N.E.A. Week

It was hot in Los Angeles as 22,000 members of the National Education Association* began arriving last fortnight for their 6gth annual convention. Hearty in all things, the city had decked itself with N. E. A.'s banners of blue & gold and welcoming committees waited everywhere to hand the delegates boutonnieres of California flowers.

New President elected last week, according to the Association's custom of alternating male & female, was a woman: Florence M. Hale, director of rural education in Maine, who succeeded President Willis Anderson Sutton, superintendent of schools in Atlanta, Ga. One of N. E. A.'s vice presidents, she was elected without opposition, prompting Will Rogers to say: "America is a land of opportunity and don't ever forget it. ... There was elected to a very high office . . . just a plain, pleasant-looking, fat (and enjoying it), commonsense woman. ... I guess from her name, 'Miss,' that she is an old maid, but, darn it, I just liked her looks in the paper this morning and I believe she could teach these young modern heathens of ours some sense."

Rural Education, President Hale's particular concern, had been chosen one of the chief subjects to be discussed. Some points:

"The majority of the children still live in the country. This is, of course, simply a reaction of economic law. In the country children are a financial asset; in the city they are a liability." City children have every advantage, but "the son of the farmer goes to school in a shack, has a teacher who may not even have been to high school. . . . The State must actually favor the country child or take over the whole responsibility for education." (Dr. Sutton.)

Country school finance is based upon an obsolete system: the property tax. Teaching is poor, the curriculum antiquated. Country school trustees know little or nothing about schools. But the Federal Office of Education is busying itself with these matters. (William John Cooper, Federal Commissioner of Education.)

If rural education is not improved, the ambitious will refuse to stay in the country. "Only the stupid will be left. We shall then have accomplished the calamitous job of making the American farmer a peasant." (Governor George Henry Dern of Utah.)

Rural education must provide high school as well as elementary training, else the adolescent farm boy will be deprived of home background during crucial years. It must emphasize cultural training by means of radio, and improve health conditions. (President Hale.)

Other snippets of fact & fancy during the meetings:

"Radio is worth $100,000,000 a year to the schools of America. . . The radio industry will eventually cease its shortsighted policy of trying to kill off stations associated with educational institutions." (Joy Elmer Morgan, chairman of the national advisory Committee on Education by Radio.)

This Brill. Dr. Abraham Arden Brill's characterization of Abraham Lincoln as a schizoid-manic personality (TIME, June 15) must be painful to teachers who hold Lincoln as a model for their pupils. "But who is this Dr. Brill?* Teachers have never before heard of him. What do other psychiatrists say? . . . Teachers, before accepting his conclusions, would want to see an analysis of the doctor's own mentality." (James William Crabtree, secretary of the Association.)

Modesty. Teachers are excessively modest. "At present they fit so noiselessly into the social and political fabric that the public does not hear the sound of the spindle and the loom." (Dr. Sutton.)

Abnormals. There is no average child. Every child is an individual. Of the 45,000,000 children under 18 in the U. S., 12,000,000 are abnormal or subnormal. In elementary schools 450,000 are mentally retarded, but only 60,000 are cared for in special classes; 675,000 present behavior problems, but only 10,000 are in special schools, 50,000 are partly blind, only 5,000 are provided for. There are but 18,coo deaf or partly deaf children attended to out of a total 3,000,000. (Edwin Cornelius Broome, superintendent of Philadelphia schools.)

At Culver

"High citizenship expectancy" is a quality which, so f ar as it could be gauged by competitive tests, distinguished four 9th grade schoolboys who last month were awarded the first Emily Jane Culver Scholarships given by Culver Military Academy at Culver, Ind. These four, who are in the upper third of their classes, "emotionally stable and in good health, possessed of ambition and a settled purpose in life," are George R. Koons, 14, of Chicago, Guy Barry, 15, of Portage, Mich., Robert Ernst Carroll, 14, of Fall River, Mass, and Campbell Gould, of Toledo. Unable otherwise to attend Culver (by the award's terms), they will receive an unusually generous stipend: $6,000 for a three-year course. Culver trustees will award in all twelve such scholarships, will watch closely the young students, for at Culver there is a "controlled situation": a uniformity of life, under military supervision, which they think will indicate the accuracy of the tests employed in spotting "high citizenship expectancy."

Culver Academy's reiterated aim is one that many an older school regards as supererogatory: to train the youth in self-control, stick-to-it-iveness, fair play, courage, self-restraint, etc. etc. Founded in 1894 by Henry Harrison Culver, stove manufacturer and onetime itinerant clock salesman whose own education had been meagre, it has today a fine military Tudor-Gothic plant and 677 cadets--twice as many as any other U. S. private military school. On the wooded shores of Lake Maxinkuckee it stands, hard by the farm where Founder Culver met and married Emily Jane Hand in 1864. He died in 1897, aged 57, but his wife had borne him five sons to carry on the work. Mrs. Culver, in whose memory the new scholarships are named, watched over the school until her death in 1922. was the donor of many a scholarship prize medal.

Merchant of Syracuse

"I hate him, for he is a Christian!" said William Shakespeare's Shylock. and claimed his pound of flesh.

Because The Merchant of Venice presents "an unfair and malicious conception of Jews," the Syracuse, N. Y. Board of Education was petitioned last week by the Good Will Committee, a local interdenominational group, to remove it from the school reading list.

*With 216,000 members (10,000 in 1918) it has become one of the world's largest professional groups.

*Dr. Brill, disciple of Dr. Sigmund Freud, is a onetime head of Columbia University's psychiatry clinic, lecturer at New York University, author of authoritative works on abnormal psychology.

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