Bill-board Tutorship
THE COMMONWEAL June 26, I929 .9 i of the group of passengers making the inaugural trip, and hence one of the chief sendees, was Mrs. Mabel Walker Willebrandt, now Washington counsel to the...
...More...
...Scientific accu...
...racy, strict limitation of the enrolment in numbers and purposiveness, and mastery of research method are stoutly demanded...
...This must be termed, in its own way, a fairly bad performance...
...Chaos attacked the universities and schools in the guise of students in droves and teachers selected by necessity...
...But it was certainly no worse than hundreds of flimflam experiments and re-cipes which have been tried out in education proper during the past troubled years...
...Those familiar with the personal styles, so to speak, of the two main personalities, would have known better...
...Willebrandt was trying to dry up the Mayor's city, might have looked for tense silences and tightened lips on this occasion...
...Mabel Walker Willebrandt, now Washington counsel to the Aviation Corporation, which helps to operate the new combination system...
...In the graduate schools, respect for form has staked out its imperial claim...
...Preach-ers and professors, the ladies' clubs and the parent- teacher associations, even organizations of advertising men themselves, have delivered stout blows...
...It is the final educator of the average citizen...
...A magazine which publishes a shady story will be barred from the mails, but it may fill half its space with misleading advertisements and circulate freely...
...We wish Senator Smoot luck because he is trying to tie the hands, chain the feet and gag the mouth of a practical joker...
...For it is trying not only to identify a need with the means of gratification, but to create a need where none exists...
...For a time the notion that military, athletic, theatrical, operatic, literary and life-saving abilities could all be developed by the systematic use of cigarettes was the second-best of our national jokes, bettered only by the fact that there existed military, athletic, theatrical, op- eratic, literary and life.saving notables willing to lend their portraits and their signatures to the spreading of that notion...
...Finally, problems of administration have been defined frankly...
...BILL-BOARD TUTORSHIP S ENATOR SMOOT would extend the Food and Drugs Act to tobacco and tobacco products...
...It influences him as soon as he is able to read, and it keeps close to him long after he is through with schools...
...There can be no doubt that the advertiser influences us about more things than the merit of his product...
...And we wish him luck because his job may not be an easy one...
...Gone are the old abstractions, in a dozen branches, which could be pasted upon the child mind without regard either for human individu- ality or the concrete structure of the world...
...It is no longer popular, excepting among the benighted, to suppose that pedagogy is merely a synonym for starving in a gentlemanly way...
...The effect of his constant eloquence reaching at our desires from every angle during our waking hours-- from the pages of the newspaper at breakfast, from the bill-boards all about us as we take a turn in the air, from the sky signs at night--is not restricted so abso- lutely as all this...
...He has introduced a resolution to this effect, and in its success lies about the only hope for the disappearance of propaganda which suggests the high social advantages of leanness, and the ease with which it can be secured through the substitution of nicotine for food...
...THE COMMONWEAL June 26, I929 .9 i of the group of passengers making the inaugural trip, and hence one of the chief sendees, was Mrs...
...They would have expected the urban- ity fairly to crackle, as crackle it did...
...Censorship...
...We wish him luck because his success in this matter might make it somewhat easier to con- trol the activities of all mischief-making advertisers, some of them quite as disagreeable as the tobacco com- panies...
...He would empower the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration to exercise the same control over de-ceptive statements made through advertising media that it now exerts in preventing the use of misleading labels on food and drug containers...
...Let us have some cen- sorship of advertising...
...The schools, on the other hand, manifest clearly a high regard for nature--in so far as personality is nature...
...And who will deny that the successful prexy of today could have earned his fame among bankers...
...For while everyone upon our limited horizon is hammering away these days at the unscru- pulous advertiser, what ground the enemy has given up is not measurable by our unmicroscopic scales...
...The result was a deluge of quackery...
...Those cognizant of the bare situation a few months back, when Mrs...
...However, honors were not quite even...
...Already one may note sure signs of a new stabilization...
...EDUCATION TAKES STOCK A BOUT the only real diamond-stickpin-novelty that drifted into the area of education during the past season was Professor Rogers's "extemporaneous speech" to the graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...
...Movies and books are censored...
...That was a turn of things to be resented...
...and that deluge is now receding...
...But both jokes wore thin, as jokes do, and besides we discovered that the tobacco companies were making money while we laughed at them...
...And in time it comes to affect our sense of values...
...What teacher, or what com-bination of teachers, elementary, high school and uni- versity, has half the educational opportunity of any combination of national advertisers ? Yet of all the agencies through which ideas are spread, it is the only one not subject to control...
...That propaganda should disappear because it has ceased to be funny, even to risibilities which are always primed and cocked...
...The inefficacy of the first attack is a little frightening...
...Both displayed the competent lightness of those who have not the habit nor the manner of defeat...
...In entrusting to the lady's care a bottle of water--said to be taken from the Atlantic and destined to mingle with the Pacific, to symbolize the occasion: but still a bottle of water-- the gentle- man is one sly and successful gesture up...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 8
