CHAPTER LXXXIII
THE TEACHERS’ MAGNA CHARTA
The first objection always brought against teachers’ unions is that they might lead to strikes. The American Federation of Teachers has met this proposition by expressly repudiating the policy of teacher strikes, and the American Federation of Labor has endorsed this attitude. Well, somebody has to make a start, and if the labor movement will not, I will. I say squarely, and without compromise or evasion, that I know no reason in the world why teachers should not strike, and I know hundreds of reasons why they should. If you want to find these reasons, all you have to do is to turn back and read this book once more. I say that the teachers of St. Louis should have struck when Miss Rosa Hesse was kicked out of the school board for opposing the candidacy of a school board member for re-election. I say that the teachers of Buffalo should have struck when five teachers were kicked out by the school board for publishing a pamphlet criticizing the schools of their city. I say that the teachers of Chicago should have struck when large numbers of their colleagues were kicked out of their positions for the crime of belonging to a union; so should the teachers of Butte, Montana, and of St. Louis, Missouri, of Fresno, California, of Austin and San Antonio, Texas, of Wichita, Kansas, of Olean, New York, of Lorain, Ohio, of Atlanta, Georgia, of Peoria, Marion, and Elgin, Illinois, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, of Terre Haute, Indiana.
These are only a few cases, and I might cite many more. In general, what I say is that school teachers of the United States should have their professional organizations, and should run these organizations; they should establish professional standards, setting down not merely their rights, but also their duties; they should hold their members to these duties, and should maintain these rights against all comers, including superintendents and school boards. I say that teachers should do this, not merely for their own welfare, but for the welfare of the schools; I say that it is necessary both for the schools and for the children, that teachers should cease to be rabbits, and should become self-respecting and alert citizens.
There has been a kind of strike going on in the American public schools for the past six or eight years; it might be described as an “individual strike.” It is made by teachers who find their positions intolerable, and who simply go into some other occupation. Professor John M. Brewer estimates that there were forty thousand such “individual strikes” during the labor shortage just after the war. These represent, of course, the cream of the profession—the people who were sure they could take care of themselves in the outside world, and who went and did it. And all these people have been lost to the schools and to the children, while the feeble-minded and feeble-souled have remained. So the profession of teacher sinks lower and lower, until now it is agreed by educators that students at normal schools—that is, those preparing to become teachers—represent the lowest grade of any to be found in training schools of the professions. It seems to me that in the light of this fact, anyone who really cares about the schools and the children would long for nothing so much as for a real, vigorous, large-scale strike of school teachers.
The school teachers of England and Canada and Australia belong to unions, and do not repudiate the policy of the strike. They have struck on many occasions, and have been dignified and successful, and highly educative to the community. The National Union of Teachers of Great Britain sent over their president to represent them at Boston, the 1922 convention of the National Education Association. This gentleman happens to be, not a college president or a state superintendent of schools, but a plain ordinary class-room teacher; and what he said about the backwardness of American teachers, their lack of independence and class-consciousness, was quite paralyzing to the N. E. A. gang. He told about the strike against a reduction of salary, then being carried on by the teachers of Southampton; and the N. E. A. ordered all reference to his speech stricken from the record of the Department of Classroom Teachers!
Professor Brewer has discussed this question of the teachers’ strike, and has not shirked the issue; he says, very sensibly:
It is our business to help discover methods of abolishing the need for strikes, but it is useless to talk against strikes when no better way to prevent injustices has yet been discovered. Employers almost always have the right to the lay-off and lockout. We can aid in the discovery of better methods for all workers if we work with them and not against them.... What have we ever done to educate boys and girls in preparation for better solutions for labor difficulties than strikes? Laborers do not enjoy striking; they do it because they believe this to be their only weapon when circumstances which they consider intolerable arise.
In order to get the fundamentals on this matter, we have to come back once more to the question, several times discussed in this book: Is a teacher a citizen? What I ask the teachers of the United States to do is to write for themselves a Magna Charta; to adopt a collective program, and put upon the statute books of every state the explicit provision that teachers are citizens, and that wherever their rights as citizens come into conflict with the rights of school boards and superintendents as hirers and firers of labor, the teachers’ rights as citizens are superior. Teachers have, and should maintain through their organizations, every right which other citizens have.
What are these rights of citizens? Teachers have a right to employ their spare time as they see fit. Teachers have a right to belong to such organizations as they see fit. Teachers have a right to take part in politics alongside all other citizens—and this includes the election of superintendents and school boards. Teachers have a right to discuss school affairs, and to say anything they please about the schools and those who conduct the schools. If they say things which are not true, they are liable, like all other citizens who make false statements, to due process of law; but they are not liable to lose their positions for exercising any of the rights of American citizens. They may belong to political parties, and may hold and advocate such political opinions as they see fit. If they advocate sabotage, violence and crime, they may be dealt with by the law, but they may not be dealt with by school boards or superintendents for political ideas which they hold, or for political activities outside the class-room.
These principles, I take it, are fundamental, and no teacher is a citizen until they are rigidly upheld; the first duty of every school teacher in the United States is to back every other school teacher in the assertion and protection of these rights, and nothing that any teacher can do or fail to do to our children is so important as this assertion of teacher self-respect and teacher dignity. Am I too much of an optimist when I say, that before I leave this earth I hope to see the teacher rabbits come out of their holes and band themselves together for mutual protection as citizens? Am I historically correct when I assert that this is the true one hundred per cent Americanism, which the author of the Declaration of Independence and the author of the Emancipation Proclamation would have endorsed? Or will the teachers of America forever let themselves be bamboozled by Chamber of Commerce lackeys into calling a man a “radical” and a “Red” because he stands for these fundamental liberties in a free republic?