Dear Editor
DEAR EDITOR The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on any of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words. SCHOOL CRISIS I have been a reader and subscriber of The New Leader for...
...This Sigel belongs on station wbai, not in The New Leader...
...As a rule when I am finished with a copy of The New Leader I give it to the library of the Van Cortlandt Workmen's Circle Center...
...Yet somehow I feel that we are in for further strikes, name-calling and bare-knuckle power plays...
...Miss Foland does not berate the military loo harshly...
...Please cancel my trial subscription...
...Sigel hopes reason will now prevail...
...New York City Herbert Cahn...
...The genuine democracy the military instituted in 1945 was not destroyed by them, but by Janio Quadros and by Joao Goulart, who made Brazil ungovernable democratically...
...Bronx, N.Y...
...He says, however, that "One charge leveled by the strikers was undeniably true: Most of us . . . came from other schools...
...Harry Schutzman Any publication that refers to United Federation of Teachers President Albert Shank-er ("Between Issues," NL, January 20) as "perhaps labor's most intelligent and articulate young leader" is out of its mind...
...any union that cannot protect its members from intimidation and arbitrary dismissals has no right to go on collecting dues...
...It has not happened yet...
...He does not seem to realize that goodwill and understanding only go so far, and that when it comes down to basics—and firing a number of teachers was very basic—then a union must use all the power at its command to gain its point...
...The Board of Education, the Superintendent, and others constantly reiterated this gibberish about trust and faith but they would not sign a contract that meant anything so there had to be a strike...
...It is a shame, but human beings never really forget their past and start afresh with a clean view of the possibilities...
...Sigel says that a "complex of reasons" made him go on teaching, but there was one perfectly simple reason why the teachers could not accept the solutions that were offered by Lindsay and his pals at the Board of Education—they were utterly unfair...
...This copy will not go there...
...I do too...
...I don't know whether Sigel has ever heard the term before, but that makes him a scab...
...But while the specter remains, the other alternative, that of Brazil solving its problems, is too often glossed over...
...If we ever achieve justice in the New York school situation, it will have to be done with the human material at hand, and with all our resentment, stubbornness and selfishness somehow incorporated into the New Utopia...
...I am shocked that you would allow this writer, who no doubt considers himself an "idealist," to appear before your readers...
...But the conclusions drawn by Miss Foland are, if not unfortunate, incomplete...
...I know all about the First Amendment and free speech...
...The fatuous pomposity of Costa e Silva deserves not ridicule but pity, both for the man and for the incredibly talented people he governs faute de miett.x...
...And if a scab crossed some picket lines I know about he might be exposed to greater indignities than a few cross words...
...Sigel joined in a proposal appealing to the teachers to call off the strike and wait for arbitration, appealing to their "fairmind-edness and professional pride...
...If you investigated a little you might find out that quite a few of these so-called "idealists" joined the school system during the strike because they wanted to avoid the Army draft...
...New York City Jeremy Peters BRAZIL The article by Frances Foland ("The Prospects for Brazil," NL, January 20) was as accurate a description of present-day Brazil as I have seen...
...Sigel seems very disturbed that some of the strikers found his presence in their classrooms objectionable, and expressed themselves with some heat...
...His article is not honest, and it doesn't reveal anything...
...He openly confessed that he is only waiting for the Vietnam war to end to be able to quit the school system...
...SCHOOL CRISIS I have been a reader and subscriber of The New Leader for over two decades and have never before read in it a "piece"—as you called it—as vulgar and pretentious as Efrem Sigel's ("Memoir of a Nonstriking Teacher...
...The Jacobin autocracy Goulart wanted to bring to power in 1964 was so riven by factiousness that, even if it had a productive contribution to make, it could not have done so...
...I would say, rather, it is insulting and took a lot of chutzpah...
...The basic issue at Ocean Hill-Brownsviile was job security...
...The specter of Brazil breeding itself into stagnation is genuine, raised as early as 1924 by Roy Nash...
...NL, January 20...
...What else is there but the Army...
...Recently the New York Times had an article about one of them...
...New York City Joseph Lerner There is overriding naivete to Efrem Si-gel's "Memoir of a Nonstriking Teacher" that I find hard to take...
...She is to be commended for this for a reason she understates, and which constitutes the real tragedy of Brazil: While opposition is everywhere, nowhere on the horizon is there any grouping of whom one could anticipate a more creditable performance than that of the military...
...You may be proud of your new contributor, but I am hurt and insulted...
...Little of factual value can be added...
Vol. 52 • February 1969 • No. 3
