Smart Smarts

On the plains below Philadelphia, in Vineland, N. J., live Arthur J. Smart, 52 and his wife Mary, 32. with their four small Smarts aged from 2 to 9. Citizen Smart, a retired bookstore keeper and amateur painter, calls his one-story red house "The Harmony Truth Centre." Harmony Truth is an invention of his own, something like Christian Science. On the front fence he has painted ELECT HOOVER. Just the same, nobody paid much attention to the Smarts until last week.

For some time the education of the two oldest children has been in charge of Mrs. Smart, who once worked in a book store herself. Neither she nor Citizen Smart liked public school methods--"Lot of nonsense," they said. But the Vineland school authorities did not see it the same way. They demanded the Smart children. Mr. Smart said no. As a free citizen of Vineland he would educate his moppets as he pleased. To President Hoover, Governor Arthur Harry Moore of New Jersey, the State Department of Education and the Vineland supervisor he sent a ten-page letter explaining not only that his wife was a better teacher than any in the local schools, but also that, going to school, his children might be bitten by dogs, run over by automobiles, exposed to disease or persuaded to play truant with other children.

New Jersey law permits parents to send their children to any schools they wish, provided the teaching is as good as that in the public schools. Last week the Vineland School Board invited Mrs. Smart to appear before it for examination as to her fitness to teach. Truant Officer Jock Steineder drove out to the Harmony Truth Centre to bring Mrs. Smart to the meeting. But he drove back without her. It was "inconvenient" for her to come, said Citizen Smart gaily. The Board then served five-day notice on the Smarts, by which they must show their competence or be liable to fine and imprisonment.

Newshawks swooped upon the Harmony Truth Centre, found Citizen Smart jovial and garrulous in his defiance of the law. He put on an old Army uniform posed by his Hoover fence. He revealed the books which the Smarts will soon read: Pilgrim's Progress, Emerson, Byron Shelley, What a Young Man Should Know What a Young Woman Should Know

Mrs. Smart also talked at length: "Being a psychologist and a student of the mind, I found in the Public schools no ideas aiming at perfection. ... I give them three hours a day on technicalities the academic foundation similar to that they'd get in school. And three hours social play. They're learning everything they'd learn in school, and they're building character, which they wouldn't do there.

"I want ours to be a test case for the nation. Before we give up our right to guide our children's future, we'll go to jail!'

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