Education: Adults at Study

They were not a promising group. One was a young man employed part-time as cook in a Coffee Pot. Another was an ex-broker who feared he was going mad. Another was a stranded high-school boy; another, a jobless secretary; another, a young cripple.

The Coffee Pot cook produced a study of morning sunlight filtering through a great tree in Central Park which a metropolitan art dealer snapped up. The ex-broker found peace in sculpture, modeled a striking bust of a jut-jawed, middle-aged tycoon. The secretary painted a smiling portrait of Anna Eleanor Roosevelt on an old piece of bristol board. It has been purchased for the White House. The high-school boy drew automobiles. It got him a job as sports cartoonist on a Manhattan newspaper. The cripple turned out some slashing caricatures of the Four Marx Brothers which Warner Bros, promptly bought for publicity use.

All of these works of art were to be seen in Manhattan last week on the walls of one or the other of two New York University gymnasiums. None of them would have been there, and no one can say what would have happened to their creators, if it had not been for Depression and the New Deal. After 20 months of existence, the Free Adult Schools conducted in New York City by Federal Emergency Relief Administration in co-operation with State and City Boards of Education, were showing what they had accomplished.

Walls and tables were choked with silver rings, pewter ash trays, fashion sketches, electrical equipment, straw hats, parchment lamp shades, gingham dresses. Demonstration classes in French, stenography, music appreciation, beauty culture, etiquette and Budgeting the Family Income chattered and squirmed in the centre of each floor. Behind exhibits and pupils lay the stories of some 75,000 men and wo-men stranded by Depression and floated off poverty, despair or boredom by a movement which has become one of the most significant phenomena of the past decade.

Name of the movement is adult education. Before 1924, when the term was first used in its present sense, “adult education” meant chiefly night schools for “Americanizing” immigrants. Because the activities which it now covers are localized, multiformed, many a lay observer is only vaguely aware of the tremendous mass march of U. S. adults back to school.

In New York City a survey lately disclosed 2,000 agencies offering adult instruction in mask-making, Albanian, ichthyology, sample mounting, international relations, some 7,000 other subjects. In Boston investigators found 180 late afternoon, night and Saturday courses in the arts. In Des Moines 4,000 citizens per month attend neighborhood and city-wide forums to discuss, and hear lectures on, current affairs. Day & night in Denver 9,000 citizens from 16 to 70 file through the city’s free Opportunity School which anyone may enter anytime, studying anything he pleases as hard as he pleases. Dallas draws 900 per meeting to its Open Forum held every Sunday afternoon from November to March. Taxes and contributions support Tulare, Calif.’s Adult Week-end School where 1,200 grownups seek culture on six consecutive Friday evenings in January and February. Model for Michigan is Lansing’s People’s University, with volunteer instructors teaching 3,000 of their fellow citizens (TIME, Jan. 29). Thousands of Kansans huddle by their loudspeakers with pad & pencil while KFKU at University of Kansas and KSAC at Kansas State Agricultural College broadcast university lectures.

Depression has supplied many an adult with time and inclination to enrich his mind, improve his skill, learn a new job or hobby. But it has also shorn many a one of cash, barred to him the oldtime channels of adult learning — commercial correspondence schools, university home study and extension courses. Enrollment in huge International Correspondence Schools has dropped from 78,600 in 1929 to 37,000 in 1933. Columbia has lost ap proximately half of the 10,000 students enrolled in home study and extension courses in 1927. Adult enrollment at University of Chicago has dropped from 6,100 in 1929 to 3,510; at University of California from 43,985 to 25,811.

A stopgap which promises to become far more than that is FERA, last week beginning its second year of education with a budget of $2,500,000 per month. Top FERA educator is Lewis Raymond Alderman, 51, big, outspoken onetime State Superintendent of Schools in Oregon, whom FERA borrowed from the U. S. Office of Education. He believes in his job, declares: “We have as many adults in this country needing elementary instruction as we have children in the elementary schools.” Another favorite Alderman dictum : “No one really needs to die mentally at 30 or 35 or 40.”

Prime goal of FERA this year will be to root out illiteracy (TIME, Aug. 27). For the rest of his program Director Alderman’s Rule No. i is: “You must teach people what they want to learn.” He has found that U. S. citizens want everything from acrobatics to zoology.

Classes thus far have been held mostly in the evening, but directors are trying to spread them through the day. Any place out of the rain does for a classroom—a loft, a barn, a boxcar, a Sunday School, a private home. Favored as instructors are practical experts, rather than professional teachers schooled in the conventional system of study and recitation. Adults learn best by discussion, demonstration, practice. Students furnish their own pencils, paper, paints, wood, tools if they can, get them free if they cannot. FERA supplies no textbooks, but Government pamphlets and bulletins often do just as well.

At New York’s exposition last week were 50 FERA educators who were soon to scatter, supervise similar activity throughout the land. Started as a temporary relief measure, FERA’s educational program looked as if it had come to stay. Said Lewis Raymond Alderman last week: “Sometimes I think this project is worth the whole cost of the Depression.”