Portland’s great educator comes home from his six thousand mile trip, and the twelve hundred teachers of the city are summoned to a general assembly to receive the new ideas and inspiration. The proceedings are opened with music; there is a supervisor of singing, who stands upon the platform, with the bulk of the men teachers on the ground floor, and the bulk of the women up in the gallery. The men are directed to sing: “Soft o’er the fountain, ling’ring falls the Southern moon.” They do not sing loud enough, and the music supervisor jumps up and shouts: “Sing until you break the chandeliers.” After which it is the women’s turn; they answer: “Nita! Juanita! Ask thy soul if we should part.” The men sing another verse, and the women answer—the sarcastic young lady teachers who told me about this performance described it as “the Romeo and Juliet stunt.” Next they sing, “In the gloaming, oh, my darling”—in the same “Romeo and Juliet” fashion. I have before me the “School Bulletin” for two successive years, which provides the texts of these chandelier-breaking melodies; also, “Just a song at twilight, When the lights are low,” and “Maxwelton’s braes are bonnie, Where early fa’s the dew.”
Now Mr. Grout rises, and a hushed silence falls upon the twelve hundred men and women teachers. The time for new ideas and inspirations has come. Mr. Grout has brought a really new idea: poetry is to be taught to the children, and he opens a normal school right there and then, to teach the teachers how to teach it. His method is to repeat one line of the poem, and then have the twelve hundred teachers recite this after him; then he repeats another line of the poem, and the teachers recite that; then he repeats the two lines together, and the teachers recite the two; then he goes on to the next two lines, and so on, until all the twelve hundred teachers are able to recite the entire poem correctly. Such is the newest pedagogic discovery, for which the people of Portland were paying a salary of six hundred and twenty-five dollars per month, plus a car allowance of fifty dollars per month, plus a traveling allowance of a hundred and thirty-eight dollars and sixty-one cents per month.
It depends upon the poem, you may say. So I give you the poem which Mr. Grout thus taught to the twelve hundred assembled teachers of Portland. Lest you find it incredible, I specify that when the teachers recited it to me, I also found it incredible; I made two or three of them recite it in turn, so as to make sure they really knew it. Later on, I made them send me a copy of the “School Bulletin,” in which the poem was printed for the benefit of any of the twelve hundred who might have forgotten it. Here it is, word for word, and punctuation mark for punctuation mark:
/* “There was a crooked man Who walked a crooked mile; But I, when I go walking, Don’t walk in crooked style. I keep my chin and stomach in And hold my chest up higher, And step along so straight and strong, And never, never tire.” */
You can imagine the silence which prevailed in the auditorium after this course in poetry. Could it be that some faint uneasiness penetrated the mind of the Portland superintendent of schools? Apparently it did, for he now told the assembled twelve hundred teachers that he had a story to teach them. There were some teachers who were dissatisfied with the school system, and were accustomed more or less surreptitiously to criticize it; for the benefit of such teachers Mr. Grout mentioned that once upon a time he had owned a dog, and this dog had acquired the habit of running out on the highway and barking at everybody and everything that went by. Once a big automobile had come along, and the dog had rushed out at that, and afterwards the dog had been buried at the foot of a big tree, and had made excellent fertilizer for the tree. The fate of this dog was one for all teachers to bear in mind and apply the moral in their lives. After which the twelve hundred teachers joined in singing: “Believe me, if all those endearing young charms, Which I gaze on so fondly today”; and the assembly was adjourned.
I was solemnly assured by five teachers at once, that at the assembly of the following year Mr. Grout started out to ascertain if the teachers still remembered the poem which he had taught them; but one of the board members seated on the platform burst out laughing, and brought the poetical proceedings to an end. The board member thought it was funny, and maybe you think it is funny; but I don’t. I think it one more proof of the deliberate conspiracy which the masters of our plutocratic empire have hatched, to keep the American people at the mental age of eight. The schools are now conducted upon the basis of keeping the pupils at that age; and of course the safest way to do this is to keep the teachers at the same age, and likewise the principals, and the supervisors—and the superintendents.
But it may be that I do an injustice to the mentality of Portland’s high-priced educators; it may be that they are not so naive as they appear, and really know what they are doing to earn their keep. The teachers have a pension fund, to which all have to belong. The amount of the fund is over three hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and some school officials are ex officio members of the board of directors of this fund. The board loaned the sum of sixty-five hundred dollars to a firm of lawyers, and there was a rumor that one school official had got the use of this money. One of the teachers came upon a newspaper clipping, telling how an official in the Philippines had been sent to jail for taking money from a fund of whose board he was a member. This clipping was mailed anonymously to the school official; and immediately afterwards the firm of lawyers began to pay up that sixty-five hundred dollars! At one time it was reported that the fund was on the rocks, and the teachers were going to lose all their money. May be it really was in danger; and again, may be somebody wanted to throw it into the hands of a receiver, so that the politicians could get it. Big Business of course wants the teachers to take out insurance with private companies; to this end the Portland “Oregonian,” organ of the Black Hand, cited seventeen cases of the bankruptcy of teachers’ pension funds!
One incident from the administration of the previous superintendent, just to show you what happens to school teachers in the days of “progressive” politics. The teachers’ organizations worked out plans for certain changes in the school system, which changes were calculated to cause inconvenience to the superintendent. The teachers went out on the streets, they went to the restaurants at night, and to the market places, and got the necessary thirty thousand signatures to petitions. (This is the thing called “direct legislation,” you understand; this is what the Honorable Leslie M. Shaw, and the Dishonorable Harry Atwood and Woodworth Clum describe as “Treason to the Republic.”) The teachers gathered in the superintendent’s office with their signatures; they took them to the office of a lawyer who was a friend of the superintendent, and locked them in his safe. After supper they found that the door of the building had been unlocked, the office door had been unlocked, the safe had been unlocked, and the petitions were gone! The politicians had made off with the thirty thousand signatures, and no more was heard of that treasonable referendum!
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE INVENTOR OF FIVE SCIENCES
The school situation in Portland assumes to some extent the aspect of a sex-war; the women teachers do the work and the men bosses get the salaries. After a long campaign the taxpayers voted money to raise the teachers’ salaries, but some of the teachers got no increase, and others got only fifty dollars a year, and others a hundred dollars a year, while the principals got four hundred dollars! Even when the teachers got the “increase,” they didn’t always get the money. Some of them told me their misadventures, trying to get this money; but when I wrote out the stories, they got scared—somebody might recognize them! So you don’t get the stories, any more than the teachers got the salaries!