RENEWAL OF FAITH

"These our charges,

As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

Are melted into air, into thin air."

No less quickly than this winter's snows have the charges of "Fascism" at Columbia's Teachers' College melted with yesterday's announcement that Professor Kilpatrick will give the Macy Lectures in 1938 and 1939. For a while the enforcing of the retirment law looked like a gag upon the liberal and controversial teacher. He does not think that his throat is being cut, nonetheless, and the report of his new position verifies the friendly words of Dean Russell before the New Orleans Convention.

The ten thousand petitioners on his behalf are not the only ones to rejoice that Dr. Kilpatrick is given a fresh mount from which to tilt at his foes. With John Dewey and George Counts he is one of the "three bad boys" of Morningside Heights, who love always to blow up old dogmas of education. Sailing with great gusto into the teaching based on folkways and tradition, he preaches a schooling tied to the life of today, teaching the latest social problems in the everchanging, indeterminate manner of modern culture itself. The great object of his scorn is the smugness with which schools tend to sit back and survey their methods of instruction.

Professor Kilpatrick is valuable because he is so irritating a part of the school-system; as it writhes under his pricks it may yet fashion a pearl. Thrice blest is Columbia's selection of him to give the series of lectures. It gives him a pulpit for his doctrines and affords his many supporters a chance to hear him teach once more. To an equal extent the University increases its honor and reputation.