 |
Ballroom at the Hotel Fort Des Moines in Des Moines, Iowa, site of the
1921 convention of the National Education Association |
Summer is
always hot as hell in the Plains States and that’s inscribed in his soul, for
he was a boy in rural Kansas and a young man in Nebraska.
Now it’s
July 1921 and Fred Hunter is ready to handle the heat of Iowa. He’s on top of the world as he pulls open a
bronze door to enter the lobby of the Hotel Fort Des Moines. He’s ready for anything.
Fred is president
of the National Education Association, the nation’s most prestigious
organization of school teachers and administrators. The 64-year old group’s annual convention is
about to begin.
 |
Fred Hunter was a rising star in the
field of public school education. |
In and out
of the hotel’s ballrooms and lounges, Fred will preside over five days of
discussions, debates, and reports. Four
thousand participants are expected. Most
will arrive in time for “Educational Sunday,” as described in the official
program: Homer C. Stuntz, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal church of Omaha, will
speak about “Educating the Other Half of the World.”
The next morning,
in between greetings from college presidents and state officials, the group gathered for an Americanization pageant performed by children in the Des Moines
Public Schools. Since the late nineteenth century, the children of immigrants
had been the focus of Americanization programs in the nation’s public schools.
Immigration
slowed during the Great War but after the Armistice it surged again. Consequently, Senators Albert Johnson and
David Reed were busy drafting the nation’s harshest immigration law to date. The Immigration Act of 1924 would encompass the
Asian Exclusion Act and, using drastically revised quotas, slam the door on
Italians, Jews, and Slavs.
Back at the
convention, female teachers and male administrators discussed salaries, tenure,
visual and music education, daylight in the classroom, rural school consolidation,
the creation of the junior high school, and educating the Negro.
 |
Excerpt from the NEA's 1921 Report on the Negro in Rural
Education and Country Life. Utter indifference among those
who could have made a difference. |
The leading topic
was student health and hygiene, including the trachoma epidemic* and proposals for sex
education. Nearly 20 sessions were
devoted to health issues.
 |
Some of the charts concerning student health which
appeared in the 1921 NEA convention program |
But the real
buzz at the convention concerned something else entirely: the application of business practices to
schooling. Educational administrators
had fallen under the spell of efficiency.
Styling themselves
as executives, the schoolmen – as they now liked to call themselves – sought better
ways to monitor truancy and supplies, keep costs down, and standardize teaching
practices. They wanted more student
testing. They wanted to account for every
red rubber playground ball.
And so
school administrators shifted their emphasis from education to efficiency. As school districts grew larger, the schoolmen
called in experts and ordered surveys. Not
until the thirties did the trend start to wind down, although arguably it never
went away entirely.
Fred was an
adherent of the education efficiency movement, but he didn’t stay a
schoolman. He had set his sights on higher
education soon after kicking off his career in Lincoln, Nebraska, where he served as
superintendent of schools between 1912 and 1917.
During those
years, as popular culture stormed across the country, Fred voiced deep
concerns. He worried about the movies,
dance halls, and penny arcades where wide-eyed youngsters learned about divorce, adultery,
suicide, drinking, and robbery. Teenagers
were dancing the Tango and the Maxixe. Church socials had been swapped out for
bowling parties.
Fred called
for “a constructive program to control the amusement instinct” – build more
playgrounds and sponsor activities at local schools. Insist on vocational guidance for each
student. Establish an “efficiency list”
comprised of reliable girls and boys who are available to perform tasks for
local merchants.
But he
probably didn’t want to keep wrestling with social deviance and the health
crisis in the public schools. As president
of the University of Denver and chancellor of the Oregon Higher Education System
– he would hold both positions – he could largely detach himself from those problems.
So here’s to
Fred, president of the National Education Association, slamming down the gavel
on July 3, 1921. He welcomes everyone to
the glittering new ventilated hotel and jovially shakes hands with his fellow
schoolmen.
Despite the
sobriquet “Roaring Twenties,” the decade was disastrous for immigrants, minorities,
and poor people (although very good for business).
The schools
were besieged by single-issue influencers ranging from the American Legion to
Nativists to the Women's Christian Temperance Union. The
teaching of history became a battleground. The juvenile justice system meted
out thousands of sentences. For many
public school students, it was the worst of times.
 |
Dr. Frederick Maurice Hunter
1939
|
*Trachoma is
a contagious disease of the eye that can lead to blindness. Many thought it was brought to the U.S. by
immigrants, but it also proliferated among white Appalachians and Native
Americans.
https://www.throughthehourglass.com/2019/07/the-schoolman.html
