Columbians to Cleveland

Out of Columbia University, that yeasty pot of progressive ideas, President Roosevelt dipped such potent Brain Trusters as Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, Adolf Augustus Berle Jr. (see p. 55), Abraham S. Hewitt, Leo Wolman, Blackwell Smith. But Columbia was still left with a good supply of bright young professors who were disgruntled with the old order, passionately dedicated to the new. Last week many of them moved in a body to Cleveland, where the Progressive Education Association and the National Education Association's Department of Superintendence were convening. There they planted in the educational world the same kind of ideas which their onetime colleagues already have well above ground in Washington.

Teachers College's bald, nervous Clyde R. Miller, reaching Cleveland early, key-noted before the Cleveland Schoolmasters' Club: "Two percent of the people in the nation control 85% of the wealth and I suspect that if they could sell air they would get a corner on it and let the rest of us suffocate."* Among his list of a dozen "axioms" were: 1) Life is worth living. If it isn't we ought to stand the unemployed up and shoot them or let them starve as our financial interests now blandly permit. 2) Most people don't know yet there are enough goods for them to live in comfort. The schools never gave us any notion that with proper organization we could have all we want. 3) There must be national control of industry and means of life.

Cleveland's schoolmasters marched out resolved to teach such doctrines to their pupils, and proclaim "the imperative need for a substitution of a planned economy for the present economic anarchy."

Kinetic, young Educational Psychologist Goodwin Watson of Columbia called on teachers and superintendents to unite for the new order in professional unions, the locals of which would be knotted together in a propaganda agency in Manhattan. Warned he: "We have a swell time here wording our dreams of c new society, but when it actually comes to putting them into action that is a different matter."

Columbia's Professor George Sylvester Counts, famed progressive educator, echoed Professor Watson's call for union and dusted off capitalism for good with: "Teachers must inform the new generation that a new society is here, that the system of private capitalism for private gain is dead."

What his colleagues had done for the economic world, Columbia's Thomas Henry Briggs did for education. "Sincerity forces me reluctantly to declare," cried he, "that no inconsiderable part of the money, the genius and the effort expended on secondary and college education is wasted. ... No credits are so frozen as many that are given in high schools and colleges. The facts are a professional scandal."

Philosopher John Dewey, 74, dean of Columbia progressives, who has spent a lifetime propounding new education ideas, wanted immediate action. "Now if ever," said he, "is the time for educational change. Today things could be proposed that could not have been a few years ago, and perhaps could not be a few years hence when general conditions may be more static."

Agreed that something must be done, the educators listened to the programs of one committee headed by Columbia's John Kelley Norton and another committee headed by Columbia's Harold R. Rugg. Professor Norton's commission on the Emergency in Education wanted U. S. school systems rebuilt from the ground up in ten years. Observers saw how well the Columbia yeast had worked when Professor Rugg's committee called in President Roosevelt to set up. and educators to support, a national planning council to formulate "a program of relief for and correction of maladjustments in the socio-economic world."

The superintendents endorsed both resolutions to a man.

*Senator Borah's variant of this hoary statistic: 4% of the people control 95% of the wealth.

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