The Pensacola journal. (Pensacola, Fla.) 1898-1985, 1918-10-23
A PRESENT NEED.

| Apart from the prosecution Of the war itself,
there is no more urgent problem before the
American people than that created by the threat
ened collapse Of the teaching profession, says
Joseph Swaine, in The Nation. Collapse is an
extreme word; but so is the emergency it de-
scribes. The drafting into other work of large
| numbers of the most capable teachers, the con-
| tinual opening of new doors Of opportunity to
thousands of others, the utterly inadequate
financial provision for the majority of the
mained-these no longer matters for debate.
They facts, facts ominous with disaster for
the nation. If the American people cannot be
made to see the situation and to supply an early
and drastic remedy, shall run the risk, even
though we win the war, of losing all that makes
the war worth winning. Our schools are the
spring and origin of our democracy. Of what
avail will it be to spend our blood in defending
the forms of democratic society, if the life that
is to fill and energize them is lost? And if our
schools suffer- it will be lost. 1t is futile to declare
that this is matter for the future. If the war
has taught us anything, it ought to have taught
us that the future becomes the present with
fatal rapidity, and that failure to provide for
then, is what is wanted and again foresight and
yet again foresight. The American people now
have supreme opportunity to exercise foresight
in the matter of schools. Will they exercise it?
Or will they kill the goose that lays the golden
eggs?
This is not merely war of chemistry and en-
cheering war of technical knowledge pitted
AGAINST I'm wlodo ic rofo ~
lures and ideals, of ideas pitted against ideas
In this sense it is literally war of schoolmasters
and only the hope of victory in this latter strug-
gle makes the sacrifices of the other seem worth
while. But to achieve that victory the ideas and
ideals for which we stand must be kept pure and
free-fowing at their source. That deeper war
behind the other is bound to go on long after the
physical strife has ceased Everywhere men
make the capital mistake of supposing that the
good or evil of this war is thing that will be
definitely settled on the day when victory is at
tanned and the treaty of peace signed. There
could not be grosser error. The outcome of the
war for humanity, the final good or bad of it, is
going to depend on what the nations do as a re-
suit of it, on whether it gets the better of the
brain of humanity by stunning it or whether the
brain of humanity gets the better of the by
understanding it. But this, in the MAN, lies with
the will and the intellect of the next generation,
and the will and the intellect of the next genera
ton are, in no small measure, in keeping of the
teachers of the present.
1t has become truism that the Germany of to- |
day is the product of the German schoolmasters
of yesterday Just as certainly the America of /
tomorrow perhaps the world of tomorrow, will
be the product of the American teachers of today.
The Metropolitan Archbishop of Czernowitz
has been removed from his post because during
the Russian occupation of Bukowina he had or
dered all the clergy to pray for the welfare of
the Russian emperor and his family.
Signor Berenini, Italian minister of education,
has ordered the establishment of chairs of Eng
lish and French literature in every Italian un-1
versity.
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