Adjustable Curriculum

Among the later utterances of that “uncommon Commoner,” the late William Jennings Bryan (TIME, Aug. 3, POLITICAL NOTES), was this: “A religion that did not appeal to any but college graduates would be over the heads or under the feet of 99% of the people.”

“Here,” answered The New York Times, “is where the possibility of compromise enters. It would be based on the principle of the adjustable curriculum.” And the Times offered the following sample syllabus of studies:

1) Origin of Man:

(a) Primary and junior high school grades —Man was created according to Genesis I.

(b) Senior high school—Man was created according to Genesis, with the contradictions in that account explained.

(c) College—Man has evolved from lower orders of life.

2) Cosmology:

(a) Primary grades and junior high school —The sun revolves around the earth.

(b) Senior high school and college—The earth revolves around the sun.

3) Vital Statistics:

(a) Primary grades—Babies are brought by the stork.

(b) Junior high school—Babies are brought by the doctor.

(c) Senior high school—Subject omitted from curriculum.

(d) College—Biological reproduction.

4) World History:

(a) Primary grades and junior high school —Man first appeared in 4004 B.C., according to Usher.

(b) Senior high school—Usher’s chronology compared with other modern estimates.

(c) College—Egypt had a highly developed civilization around 12,000 B.C.

5) American History:

(a) Primary grades and junior high school —Taxation without representation was tyranny.

(b) Senior high school—The Colonies protested against excessive taxation.

(c) College—The Colonists hated to pay taxes.

Year-Round School?

School children in rural districts are given summer vacations on the theory that they will help their fathers make hay. In the fields of education, however, those who are in authority disapprove more and more that expensive school machinery should lie idle for many summer weeks, particularly in view of the number of children whose fathers do not make hay, and of the congestion that exists when all children, country-goers and city-dwellers alike, descend upon the schools in a body every September.

Last week a corps of assistants to School Superintendent William McAndrew of Chicago made their chief a report recommending the institution of all-year sessions in both grade and high schools. With a seating shortage of 40,000 staring him in the face, Superintendent McAndrew was impressed with their plan, interrogated parents far and near for opinions.

The plan divides the school year into the four usual semesters of ten weeks each, plus another semester of ten weeks in what is now the summer recess, leaving two one-week recesses, at Christmas and in June. Pupils would be required to attend four of the five semesters. Teachers could serve four or five, at choice. Arguments offered in addition to the obvious mechanical recommendations:

1) “Summer recess is the most serious interruption the child encounters in school life.” A child attending all five sessions regularly could complete his grade and high-schooling in three years less time.

2) “Most serious to community welfare is the attitude of thousands of parents who dump responsibility of their children’s physical, intellectual, civic and moral development almost entirely upon the schools. The community cannot continue its traditional custom of turning these youths loose to shift for themselves through a long summer recess.”

Far, far is this Chicago recommendation from sponsoring an “all work and no play” policy. More drastic is a recommendation made last winter (TIME, Jan. 19) by The New York World, which quite omitted the rotating-semester feature, saying with cold logic: “It is absurd for healthy children in high school to have a ten-weeks summer vacation, with weeks off at Christmas and Easter, when their hard-worked fathers, who pay for it all, get little or none.”

“Exemplary” Sumner

WILLIAM GRAHAM SUMNER—Harris E. Starr—Holt ($4.00). “Exemplary biography.” Sound phrase. Aged and middle-aged Yale men, sipping coffee and nursing cigars, go back to William Graham Sumner, professor at Yale of political and social science, as to a hero of their youth. They declare there was hone like him for forthrightness, wisdom, integrity.* They say the “grand manner,” the strong individualism of which he was such an exemplar, is gone out of college professors in these days of alumni control, teaching unions, mass education. Survivors of Yale ’83, for instance, recall how they were circularized their senior year with copies of The New York Tribune in which was marked an editorial attack upon the ardent young free-trade professor: “Men who are really able are not often inclined to substitute insolence for argument, “†They recall his reply: “The protectionists get lachrymose. . . . They sigh to think that young men are growing up who assail political saints and economic quacks.”

Born of terse North Englanders, serious as a youth, more so as a student, critical as a traveler, unabashed as a college reformer; a militant rector, fearless and hard-headed politician, prolific publicist, consistent evolutionary sociologist—William Graham Sumner comes vigorously to life in this friendly biography, the planning and writing of which deserve, quite as much as the subject, that old-fashioned adjective, “exemplary.”

Glimpses of the man: Sumner sitting under a blazing gas jet, swatting mosquitoes, helping arrange the term time-schedules of the college; Sumner, the inactive man, bicycling for his health, in uncharacteristic dowdy clothes, a cap pulled forward so that the bald cranium was revealed behind, pedalling at such a pace that his panting companion could not catch the scraps of conversation flung back at him; Sumner suddenly giving up smoking; asking for a picture of his physician’s pretty child, looking at it constantly; pitching at one-o’-cat for his own boys, plunging through the blizzard of ’88 to fetch them from their school; Sumner embarrassed beyond graciousness when ’04 presented him with a loving cup.

