Alarums and Excursions (cont'd)

DON'T WORRY, MOTHERS, THE EVACUATED KIDDIES ARE HAPPY IN THE COUNTRY.

So ran a headline in London's Sunday Express. Datelining their dispatches "Somewhere in Surrey," or "on the Cambridgeshire-Northants border," correspondents reported that 1,000,000 city children were busy fishing, blackberrying, golfing, bathing, enjoying many another unaccustomed treat.

One correspondent found eleven lucky slum children quartered on a big estate with yew trees, sunken lawns, wrought-iron gates and a flock of servants to wait on them. When he arrived, the children were clinging to their delighted host's coattails, calling him "Uncle." They reported that they had roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for dinner, were allowed to read in bed.

Many evacuated children had never before seen a hen, a pig or an apple tree. But they needed scant introduction, soon learned to shinny up apple trees and drop the fruit into caps held by their sisters. Wherever they went--apple-picking, blackberrying or fishing--most of the children still dutifully carried their gas masks.

Closed during the evacuation, Britain's rural schools began to reopen last week. By running school houses on double shifts, using village halls, taking pupils on field trips, Britain's teachers, who had efficiently supervised the evacuation, hoped to give their children as good an education as ever.

Meanwhile, the war touched schools in many another land:

P:In Canada, many a first-grade moppet began the term without textbooks, for the books they were to have used went down with the Athenia.

P:In the U. S., the Council Against Intolerance in America (cochairmen: William Allen White, George Gordon Battle, W. Warren Barbour) sent to the nation's high schools a manual called An American Answer to Intolerance, instructing teachers how to immunize pupils against propaganda, teach them not to hate aliens, Jews or Germans (by teaching them to recognize their own prejudices, propagandists' tricks).

P:In Philadelphia, Superintendent Alexander J. Stoddard formed a "war strategy board" of teachers to "keep war hate out of the schools," warned teachers to be wary of discussing war dispatches. Said he, with the defensive cynicism which censorship has made almost universal: "War news has no place in the classroom unless it is definitely tagged as rumor."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.