Lesson in Loyalty

A State Supreme Court is currently examining New York's Feinberg Anti-Subversive Law for symptoms of constitutionality. A number of civic and political groups have asked for a permanent injunction against the bill, which would root "disloyal" teachers out of New York public schools. These organizations claim the law would install "thought control" in the Empire State. The bill's framers say their measure will protect "children of tender years" from the Communist ideology.

Guarding America's children against classroom Communism-or any other dogma-is a good cause; no instructor who propagandizes during working hours should teach youngsters of "tender" or any other age. But the Legislature and the Board of Regents have created a protection system which provides quite a primer for New York's children, who should be learning what democracy is really like.

Here is what the Legislature did: An old New York statute prohibits teachers who advocate violent overthrow of the government. But since no court of law has yet decided that any particular group preaches revolution, the Legislature figured it had better write a decision of its own. So it passed a law ordering the Board of Regents to make up a list of "subversive" organizations, whose members could not teach in New York public schools.

Lesson for school children: By executive action, outside a court of law, decide that a group advocates revolution. Then forget that in this country guilt is individually determined and presume that any member of a group is automatically a party to that organization's supposed crime.

Here is what the Board of Regents did: It set up a pyramidal network of loyalty checks, wherein school principals file reports on the private and professional actions of teachers; assistant superintendents report on principals; the superintendent reports on assistant superintendents; the Board of Education reports on the superintendent; and somebody else checks on the janitors.

Lesson for schoolchildren: Set everyone to giving the litmus test to everyone else, so that in private life teachers will think twice before criticizing and comparing, before saying what they believe.

The Board of Education and New York City's us per student of schools have promised that proof of subversives must be decussated and that whispers will not do. But New York State has conjured up a monster of a system, which can work wonders on its own. If by some chance this system is found constitutional, New Yorkers should speak softly to their kids and tell them there are lessons it were better not to learn.