Indoctrination of Youth

If the private owners of some public utility, the suppliers of gas, bringers of electric light, should want their ownership to continue, might they not teach school children that such ownership was beneficent? Here and there they might juggle a paragraph in a textbook adopted throughout the land. They might now and again send inconspicuous checks to school teachers who preached that private ownership was public weal, State ownership "Bolshevism." When the school children reached maturity and taxpaying, they would accept private ownership of public utilities as matter of course.

Such propaganda would be viewed by many as pernicious. Others, hailing it as informative, would uphold it. Last July, the Federal Trade Commission conducted a public utility investigation following the acerbities which greeted the political largess of Public Utility Potentate Samuel Insull. That these utilities had spread propaganda throughout the schools of the land was made patent.

In November, the potent National Education Association appointed a nationally representative committee of ten (teachers, headmasters, deans) to investigate public utility propaganda in schools. Dr. Edwin Cornelius Broome, superintendent of Philadelphia public schools, was made chairman. Last fortnight, Dr. Broome spoke. Oracular, he seemed to mean more than he said when he said: "It is the unanimous conviction of the committee that the function of the school is to teach children how to think, not what to think. It is not right to indoctrinate the minds of young people with either one side or the other of controversial questions. It is not right to use in the schools material which seeks to advertise or bring profit to any agency in the community."

Shrewd readers of Dr. Broome's words realized that it was not right of the Hearst press to perceive in his tempered statements a sweeping denunciation of Power Trust (public utilities) propaganda. So far Dr. Broome has merely decried propaganda in the school, has refrained from stating whether there was any. In Atlanta, in June, when the National Education Association (known to all educators as N. E. A.), holds its annual conference Dr. Broome will speak more exactly.

As early as last June, however, a group of educators formed a committee to investigate and combat propaganda. These, linked by the hysterical name of the Save-Our-Schools Committee, boldly pledged themselves "to defeat the present dangerous attack on our schools and colleges . . . an adaptation as it were of the Monroe Doctrine to the American educational world."

The names of such famed educators as Professor John Dewey of Columbia, Bishop Francis J. McConnell of New York, Dr. Alexander Meiklejohn of Wisconsin found their places on the committee, but confronted with N. E. A.'s measured investigation, the Save-Our-Schools Committee seemed to lose zeal.