Crazy Teachers

New York City parents clutched their newspapers in wide-eyed alarm one day last week. They had often suspected that teachers as a class were a little queer. But here in big black headlines was the appalling assertion that no less than 1,500 of New York's public school teachers were actually unbalanced. Many were hopelessly insane, some almost maniacs. Reading down, startled parents learned of a teacher so self-conscious that she had poked a chair-leg into a boy's eye and twisted it ''to distract attention of the class" from herself. Another had sat furred and hatted in a warm room complaining that the janitor was trying to freeze her. Several had commuted to work from suburban White Plains' Bloomingdale Hospital for mental ailments.

Author of these charges was the city schools' Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Emil Altman. He blamed political pressure, negligence, mistaken kindness and a Retirement Board which, rather than pay disability pensions, kept unbalanced teachers in service. Teachers who could not hold jobs elsewhere went to New York. Said Dr. Altman: "We have drained the country of crackpots."

"Crackpot! Crackpot!" echoed many a tough East Side urchin as Teacher walked into her classroom next day. Before long it was plain that, whether or not 1,500 of them were insane, all 36,000 of the city's teachers were hopping mad. Indignant mass-meetings called for a reprimand, for proof, for Dr. Altman's dismissal, for an investigation of his competence by the New York Academy of Medicine. "He sees insanity in everybody," cried Dr. Abraham Lefkowitz of the Teachers Union.

Superintendent Harold G. Campbell called for a list of names, promised an inquiry. Swart Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia grabbed a pencil, figured that there were no more crackpots among teachers than in any other large group. "You know," he remarked cheerfully, "we have epileptics in our police department."

Psychiatrist Abraham Arden Brill rallied to the teachers' defense with a statement that manic-depressives and other neurotics often made brilliant teachers. In the midst of the furor police picked up a high school substitute instructor in Brooklyn, charged her with attempting to strip in a subway station.

Day after his first charges Dr. Altman began to back down. He had not meant, he said, that the 1,500 were actually in sane. And 1,500 was only an estimate. All he had was a list of some 700 teachers who had been referred to him as unbalanced during the past ten years. He did not know how many of them were still in the system, or how many were really unbalanced. In a formal report to the Board of Education he declared that there were "no teachers in the system who are 'insane' in the sense in which the layman understands this word." In fact, said he, the whole rumpus was the fault of a bungling newshawk who thought he meant maniacs when he said some teachers were manic-depressives. And he had not said that a teacher twisted a chair-leg in a boy's eye. She had merely twisted it near the eye.

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