Education: Commerce for Children

McGuffey’s Readers marked a milestone in U.S. education. What textbooks will become the McGuffeys of tomorrow? A notable contender for the role of McGuffey’s successor is a Stanford professor of education, Paul Robert Hanna, supervisor and part author of a thumpingly successful series of elementary school textbooks on social questions. Last week teachers were leafing through two new additions to the series.

The social textbook field for grade-school children is largely divided between Hanna’s series and that of pioneer Progressive Educator Harold Rugg (TIME, Sept. 9, 1940). With a momentum built up by his high-school books since 1922, Rugg’s elementary series has sold over 2,000,000 copies. Hanna’s series, starting cold in 1936, is already pushing the 1,500,000 mark.

The new volumes, for the fifth to seventh grades, are Making the Goods We Need and Marketing the Things We Use (Scott, Foresman; $1.60 each). They attempt to teach, in simple language, and with hundreds of pictures and charts, the basic facts about manufacture and marketing, and the interdependence of all peoples in a world in which these processes go on. Hanna’s textbooks, from the first-grade study of Peter’s Family, are one-and-two-syllable demonstrations that any modern man must be part of a world society, good or bad.

Great Tasks. Making has chapters on how men learned to use machines and power, how goods are transported from maker to user, how factories are located, organized, operated, plus detailed studies of the making of food, clothes, airplanes, houses.* The child may learn something about division of labor, distribution, unemployment, technology, rationing.

Ambassador to the U.S. Bantamweight, bespectacled, intensely earnest Paul Hanna is himself wholly optimistic about the possibility of solving social problems, and is one of the most rapidly moving parts of the Stanford School of Education machine run by Dean Grayson Neikirk Kefauver (TIME, Oct. 18). Born in Sioux City in 1902, Hanna took his doctor’s degree at Columbia after graduating from St. Paul’s little Hamline University. For several years he taught at Columbia’s Teachers College, archseminary of “progressivism.”

Today Hanna spends much time in Washington as Stanford’s ambassador to the U.S. Government. Stanford is reputed to have the largest U.S. university program for the specialized training of soldiers, is widely expanding its Far Eastern research, is playing a major role in bringing the U.S. into a global educational setup. For two weeks every month Paul Hanna leaves his wife and children and a Palo Alto hilltop which in peacetime was a tripper’s cynosure: a redwood, cement and sheet-glass honeycomb architectured by Frank Lloyd Wright.

*Hanna illustrates pioneer house construction by telling the story of Ancestor Washington (“Wash”) Hanna’s log cabin in Waterloo, Iowa. He skips his chance, however, to draw from the story of his distant kinsman, “President-Marker” Marcus Alonso (“Mark”) Hanna (groceries, coal & iron, traction, banking).