Why Johnny Can’t Do Nothing

Make no mistake about the growth: NEA has today “nearly 700,000 members,” who “function” through 66 state organizations and 6,000 local associations, elect 4,000 to 5,000 delegates to a Representative Assembly (a little vague that, but who cares about a thousand delegates more or less?), and act through an executive secretary with a 440-man staff. Time was (1870) when NEA had only four departments through which to accomplish its two-fold purpose (“elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and… promote the cause of popular education in the United States”); today it has thirty. It is, in a word, a whopping big pressure group (though Mr. Wesley never gets around to noticing this), which knows what it is after, and has quite a history of getting what it is after. The gates of hell may one day prevail against it; but Mortimer Smith and Arthur Bestor pretty certainly won’t. For NEA has what it takes—that is, numbers, and a full-time bureaucracy to jump those numbers through the hoop.

Make no mistake, either, about the character of those achievements, which Mr. Wesley chronicles under the general heading “Development of American Education.” A notable series of NEA “actions,” he says, brought the American people to accept the “ideal of secondary education for all youth,” and so made way for the “rise” of our present kind of high school. “The public high schools,” stated an NEA resolution of 1908, should not be chiefly fitting schools for higher institutions, but should be adapted to the general needs, both intellectual and industrial of their students and communities, and we suggest the higher institutions may wisely adapt their courses to this condition. The high schools must become the “poor man’s colleges,” because the amount of latent and dormant power; of wealth-discovering and wealth-producing energy; of beauty-loving and beauty-inspiring taste and skill, that lie concealed and slumbering in the brains and hearts of the keen, shrewd, capable, but untutored millions of our youth, is beyond computation.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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Make no mistake about the growth: NEA has today “nearly 700,000 members,” who “function” through 66 state organizations and 6,000 local associations, elect 4,000 to 5,000 delegates to a Representative Assembly (a little vague that, but who cares about a thousand delegates more or less?), and act through an executive secretary with a 440-man staff. Time was (1870) when NEA had only four departments through which to accomplish its two-fold purpose (“elevate the character and advance the interests of the profession of teaching, and… promote the cause of popular education in the United States”); today it has thirty. It is, in a word, a whopping big pressure group (though Mr. Wesley never gets around to noticing this), which knows what it is after, and has quite a history of getting what it is after. The gates of hell may one day prevail against it; but Mortimer Smith and Arthur Bestor pretty certainly won’t. For NEA has what it takes—that is, numbers, and a full-time bureaucracy to jump those numbers through the hoop.

Make no mistake, either, about the character of those achievements, which Mr. Wesley chronicles under the general heading “Development of American Education.” A notable series of NEA “actions,” he says, brought the American people to accept the “ideal of secondary education for all youth,” and so made way for the “rise” of our present kind of high school. “The public high schools,” stated an NEA resolution of 1908, should not be chiefly fitting schools for higher institutions, but should be adapted to the general needs, both intellectual and industrial of their students and communities, and we suggest the higher institutions may wisely adapt their courses to this condition. The high schools must become the “poor man’s colleges,” because the amount of latent and dormant power; of wealth-discovering and wealth-producing energy; of beauty-loving and beauty-inspiring taste and skill, that lie concealed and slumbering in the brains and hearts of the keen, shrewd, capable, but untutored millions of our youth, is beyond computation.