Reading, Writing, and Revolution

U.S. Army Captain John P. Simoni was an exasperated man last week. The AMG's chief educational officer in disputed Trieste perspired and wrung his hands. To New York Herald Tribune Correspondent Barrett McGurn he stormed: "What do children of grammar and junior high school age know about politics?"

Captain Simoni's agitation was caused by the behavior of students in Trieste's Slovene-language schools. It was far beyond anything in his experience as a fine arts professor in a Kansas university. On a visit to the schools he had been shocked to see "walls just plastered with inscriptions reading 'Viva Tito,' 'Viva Stalin,' 'Down with this and down with that.' " When students left their classes to join a demonstration staged by the pro-Tito Italo-Slovene Anti-Fascist Union, it was too much. The Captain issued a decree closing the city's three Slovene high schools and six elementary schools. The students and their parents, he scolded, "appear concerned with the schools as a means of political propaganda rather than as educational institutions."

Next day 100 students and three teachers defied the Simoni lockout by reopening two schools. Said a pupil: "It is the will of the students. . . . This is the new democratic sort of school."

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