N. E. A.

Five Days in Boston, or Much Said and Little Done--that was the 58th annual convention of the National Education Association. But it was a success: the biggest attendance in N. E. A. history, 15,000. Mrs. Evangeline Lodge Lindbergh flew from Detroit and was mistaken for Mrs. Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller of Massachusetts in one receiving line.

Speeches and good resolutions were duly recorded, in order to be issued in a fat handbook early in 1929. The chief topic of speculation among these teachers and superintendents of grade schools, high schools and "prep" schools was the speech of

A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University, who roundly flayed U. S. public schools for their excessive cost, their waste of youth's time, their superficial courses, their poor preparation for college. Said President Lowell: "The saying that there are many ways of killing a cat besides choking it with butter can be applied to American schools in more than one sense. . . . What we need is a good mental training, an accurate and thorough habit of mind, not a frittering away of the attention by a multitude of small matters of which the pupil does not get enough to develop consecutive thought. Too much attention has been paid to making education attractive by smoothing the path as compared with inducing strenuous voluntary effort."

Frank D. Boynton of Ithaca, N. Y., president-elect of the N. E. A. department of superintendence: "President Lowell seems to think that the main function of the American high school is to send its pupils to college. . . . Our objective is not to train a chosen few for higher education, but to prepare all our students for American conditions of life. . . . The, only tests which the colleges use in determining the fitness of a boy are intellectual tests. ... A Leopold or a Loeb could pass them easily."

William McAndrew, ousted superintendent of Chicago schools (see p. 35), was applauded loudly when he said: "You remember, perhaps, what Dr. Eliot said to us not so many years ago: 'The fear of losing one's job has kept education in America fifty years behind its possible improvement.' . . . If I read the times aright, the chambers of commerce, the Lowells, the associations of mayors and governors will succeed in their protests against the rising costs of education. Then our magnificent high schools will follow in the tracks of Napoleon the Little to an inglorious end at some Sedan. . . .

"Once the policy of the schools was to prepare a small number of students for college. Now the situation is that we get all kinds of students, studious and lazy, dirty and clean, brought in by the force of the compulsory education law. . . .

"There is no use in your trying to train your pupils for leadership. The graduates of our old high schools are out playing golf while the real leaders who never saw the inside of a high school are herding the voters to the polls."

Alvan Tufts Fuller, governor of Massachusetts: "Business, as such, desires that the lower schools should help the boy to understand his obligations to the social, civic and economic community . . . as the English would put it, to 'play the game.' ':

S. M. Thomas of Madison, Wis., did not endear himself to little boys when he said: "The traditional school year with a summer vacation of ten weeks or more is . . . a manifest absurdity in the city."

Cornelia Storrs Adair of Richmond, Va., first classroom teacher ever to be elected president of N. E. A., made backward delegates feel at home, bustled up to greet Harvard's Lowell, attended teas, smiled maternally for petulant photographers, said little for publication, was awarded an especially created degree, G. L. (Gracious Lady), by the Massachusetts Teachers' Federation. A mathematics master, Harry C. Barber of Philips-Exeter Academy, was elected to succeed Miss Adair as president at the next convention.

Fletcher Harper Swift, professor of education at the University of California: "There is a breadline in Chicago and a breadline in Boston which grows longer and longer and will continue to grow unless we can keep the people contented on the farms."

Eldo Lewis Hendricks of Warrensburg, Mo.: "There is no greater problem in the field of education than the one-room rural school, and we have more than 150,000 of them. . . . Education fails to function in rural districts as certainly as democracy fails to function in a national election. . . . A teacher in the rural school gets $750 a year and a city teacher $1,900."

Amanda Lee Beaumont, dean of women at Marshall College, Huntington, W. Va.: "Young women studying to be teachers spend much of their spare time reading up on beauty culture and etiquette in order to attain 'it.' "

Edward J. Eaton of Boston University: "The older high school boy has been the neglected child of the educational family circle."

Joseph M. Gwinn of San Francisco found time to tell Boston Rotarians: "The universal effort in education is to change that which is lower into that which is higher and that which is less useful into that which is more useful. . . . Rotary has helped to break down the barriers that separate business and professional men and those between countries."

Resolutions drawn up by N. E. A. included: 1) a demand that Congress pass the Curtis-Reed bill creating a Secretary of Education in the President's Cabinet; 2) a condemnation of all political interference with school superintendents.