LET'S HAVE THE FACTS

"Teachers cannot build a new social order, as some people would have them do. On the other hand, teachers cannot remain aloof from current realities if their teaching is to be at all vital and significant. Teachers ought to teach what they believe to be the truth on all questions where the community as represented by the School Board has not expressly forbidden them to teach. Teachers can be much more aggressive in teaching the truth on all matters about which the community has not crystallized an opinion than they commonly are.

"For example, teachers are relatively free to adjust the school curriculum to a closer relation with the international realities of today. We can teach more of the international setting of our national history. We can teach more of the unpleasant truths of war. All this we ought to do in the interest of a better relation between public education and international realities."

So runs a newspaper account of an address delivered Wednesday evening before a meeting of Pi Gamma Nu, national educational organization, by Dr. Howard Wilson, member of the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

After the recent protrusion upon the cod-fish commonwealth of Hon. James M. (Five-Cent) Curley, there should be few, indeed, who care to dispute Dr. Wilson's suggestion that it is high time for those who dispense knowledge in the public school system to begin dealing in the facts of life. It is a point needing little re-emphasis that the semi-literacy which is weaned on the diet dished out by earnest graduates of the neighboring normal school provides a noble share of the tragic humor in any democracy. It enthusiastically fosters huey longs and pink toothbrush, joe penners and streamlined bathtubs, athletes foot and esquire. It glories in the Sir Galahad account of the Spanish-American War, and it establishes as a natural limit to the study of civics, the skeleton of the local street-cleaning department.

The Boston Globe, from which the quotations are taken, avers in its headline that Dr. Wilson "ADVISES RADICAL TEACHERS TO 'GO SLOW'." Now this may have been the point of the address, but if that be so, the portions chosen to illustrate the idea were very ineptly selected, indeed. For it appears, on anything resembling a close examination, that what Dr. Wilson was really trying to say is that teachers should attempt, on every possible occasion, to circumvent the propagandizing influence of that most thoroughly Democratized of all nabob institutions, the American School Committee.

It is an old saw, but not therefore to be gainsayed, that a little knowledge, particularly if it be distorted knowledge, is a dangerous thing. And this is the reason why any person with claims to the shadow of sense earnestly prays that someday the public school teacher may be able to follow some such path as that outlined by Dr. Wilson, and become rather less of a menace to intelligence and good government.

Dr. Wilson evidently believes that steps in the right direction are possible even under existing handicaps. His belief is postulated on the rather precarious assumption that the teacher will be in advance of the school-committee in "crystalizing" his knowledge of the significance of current affairs. At the risk of appearing cynical, one is tempted to suggest that Dr. Wilson overestimates the alertness of the average teacher and, far more important, neglects the capacity for bootless anxiety, which characterizes the mental state, and inspires the interference, of his committeeman.