Schools & The War

"Walk along our streets, look at the people you see, look into our taverns with their vast patronage of both sexes and most ages. Anyone who thinks that a nightclub is a place to prepare for an all-out war has another think coming. We need to shake off these cocktail, nightclub and roadhouse years, with their loose thinking, loose habits and health-destroying tendencies. Health will win this war."

So Stanford's dour President Ray Lyman Wilbur admonished U.S. educators, convened last week in lusty San Francisco, whose bars were jampacked with soldiers & sailors.

The 13,000 delegates of the American Association of School Administrators ignored nightclubs, listened carefully to many an expert from Washington. They were told that the war would be won by 1) mathematics, 2) morale, 3) calisthenics, 4) acceleration, 5) calm, 6) air-mindedness, 7) canning, 8) education-as-usual.

Incidentally, the convention threw light on many a wartime school problem, outlined the shape of things to come:

> Biggest problem before the convention was "acceleration" of high-school students. The U.S. Office of Education's Wartime Commission recommended that high schools cut their course from four to three years by means of summer sessions, a six-day week or a longer school day. Object: to graduate students earlier to college or defense jobs. Objection: although acceleration would be restricted to selected students, many delegates feared that it would lower standards for high schools, observed that there was no way to accelerate a youngster's growing up.

> Most alarming news was of an accelerating shortage of teachers. By next year, it was predicted, U.S. rural schools may lose half of their instructors to better-paid jobs. Probable results: 1) hiring of incompetent teachers; 2) consolidation of many one-room schools. The convention urged salary increases for teachers.

> Because of the shortage of farm labor, many a U.S. high school will be closed this year from May to November, to let its students plant and harvest the crops.

> Most significant session was on Asia, Stanford's Wilbur presiding. Looking past the Golden Gate toward the once-"mysterious" East, the nation's educators decided that it is "an alarmingly neglected area in American schools and colleges."

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