Made in U. S. A.

Czechoslovakia is today a lumpy sausage of democracy completely surrounded by authoritarian regimes. Last week a book* was published which made the striking claim that the skin holding the Czechoslovakian sausage together is its school system. Stamped on that skin is the label: Made in the U. S. A.

Author of the book is a young, spectacled teacher of German at New York University, Francis H. Stuerm, who investigated the Czech schools for two-and-a-half years, who himself married a Czech.

Although Czechoslovakia became a republic soon after the War--when it was created out of detached fragments of neighboring monarchies--its school system was not made over until a decade later. The agent of that change was a clean-shaven, energetic, gesticulating educator. Dr. Vaclav Prihoda, 45, who studied at Columbia's Teachers College and the University of Chicago, the two great springs of modern educational ideas in the U. S. He returned to Czechoslovakia with a burning zeal for the educational theories of Philosopher John Dewey.

In the U. S., where schools are controlled by local boards of education, Dewey's ideas have made slow and sporadic progress. Czechoslovakia, which has a national school system, moved more swiftly. In 1929 Dr. Prihoda was appointed to head a national school reform committee by Socialist Education Minister Ivan Derer. First step of the reformers was to start experimental progressive schools in a few cities. So rapidly did the progressive movement spread that by 1933 the Ministry of Education decreed a revision of the curriculum for the entire country, permitted progressive methods in all schools.

Progressive schools in Czechoslovakia, like those in the U. S., stress moppets' health (see cut), and teach children informally: let them learn arithmetic by keeping records of their height and weight; teach them reading by the "global method" (to recognize whole words instead of plodding through them letter by letter), etc.

An important part of the new curriculum is training in democracy, the central idea in John Dewey's philosophy. One of the chief devices used for this training is student self-government which is carried a good deal further in giving authority and responsibility to pupils than in the more or less wishy-washy system by the same name by which many a traditional U. S. school tries to hoax its pupils into the belief that they run their own affairs. Today one-fifth of the population of Czechoslovakia, some 2,680,000 students--1,832,000 in primary schools (grades 1 to 5), 428,000 in junior high schools (grades 6 to 9), 126,000 in secondary schools (grades 6 to 13) 243,000 in industrial, commercial and agricultural schools, 10,000 in teacher-training academies and 32,000 in the 28 schools of university rank--are being trained to want and practice democracy.

This nationalistic tendency is further marked by the appearance on many a schoolroom wall of pictures of two of Czechoslovakia's few national heroes, John Huss, the 14th Century religious martyr and the late President Masaryk. But in one respect the Czech system differs notably from most nationalistic educational systems. Instead of teaching all the children one language, Czechoslovakia, a nation of many nationalities, teaches its children in 14 languages: German, Hungarian, modern Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, Carpatho-Ruthenian, Croatian, Serbian, Rumanian, Ukrainian, English, French, Czechoslovak. In fact, wherever 40 children in a town natively speak one of these languages they must be taught in their own tongue. If they are members of a minority group, they are taught Czechoslovak also from the third grade. But the majority group, the Czechoslovaks, also are taught a second language--German. The result is that German is at the same time a unifying force for democratic nationalism and an avenue for the infiltration of Nazi propaganda.

*TRAINING IN DEMOCRACY--Francis H. Stuerm--Inor Publishing Co., N. Y. ($2.50).

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