Intellectual Slums

In the national headquarters of the American Federation of Teachers in Chicago, President Jerome Davis last week tacked up a map of U. S. "intellectual slums." The Federation had just finished a shocked inspection of the nation's blighted school areas, where the generation growing up is getting little schooling or none at all. It found some 3,300,000 children of school age (5 to 17) not enrolled in any school, found even in relatively well-off Wisconsin 55,000 youngsters who get less than 90 days of schooling a year (the U. S. norm is 200 days). Most squalid intellectual slums are in the South. Worst slum: Alabama, with only 59% of its children in school.

Cupboarded in Senate and House committees last week was the Harrison-Fletcher Bill, intended to wipe out the intellectual slums. The bill, which would appropriate $72,000,000 for Federal aid to education in the coming year and raise the ante to $202,000,000 by 1944, embodies the recommendations of the President's Advisory Committee on Education (TIME, March 7). Because it would permit Federal money to be used for books, bus service and scholarships for pupils in parochial (e.g., Roman Catholic) schools, it is opposed by Catholicophobes, led by Columbia University's Professor George Drayton Strayer. Meanwhile, to drive the bill out of the hostile House committee, the American Federation of Teachers and Progressive Education Association held a national conference in Washington, brought together college presidents, educators, Congressmen and 25 labor and farm organizations, which unanimously endorsed the bill. United in demanding its passage were A. F. of L., C. I. O., the railroad brotherhoods. Said A. F. Whitney, president of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen: "The Harrison-Fletcher Bill is must legislation."

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