World Conference

It has met--the first World Conference on Education. Assembled at San Francisco simultaneously with the regular annual conference of the National (American) Education Association, the World Conference brought hundreds of teacher-delegates from 50 nations, and promulgated plans to destroy war through the instrumentality of education.

Specifically, for example, the conference desires to eliminate from schoolbooks all " spreadeagle nationalistic propaganda." Said one leader, Miss Charl Ormond Williams: " Children of one country do not hate children of another unless they are taught to do so. We teachers positively refuse to teach them that sort of thing any longer!"

At the conference, Japanese and Chinese, Germans and Frenchmen, mingled fraternally in a common allegiance to a common ideal of international goodwill.

The conference's President was Dr. Augustus O. Thomas, of Maine, Dr. David Starr Jordan, pre-eminent advocate of Pacific peace, present, said: " If we cannot educate for peace it is not worth while to educate at all."

The National Education Association, headed by Dr. William B. Owen, of Chicago, devoted itself chiefly to the question of costs. "Educational economics has been a sadly neglected science," was the chief point. And the second point was crusader-like re-endorsement of the Towner-Sterling bill (TIME, March 3), which bill is designed to make the Federal Government more responsible for the education of every child from Portland to Portland.