Winning his case and returning to the classroom, militant Socialist teacher J.E. Sinclair is undaunted.

‘The Working Class and the Public Schools’ by J.E. Sinclair from The Commonwealth (Everett). No. 168. February 19, 1914.

Stroll into any school room and pick up a school history or a reader or a book, even an arithmetic, and there you will see reflected and glorified the capitalist system. Once there was published a geography that gave the average American worker credit with having produced over two thousand dollars worth of goods a year; but that book is very scarce now. The whole trend the last few years is to- ward a sugar coated reaction that amply demonstrates the decay of capitalist education.

We have seen how the perpetuation of antiquated ideas can be made possible through artificial means and we know that the schools are now striving most valiantly to keep alive ideas that have a deadening effect on the minds of the workers.

Hero worship is one of the most effective ways of keeping alive outworn ideas. Were these fossilized school authorities capable of selecting real men for heroes the working class would not object. But their heroes are almost without exception butchers. The pages of their histories teem with sword bearers, battle scenes, battle ships, carnage, and slaughter. When these pall a series of political tricksters is sprung. Webster, Clay, Calhoun, and the long series of politicians that have been flaunted in the faces of the children of America were in every case the peculiar product of an economic condition that has since passed away. Their deeds were the outcome of that condition and cannot be interpreted in terms of today without a full knowledge of the industrial history that connects our time with theirs. And this industrial history is the very thing that the capitalist pedagogues know nothing about. Or if they chance to know anything about it they see it through law books and not through belts and pulleys and mine shafts.

Workers Must Face Facts.

It is certainly to be regretted that men who pretend to believe in the organization of labor, men who are really proud to be called union men, should allow the schools to be used in the interest of the very crowd that aims to crush out every vestige of working-class organization. Unless all signs fail next year will witness the greatest labor conflict on the Pacific Coast. that we have ever had. Already the forces of capitalism are preparing for the fray. As a matter of fact they have been preparing for years. They have been using the schools as scab factories in which scab teachers have been teaching scab ethics. It is time that every intelligent worker faced these facts squarely.

The enemy may shout, “No politics in the school,” but we know that all through their schools there lurks the rotten politics and the still more rotten ethics of the reaction. In the old sense they are non-partisan. Few schools are strictly republican or democratic, but all schools worthy of mention are anti-labor in the true sense. Profit is their god. Look into any arithmetic and see.

Must Be Politics in Schools.

The fight that has been made against Socialist teachers during the past year should convince any thinking worker that there must be politics of some kind in the schools. In any event economic determinism is working there against the producing masses. The Arlington fight, which has degenerated into a miserable farce in the hands of the self-appointed patriots, has amply demonstrated the need for working class solidarity at the polls at every school election. On the first Saturday in March let the producers win control of their schools and then let them show the enemy that efficient teachers of the working class are not lacking. Meet and nominate your candidates now. Get ready for the labor war that is coming. Seize the schools.

The Washington Socialist was a weekly newspaper of the Socialist Party of Snohomish County published in Everett, Washington and edited by Maynard Shipley. Closely aligned with the Industrial Workers of the World, who were strong in the Pacific Northwest’s lumber industry, the paper ran for only 18 months when it was renamed The Northwest Worker with Henry Watts as editor in June, 1915, and again Co-Operative News with Perter Husby as editor in October, 1917. Like virtually all of the left press, the Co-Operative News was suppressed in June 1918 under the Federal Espionage Act.

PDF of full issue: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn84025731/1914-02-19/ed-1/seq-1/