Superintendents Meet

The "complete breakdown of the American school system" is no new thing for pedagogs to discuss. Last week, as 6,000-odd members of the Department of Superintendence of the National Education Association gathered in Minneapolis for their 63rd annual convention, they stirred themselves once more to "avert this disaster." They were more anxious than ever before. It no longer seemed sufficient simply to cry: "Save the schools! Save the innocent children!" An emergency commission reported, first thing, that while public school enrolment had increased nearly a million since 1930, the number of teachers had decreased 15,000; the amount to cover per diem cost per child slipped from 63-c- to 49-c-: funds for building expenditures dropped from $400,000,000 to $154,000,000 annually. To some people, notably Henry Louis Mencken who belabored the pedagogs in his American Mercury last month (TIME, Feb. 20), this might have seemed a blessing. Of such critics the superintendents took no direct notice last week. But they were girded to fight, most of them agreeing, however reluctantly, with a Wisconsin superintendent's statement: "The teaching profession as a whole has been too smug in it? reliance upon universal desire for good schools." Said Dr. Jesse Homer Newlon of Manhattan's Lincoln School: "It is time to smash the tradition that the teacher must be neutral in political matters. . . . They must participate actively as an organized group [more than 1% of the U. S. electorate] in the discussion and solution of many social problems."

Said Dr. John Kelley Norton of Teachers College, Columbia: "Teachers will oppose the efforts of any selfish group to create a peasant class and impose a peasant education in the U. S. . . . We are going to have an organization that can give blow for blow and ask no quarter."

For amusement and instruction the superintendents were to listen to some 100 speeches in five days, not including invocations, welcomes, "jury panel discussions and ordinary discussions. They talked of differential predictions, probable errors, I. Q.'s, unit plans, retention measures. They heard of the Carroll Prose Appreciation Tests and the Minnesota Employment Stabilization Research Institute. They scanned a display of "effective publicity materials for the defense of the schools."

For their convention the superintendents had chosen a label, "New Frontiers for American Life." This permitted some oratory: "Frontiers have been the wealth, the opportunity, and the luring hope of America. . . . Pioneers pushed out into the unexplored wilds--across the Appalachians, over the prairies, scaled the Rocky Mountains and finally were stopped by the immensity of the Pacific Ocean." (Professor Thomas Henry Briggs of Teachers College.) It also permitted some sense: "The pioneer had mosquitoes but he was free from questionnaires." (Ernest Clark Hartwell, Buffalo's Superintendent of Schools.)

As is usual with the N. E. A., there were Names. This was N. E. A.'s first chance at Technocracy. It was a bit late, but Howard Scott was there ("Value is defined by the British economist Marshall as the measure of the force of desire. To those of us who are technically trained, all that definition can mean is an amusing lot of hooey"). Other speakers nibbled at many and many a current ill. Speaking of Education's fund curtailment, President Gleen Frank of the University of Wisconsin said: "The issue is real economy versus bogus economy. By all means let us stop waste, but let us be sure it is real waste that we are stopping."

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