Education: Bold Talk

Biggest professional organization in the U. S. is the National Education Association, which numbers some 225,000 (four-fifths women) of the nation’s 1,000,000 school teachers. But teachers, who in many communities are expected to be politically as well as physically chaste, seldom raise their voices outside the classroom. Consequently they are perennially startled at the bold talk that springs up at the N. E. A.’s annual conventions, attended chiefly by the outspoken fringe.

Last week the 1,680 delegates and 12,000 visitors who arrived in Manhattan for the 76th N. E. A. convention and incidental sight-seeing were embarrassed by even bolder talk than usual. Before the meeting began, a teacher tossed a firecracker at the American Legion (see col. 2). At an opening session, New York University’s short, blunt Professor Alonzo Franklin Myers proposed that U. S. teachers discuss with their pupils, as study materials on dictatorship, the recent testimony of Jersey City’s Mayor Frank Hague on suppressing opponents’ speeches. Wriggling under such naming of names, the N. E. A. delegates became even more uncomfortable (though some cheered) when Professor Goodwin Watson, of Columbia’s Teachers College, praised the cooperative achievements of Soviet Russia and sneered at New York City’s World’s Fair as “ballyhoo for business, a coming to gigantic life of the advertisements in the expensive magazines.”

By week’s end the teachers had watched a host of speakers shake scolding fingers at foreign dictatorships, had heard themselves nominated for the job of immunizing the nation against emotional propaganda. Thereupon the delegates adopted a resolution urging the President and Congress to “work intelligently, cooperatively and unselfishly for world peace.”

The convention also:

¶Elected big, sandy-haired Reuben Taylor Shaw, a Philadelphia high-school teacher, as its president.

¶Listened to a pronunciation bee in which ten teachers took part and everybody flunked. Words flunked: dioceses, cantatrice, Nabuchodonosor, a fortiori, conchoidal.

¶Heard a remarkable report on experiments that proved intelligence is affected by environment. Psychologist George Dinsmore Stoddard, director of the Child Welfare Station in Iowa City, Iowa, reported that: 1) illegitimate children of feeble-minded mothers and laboring fathers, after being placed in good homes, turned out to be bright children; 2) apparently normal youngsters, kept in an overcrowded orphanage, “deteriorated.”

¶Awarded its highest honor (life membership in the N. E. A.) to 19-year-old Virginia Sappington, a $70-a-month teacher in Piety Hill School, near Chetopa, Kans., who last March herded 21 children into a ditch and saved their lives before a tornado made splinters of the school building.

But the N. E. A. was not yet ready to adjourn. Out it marched to the World’s Fair, busily abuilding, made an honorary life member of onetime Teacher Eleanor Roosevelt. Presiding over the convention’s final meeting, Mrs. Roosevelt introduced the main speaker. Said she: “It is the privilege of a presiding officer to make a speech. I will not avail myself of that privilege. May I present the President of the United States.”

Said President Roosevelt (on Federal aid for education) : “Our aid, for many reasons, financial and otherwise, must be confined to lifting the level at the bottom. . . . [On freedom] : When the clock of civilization can be turned back by burning libraries, by exiling scientists, artists, musicians, writers and teachers, by dispersing universities and by censoring news and literature and art, an added burden is placed upon those countries where the torch of free thought and free learning still burns bright. If the fires of freedom and civil liberties burn low in other lands, they must be made brighter in our own.”