COURAGE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

American public school authorities will watch with hopeful interest the reactions of their own, communities to the recent move of the Superintendent of Schools in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Announcing that some forty students were "too lazy to study", the superintendent ordered their names dropped from the school rolls. Later relenting, he called a conference of the parents concerned, and as a result allowed the men to be reinstated under probation. If the students do not show marked improvement within a reasonable length of time, they are to be summarily dismissed.

This case illustrates that the most serious handicap to the American public school system: the belief that the state must provide every man under the legal age with a free and complete secondary education. Many men attend high school only because they are required to by law, or because they prefer it to working for wages. In either case they feel that no matter how little studying they do, the school cannot deny them instruction and the use of athletic facilities. The invariable result is that these laggards impede class work forcing the standard over lower. Men who show any inclination to work are termed grinds; those who refuse to study are kept on the roster long after they should have graduated and are finally awarded diplomas by desperate authorities. Private schools and colleges are able to hold the axe of dismissal over the heads of such an element and can extract at least a minimum of effort. But public school officials, hedged about by political exigencies, have been unable to deal with the situation in this manner.

The move of the Asbury Park superintendent is therefore courageous in that it voices loudly a desire which officials have hitherto submissively silenced. A brace in morale has already been noted at Asbury Park but it is unlikely that the incident will have any immediate effect on the position of authorities in other communities. It indicates, however, a growing impatience on the part of educators with those who continually misuse opportunities provided at public expense. If some definite power of removal could be granted to officials in public schools, American education would be freed from the burden imposed by the pernicious influence of educational vagrants on the standards of the public school system.