He died in 1910.

In Georgia

“Ah don’t want any smart Alec tryin’ to teach mah child that man descended from a tadpole or a monkey. . . . When a man gets so smart that he cain’t believe the Bible, he’s jest too smart to know that he’s a fool.”

Last week in the Georgia House of Representatives, the querulous voice of Representative Lindsay from Jefferson Davis County shrilled with alarm. The subject of his excited speech was an amendment he had drafted for the constitution of his state, an amendment cutting from the state payroll any schoolteacher or state-aided institution who should teach a modern theory of the origin of man in contradiction to the terse account bequeathed the world by the author of Genesis.

Representative Lindsay referred to the University of Chicago as the source of new theories “which for the last 25 years have overwhelmed this country arid which culminated a short time ago in one of its graduates* taking the life of a little boy [Bobby Franks] as a scientific experiment.”

It was a rare chance for the wittier of Mr. Lindsay’s colleagues to fire off recently-acquired ammunition.

A voice: “Ah want to ask the gentleman if he is familiuh with the Tennessee joke?”

A voice: “Ah need no pussuading that, whethuh o’ not a monkey made a man of himself, a man kin make a monkey of himself.”

A very few voices, the viva voce vote having been called for: “Aye.”

A great many voices: “NOOoo !”

“Wise action,” the leading newspaper of the South called it.

Said The Atlanta Constitution: “The people of this country overwhelmingly believe in the literal Scriptures, and the alleged conflict between the Bible and Science is more in the agitation than in the reality—certainly insofar as it relates to the teachings in the schools of Georgia.”

Retired

Harvard University lately found itself in a pleasantly curious position. By the will of the late Artemas†Ward, Manhattan advertising man, Harvard entered business as the owner of a large advertising concern (Artemas Ward, Inc., Manhattan), a cocoa and chocolate corporation and a listerated gum corporation. The total value of the bequest was somewhere between two and three million dollars and Harvard trustees could reflect that every time a penny went into one of the University’s newly-acquired subway slot-machines, it would help pay professors, salaries, that if cocoa consumption should rise, Harvard could perhaps afford to reestablish her abandoned Memorial Hall Commons (TIME, Mar. 23).

Folks pondered Harvard’s position, so like that of the medieval Church in its combination of temporal power with the higher things of soul and mind.

Last week Harvard retired as an entrepreneur, sold all three of her enterprises—advertising, cocoa, gum—to Barren G. Collier, Inc., a rival of the Ward firm.

*Potent at carrying on the Sumner tradition is Robert L. Luce, Yale 1889 (“famous class”), able Manhattan lawyer, onetime New York Supreme Court justice. Frequently he eulogizes Prof. Sumner. Once he addressed an audience of Yale students as follows:

“It is no disparagement to the other members of the Faculty to rank Professor Sumner first. The New York Times editorial a few Sundays ago said truthfully: ‘A Billy Sumner is produced about once in ten centuries.’

“His learning was the most ubiquitous I ever knew in any man. It ran all the way from theology—he was a priest of the church —to the pedigree of the domestic animals. He was proficient in history and literature, finance and philosophy. His first book was a translation of a commentary upon ‘The Books of the Kings,’ and is still a standard textbook in the theological schools. His studies had ranged

‘from politics to puns,

from Mohamet to Moses.’

His was a most fascinating personality; he possessed a nimble wit, and a keen sense of humor.

‘He was a man, take him all in all

I shall not look up his like again.’

It is a source of great satisfaction that the whole world is coming to recognize the importance of his principles of individualism as the antithesis of socialism. We, who were privileged to sit under his teaching, imbibed from him those great principles of civil liberty and individualism, which are the foundations of our American commonwealth.

“From Professor Sumner I acquired most of what I am to say to you this evening.”

†Sumner had riddled a protectionist speech by William Maxwell Evarts, U. S. Secretary of State, 1877-81.

*A mis-statement. Murderers Loeb and Leopold were students at the University of Chicago, not graduates.

†Not to be confused with Humorist Artemus** Ward, (Charles Farrrar Browne, 1834-1867), printer, editor, lecturer, who is thought to have plundered his nom de plume (and misspelled it) from the great-grandfather of Harvard’s late benefactor, General Artemas Ward who fought with distinction in the French-and-Indian and Revolutionary Wars. Humorist Ward wrote for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Vanity Fair, Punch. Typical ward discourse (cf. Mark Twain, same period): “Here in the centre of the African continent is what is called a ‘howling wilderness’ but for my part I never heard it howl or met with anyone who has. It abounds in various natural productions, such as reptiles and flowers. It produces the red rose, the white rose and the Neg-roes.”

** Not, in turn, to be confused with Artemis, Greek goddess of the moon.