"Fight!"

''On tests for inferiority it is interesting to note that those choosing the vocation of teacher have the highest feeling of inferiority. It is this type of person who seeks a protective profession with a maximum of security and with guarantee of superior respect. The tendency is. of course, unconscious hut it has been true for a number of years that the students showing the highest inferiority score have inclined to the teaching profession."

Such was the comment last week of President Frederick B. Robinson on results of tests at his teeming College of the City of New York, which has trained thousands upon thousands of teachers. Simultaneously in Chicago 10,000 teachers at the

National Education Association conference were earnestly trying to demonstrate to themselves and the country that Dr. Robinson was wrong, that they as a class suffered from no sense of inferiority. Their method consisted of a fierce militancy against a variety of foes, real and imaginary. Bunched in conference corridors, gathered around committee tables, massed in auditoriums, embattled pedagogs ex changed their 193,} watchword: "Fight!"' "We are not cowards. We are red-hlooded American citizens!" clarioned Superintendent Willard E. Givens of Oakhind. Calif. ''The old idea of the teacher as a submissive, bookish person is impossible!" cried the Association's onetime President Florence Hale. "The teacher in the new deal must not be timid!" declared President Herman Lee Donovan of Eastern Kentucky State Teachers' College. "He should participate in politics ... as the champion of great and fundamental issues. . . ." Getting down to cases. Professor John Kelley Norton of Columbia's Teacher's College beat a dead horse when he flayed the banker who was supposed to evade taxes and starve education. Retiring Presi dent Joseph Rosier let fly at the R. F. C. for refusing loans to schools while lending millions to insurance and railroad companies. Almost as pugnacious as the speeches were the convention's resolutions: 1) against political interference with teacher appointments; 2) for a nation-wide investigation of anti-education "taxpayers' leagues"; 3 ) for an expose of utility companies in N. E. A.'s own publications; 4) for vigorous censure of cities which fail to pay teachers while meeting other public obligations.

But the conquest of inferiority can cut two ways as N. E. A. discovered last week after its convention had disposed of its outside enemies. Still full of fight, the Association's "inferior" members (i. e. classroom teachers) uprose against its "superior" members (i. e. principals and superintendents) who have long controlled its organization. Flayed was the influence of State superintendents, life directors and past presidents who sit ex officio on the N. E. A. assembly. Cried one critic: "We don't have ex-Presidents in the Congress . . . and. thank God. we don't have ex-Mayors in our city council. I see no reason why we should have ex-presidents of the Association on the assembly. . . . Men who once represented the feeling of their local membership do not always continue to do so. Take the historic case of Benedict Arnold, for instance!"

The rebels lost their fight to reorganize the assembly but they did win theN. E. A. presidency. Elected over a Denver high school principal was Miss Jessie Gray, thin-lipped, spinsterish fifth-grade teacher of Philadelphia's Girls Normal School. London-born. Miss Gray was taken to suburban Frankford. Pa. as an infant, has lived there with her brothers and sisters ever since. In 1925 she was elected first woman president of Pennsylvania's State Education Association, was an N. E. A. vice president in 1930-31. She believes that the nation's only hope of political and social safety lies in teaching the wise use of leisure by schools.

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