the conference they heard disquieting reports: lowering of the draft age to 18 or 19 (making students subject to immediate call) was virtually a certainty after election; the Navy may resort to the draft; even if the Armed Forces allowed students to stay in college for training as reservists, they would cut enrollment and curriculum to the bone of military necessity.

One thing the colleges did learn definitely: after this season, intercollegiate football is out for the duration.