Padagogical Tragedy

While California, Cornell, et al have jumped into the headlines lately because they have been forced to cut their athletic programs, and while various other universities have been worrying themselves to death for fear that the truth about non-athletic cuts will get into the headlines, also, things have been happening throughout educational America that are really much more alarming than the more spectacular events of which we all know. One is continually hearing that the Depression is a great teacher of youth. Yet it is just as obvious, and almost as trite, to observe that the Depression is worse than war or pestilence in the way it takes educational opportunities away from youth and raises havoc with students and teachers alike.

What has happened during the Depression is that the nation's primary school system, on which depends the whole rest o' American education, has suffered far more than any of its brother systems and far more than most people realize. With, virtual chaos reigning in state and municipal economics, the teachers of primary schools have had their numbers reduced, their salaries cut or suspended, their facilities seriously impaired. Many a rural school has been discontinued and many a needed building plan has been scrapped. In fact a reliable federal survey has shown that 9,500,000 children in the nation are being deprived of proper education.

There is not much advantage in talking about what fools we are to boast about our glorious American civilization, democracy, heritage, and so forth and to allow at the same time the bedrock of all this civilization, democracy, heritage, and so forth to be pulverized. There is more advantage in seeing what can be done about it. And two things can be done. For one, budgets can be reduced in other ways than by attacking the schools. It is better, for example, to reduce the salaries of a few bloated. Tammany commissioners than to curtail the functioning of any New York public school. For two, schools could receive loan from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

A Senate Sub-Committee on Banking and Currency is now holding hearings on a bill to permit R. F. C. loans for school maintenance: Why banks and railroads should be the only ones to receive such aid is difficult to see. After all, education was considered a governmental responsibility long before business. --Yale News