Education

Teaching in the Forties
(Pageant Magazine, 1944)

“Teachers, during the war period, have been undergoing unprecedented, exhausting struggle in the classroom. And in their ranks have been casualties that add up to a dangerous teacher shortage. According to the National Education Association, ‘the economic status of teachers has been pushed back 20 years since Pearl Harbor’… The combination of overwork, underpay and the thanklessness of teaching has created an army of deserters from the profession.”


More on the hard lot of teachers during the war can be read here.

”I Like Being a Teacher”
(Pageant Magazine, 1952)

Eleanor Metheny (1908 – 1982) enjoyed a full life in academia, spanning over forty years. Mid-way through her career she wrote the attached article explaining to one and all why she found teaching such a fulfillment.

Problems with Progressive Education
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1952)

If you thought progressive education was a scourge that existed only in the digital age – you’d be wrong; the apostles of progressive education have simply been able to gain traction in our era where leftism has been enjoying greater momentum. Progressive education policies, intent on preserving the student’s “sense of self” over their genuine education, have been around for decades – and the attached article seems no different from much of the criticism that is leveled at them today.


“Critics of progressive education insist teachers don’t place enough emphasis on achievement in their fear of harming the child’s personality.”

”School for Monsters”
(Newsweek Magazine, 1945)

During the second week of February, 1945, the men of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division ran across one of the six Leadership Academies run by Nazi King-Pin, Robert Ley (1890 – 1945; you can read about him here). Among the papers they liberated was a public relations pamphlet explaining what was required of each candidate and what would happen to them if they want out:


“These men must know and realize that from now on there is no road back for them. When the party takes the Brown Shirt away from anybody, the man involved will not only lose the office he holds, but he, personally, and his family, wife and children, will be destroyed.”


An eyewitness recalled Hitler as a boy…

The Fuehrer Schule at Vogelsang
(See Magazine, 1946)

“In 1934, Adolf Hitler boasted: ‘In my Ordensburgen a virile youth will be developed from whom the world will recoil in terror – a violent, dominating, intrepid, brutal youth indifferent to pain and knowing no tenderness or weakness.'”


Nice.

State Sponsored Ignorance
(Pathfinder Magazine, 1940)

The editors of Pathfinder Magazine were rightfully scandalized to report that the Mississippi State Senate voted in favor of purchasing two sets of civics books for the school children of their state:

[The] idea behind this, said the Senate Education Committee, was to eliminate instructions for voting from the books to be distributed to Negro pupils.

Kicking God Out of the Schools
(Newsweek Magazine & PM Tabloid, 1945)

A religion-in-the-schools trial, held last week in the Champaign, Illinois Circuit Court, will probably make history. The plaintiff was Mrs. Vashti McCollum, 32, pert, wide-eyed wife of a University of Illinois professor, demanding that the Champaign School Board discontinue a five-year program of religious instruction in school buildings, on the ground that the constitutional separation of church and state is jeopardized.


Posted herein was one of the first of many articles concerning what would come to known as the landmark Supreme Court case McCollum v. Board of Education (1948): the court decided in her favor.


Click here to read about Darwin in the schools.

Should the Federal Government Fund Schools at All?
(Literary Digest, 1921)

‘The public school system will become a vast political machine.’ And this machine, it is charged, ‘will give a Federal Administration the opportunity of creating an educational autocracy, really endangering the liberty of thought and information, which is a basic right of the people.’


This article pertains to a bill that was before the Congress one hundred years ago that proposed the creation of a Department of Education. The bill was defeated. The proposed legislation was enthusiastically supported by the National Education Association.

Should the Federal Government Fund Schools at All?
(Literary Digest, 1921)

‘The public school system will become a vast political machine.’ And this machine, it is charged, ‘will give a Federal Administration the opportunity of creating an educational autocracy, really endangering the liberty of thought and information, which is a basic right of the people.’


This article pertains to a bill that was before the Congress one hundred years ago that proposed the creation of a Department of Education. The bill was defeated. The proposed legislation was enthusiastically supported by the National Education Association.

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