Truce by Compromise

The 3,500 delegates to the annual convention of the National Education Association trooped into Detroit's Masonic Temple last week ablaze with indignation. Object of their wrath: the American Legion, a longtime ally of the N.E.A. on a joint educational committee, but a frequent critic of progressive education in U.S. schools. In the June issue of its monthly magazine the Legion had printed an article entitled "Your Child Is Their Target," which branded the N.E.A. leadership as "one of the strongest forces today in propagandizing for a socialistic America."

Author Irene Corbally Kuhn accused the N.E.A. on all the familiar counts (e.g., subversive textbooks, lack of discipline, failure to concentrate on the three Rs), traced the responsibility for left-wing doctrines in the N.E.A. straight back to the late John Dewey and his disciples. All progressive education, she wrote, "has been a deliberate, calculated action by a small but powerful group of educators ... to change the character of American education radically . . . usurp parental authority and so nullify moral and spiritual influences."

As a good analysis of the curriculum advocated by Dewey's followers, Author Kuhn quoted the opinion of British Socialist Harold Laski. Commenting on the educational theories of Sociologist Harold Rugg and other progressive educators at Columbia in the early 1930s, Laski said: "Stripped of its carefully neutral phrases, the report is an educational program for a socialist America. It could be implemented in a society only where socialism was the accepted way of life; for it is a direct criticism of the ideas that have shaped capitalistic America."

Even before the N.E.A. convention, its headquarters had issued a sharp statement defending N.E.A. leadership, and charging distortions and inaccuracies in the article. Out-of-date statements by Rugg and others, said the N.E.A., must be read as off-the-cuff theorizing that never was accepted by the N.E.A.

But at the convention itself, the official attitude was compromise. Donald Wilson, national commander of the Legion, who defended the article in a news conference, set the tone by carefully skirting the controversy in his speech to the N.E.A. He contented himself with a warning against the menace of Soviet power.

Despite the anger of its rank & file, N.E.A. officials also did their best to smooth things over. Though the grumbling continued in private, the N.E.A. unanimously adopted a resolution "deploring" the Legion's article, recalling the cordial cooperation of the two organizations, and asking for space to defend itself in the Legion magazine.

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