Teachers' Champion

"A brighter day is dawning," cried the famed Horace Mann, "and education is its daystar." To the 200 educators who had come from all over the country to Cincinnati that day in 1858, the words of the main speaker were not just empty grandiloquence. One year earlier, they had met to form the first national organization that the U.S. teaching profession had ever known.

Last week, as it started celebrating its 100th anniversary, the National Education Association had nearly 700,000 members, accounting for 54% of the nation's teachers, superintendents, principals, professors and college presidents. In its new $7,000,000 green-glass and white-limestone Washington, D.C. headquarters alone, N.E.A. has a staff of 560 running 31 different departments that delve into every aspect of education. Supported mostly by annual dues (now $5), it has grown far beyond its original role as the champion of the schoolteacher. It has become education's statistician, policeman and lobbyist.

Above all, it has been a determined and powerful propagandist for the school which advocates "education of the whole child." It espoused Pestalozzi's methods, e.g., using objects as well as books, John Dewey's "learning by doing," and the current doctrine that if Johnny isn't ready to read, don't force him. To its critics, it shares the blame for the fact that some Johnnies never seem to learn to read; its supporters give it credit for the fact that many more Johnnies can learn a useful trade in their local high school.

The Few & the Many. From the start, it opposed those who thought that educators should be content to cram the three Rs down the throats of the many and devote their best energies to the college-bound few. While such subjects as Latin and Greek began to retreat, the N.E.A. called for more and more vocational and physical education. Since World War II, it has backed the movement for safety education, driving lessons, audio-visual aids, and the whole host of courses (how to get along with the family, to buy clothes, to behave on a date) that go under the name "life adjustment."

As a gatherer of facts and figures, it is tireless. In 1905 it published the first comprehensive study of teachers' salaries and working conditions, was the first organization to collect national enrollment statistics in a systematic way. This week it published a report on each state's educational achievements. Among its findings: California has the most college graduates, New York the highest teacher salaries, Wisconsin the fewest dropouts.

Lobbyist & Friend. Over the years the N.E.A. has been an insistent voice in Congress' ear, a kind of permanent lobbyist in Washington for education's needs. The U.S. Office of Education was one result of its badgering. It has also battled relentlessly for a prize which some other educators considered a poisoned apple: federal aid to education.

The N.E.A. is fiercely opposed to the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s efforts to organize a teachers' union, considers the N.E.A.'s own methods far sounder in helping teachers improve their lot. "The American people," says the N.E.A.'s Executive Secretary William G. Carr, "do not want their teachers to become a part of a particular segment of American life." Should organized labor ever get a real hold on the profession, "the whole character of American education would change."

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