Biggest professional organization in the U. S. is the National Education
Association, which numbers some 225,000 of the
nation's 1,000,000 school teachers. But teachers, who in many
communities are expected to be politically as well as physically
chaste, seldom raise their voices outside the classroom. Consequently
they are perennially startled at the bold talk that springs up at the
N. E. A.'s annual conventions, attended chiefly by the outspoken
fringe. Last week the 1,680 delegates and 12,000 visitors who arrived in
Manhattan for the 76th N. E. A. convention and incidental sight-seeing
were embarrassed by even bolder talk than usual. Before the meeting
began, a teacher tossed a firecracker at the American Legion . At an opening session, New York University's short, blunt
Professor Alonzo Franklin Myers proposed that U. S. teachers discuss
with their pupils, as study materials on dictatorship, the recent
testimony of Jersey City's Mayor Frank Hague on suppressing
opponents' speeches. Wriggling under such naming of names, the N. E.
A. delegates became even more uncomfortable when
Professor Goodwin Watson, of Columbia's Teachers College, praised the
cooperative achievements of Soviet Russia and sneered at New York
City's World's Fair as “ballyhoo for business, a coming to gigantic
life of the advertisements in the expensive magazines.” By week's end the teachers had watched a host of speakers shake scolding
fingers at foreign dictatorships, had heard themselves nominated for
the job of immunizing the nation against emotional propaganda.
Thereupon the delegates adopted a resolution urging the President and
Congress to “work intelligently, cooperatively and unselfishly for
world peace.” The convention also: Elected big, sandy-haired Reuben Taylor Shaw, a Philadelphia
high-school teacher, as its president. Listened to a pronunciation
bee in which ten teachers took part and everybody flunked. Words
flunked: dioceses, cantatrice, Nabuchodonosor, a fortiori, conchoidal. Heard a remarkable report on experiments that proved intelligence is
affected by environment. Psychologist George Dinsmore Stoddard,
director of the Child Welfare Station in Iowa City, Iowa, reported
that: 1> illegitimate children of feeble-minded mothers and laboring
fathers, after being placed in good homes, turned out to be bright
children; 2> apparently normal youngsters, kept in an overcrowded
orphanage, “deteriorated.” Awarded its highest honor to
19-year-old Virginia Sappington, a $70-a-month teacher in Piety Hill School,
near Chetopa, Kans., who last March herded 21 children into a ditch and saved
their lives before a tornado made splinters of the school building. But the N. E. A. was not yet ready to adjourn. Out it marched to the
World's Fair, busily abuilding, made an honorary life member of
onetime Teacher Eleanor Roosevelt. Presiding over the convention's
final meeting, Mrs. Roosevelt introduced the main speaker. Said she:
“It is the privilege of a presiding officer to make a speech. I will
not avail myself of that privilege. May I present the President of the
United States.”
