Church & State

Last week 10,000 U. S. school superintendents and their professorial advisers gathered in Atlantic City prepared, as usual, to sun themselves, dine, dance and hear some 500 speakers roll off some 1,500,000 more or less hackneyed words. But the 68th annual convention of the American Association of School Administrators turned out to be far from hackneyed.

School superintendents favor Federal aid for schools as naturally as businessmen favor more and better business. Hence, they were well pleased with the recent report of Franklin Roosevelt's Advisory Committee on Education. That committee, to overcome the long-standing objection of Catholics to Federal aid, incorporated in its recommendations a proviso that Federal money be also made available for the education of children in parochial schools (TIME, Mar. 7). To Protestant educators, who hate and fear Catholic influence in education, that recommendation last week was like a red flag.

Atlantic City's hotel lobbies buzzed with angry talk. Catholico-phobes spluttered that the Church already dominated some public-school systems, pointed as an example to New Haven, Conn., where two public schools are staffed by nuns.* Eight hundred adherents of the left-wing "Social Frontier" group demanded that Federal aid be restricted to public schools. Before the Association's legislative committee, up rose conservative, heavy-jowled Dr. George Drayton Strayer, of Columbia University's Teachers College, to cry: "Let's not have any church-- Catholic, Protestant or Jewish--using public money to make propaganda for any policy or belief peculiar to itself. . . . Keep the public schools public." From New York University's soft-spoken Dean Ned Harland Dearborn came a warning that the proposal to subsidize parochial education had started a religious controversy which might not only jeopardize Federal aid but "cause the spirit of the Ku Klux Klan to ride again."

Meanwhile, a member of the President's Committee, dark, bushy-browed Rev. George Johnson, of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, snorted that Dr. Strayer's charges were "utter nonsense." Catholic children, said he, "should not be deprived of their rights as Americans because they do not happen to be attending public schools." Arriving in Atlantic City to address the convention, the Committee's chairman, wiry Dr. Floyd Wesley Reeves, tried to smooth the waters by explaining the Committee had not suggested that Federal money go directly to parochial schools, but that States and localities receiving Federal aid be permitted to supply free textbooks, school bus service, scholarships, health and welfare services to parochial school children (as at least five States already do).

Desperately seeking to avoid an open fight on the convention floor, the Association's officials brought in to the final session a resolution ducking a commitment on specific Federal aid legislation until after study of the Reeves Committee's full report, not yet published. Unappeased, Professor Strayer strode to the auditorium platform to again demand "separation of Church and State," boomed: "If this movement develops sufficient strength, we may find ourselves in the not distant future committed to a program which will deny to the people the control of their schools." But he made no effort to amend the resolution. At the week's end as the harassed leaders of the National Education Association prepared to draft a bill, it appeared that the battle over Federal aid had merely been shifted to Washington.

Higher Learning. Most newsworthy speech on the superintendent's formal program was made by Harvard's youthful President James Bryant Conant. Observing that the number of students in U. S. professional schools might well be reduced, President Conant challenged the view that students are better off if they stay in school and study for an overcrowded profession than if they leave school and become unemployed. Said he, "The existence of any large number of highly educated individuals whose ambitions have been frustrated is unhealthy for any nation."

But President Conant's chief concern was not the students who are in U. S. universities, but those who are not. Pointing out that few families with incomes of less than $2,000 a year can afford to send a child to college, and that 80% of U. S. families are in that category, he declared: "It is perfectly evident to me that at the college level and at the advanced professional school stage, all the institutions of the country have been fishing in one small pond."

* Hamilton Street School (1,025 pupils) and Highland Heights School (500), which are housed in church buildings rented by the city.

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