As we are being led back to leeches for medicine, astrology for science, and witch trials for entertainment, it is good to remember what the ‘good ole days’ in this country were like for the working class. The Labor Research Association’s Myra Page on ‘education’ provided for workers’ children.

‘Workers’ Children in Capitalist America’ by Myra Page from The Daily Worker. Vol. 6 No. 313. March 8, 1930.

The general myth has been developed thruout the country by capitalist agencies that there is free and equal opportunity for all children to get an education. But what is the actual situation? True, the public schools exist, yet there are 140,000 children between the ages of seven and fourteen years of age who are not in school at all. These children form part of the army of child laborers in the United States. Numerous studies reveal that thousands of other children are absent from schools, months at a time, laboring on cotton, tobacco, cranberry and fruit farms, in canning factories and other seasonal industries; while thousands more are working before and after school hours, as newsboys, messengers, clerks, or doing factory work in their homes, and being paid at the munificent rate of three to ten cents an hour. As a result, these children’s health becomes impaired and they fall behind in their studies.

This is the “free” education in America, where the majority of labor’s children cannot hope to get beyond the grammar grades, for in spite of all the sacrifices and skrimping which working class parents make in order to keep them in school, they must leave at fourteen or earlier, in order to go to work. Only those of the most skilled and best paid workers can remain in high school, and only a few of these can afford to stay until graduation. The last census showed that:

One out of every seven children never reaches the fifth grade.

One out of every four children never reaches the sixth grade.

One out of every three never reaches the seventh grade.

Almost one-half never reach the eighth grade.

Less than one-third of the school age population enter high school and but one in eight graduates.

These facts reveal the class basis of “free” education in the United States. In many working class areas, where wages are poorest and school facilities the worst, as in the southern textile districts and in mining areas, the average amount of schooling runs from three to four years, and illiteracy is very common. One-fifth of the children of the highly exploited Negro workers and poor farmers receive no schooling at all, while the majority are able to get one, two, or three terms of six or seven months each.

Illiteracy among the industrial and agricultural masses in this country is so great that United States stands tenth on the list of nations in percentage of illiteracy. Government figures place the number of illiterates within the country at five million, but other estimates place the actual total at twelve millions. One grave result of American imperialism’s rule over its colonies of Haiti, Porto Rico, Alaska, the Philippines and other territories has been the continued, enforced, ignorance of the toiling populations. From one-fourth to more than one-half of the total populations are illiterate, while child labor is excessively high, and general impoverishment has reached drastic proportions.

So much for the boast of “free and equal opportunity for education in America.” Education will never be really free, so long as capitalism places upon working class children, who form the vast majority of the school age population, the severe handicaps of poverty, child labor, malnutrition and resulting disease.

Class Discrimination in the Public Schools.

Discrimination against labor’s youth in the public schools is widespread. The facilities in schools attended primarily by working class children, as in textile, mining, oil and agricultural regions, and those in proletarian districts in the big cities, are notoriously poor. Classes are often overcrowded, buildings in need of repair; there are insufficient books and other supplies, and teachers are so over-burdened and usually so poorly paid that they cannot give the children the aid they require. There are exceptions to this statement, but this is the general rule. In middle class neighborhoods, the schools offer a sharp contrast. They are big, model structures, with every modern convenience, including gymnasiums, swimming pools, auditoriums, well-equipped libraries, and large airy class rooms with twenty-five pupils per teacher. In working class districts, the number of pupils per teacher ranges from forty to forty-five up to fifty-five and sixty pupils.

The most glaring instance of this class discrimination is furnished by the “Jim Crow” system of schools, into which colored children are segregated throughout the southern states. These colored schools are small, ramshackle buildings. often without desks or books or even window panes. Most of these are grammar schools, for few high schools for colored children exist. State appropriations for schools vary from five to ten times as much per head for each white child as for each colored child. Teachers in colored schools are generally poorly trained, yet they must teach 5 to 7 different grades.

Education For Workers’ Children in Soviet Union.

The only country that has faced the issue of adequate education of workers’ children is the Soviet Union. One of the first acts of the workers’ government was a decree establishing a free public school system, for none existed under the old regime. But the Soviet Government did not stop there. It recognizes as part of its responsibility the freeing of the workers’ children from the many handicaps which the old social environment had placed on them. The Communist Party, the Soviet Government, and the unions and cooperatives are all working together, in order to see to it that every child has adequate food, clothing, shelter and healthy surroundings and that no child labor exists, so that the masses’ children may, for the first time in history, get a real opportunity for education. The educational system is recognized as the most progressive in the world. The children are not taught to be unthinking robots as they are in this country, but receive their all-round working class development through active participation in useful activities. These activities, or “projects,” are grouped around three great themes–nature, labor and human relations.

Illiteracy under the czar was enormous, embracing usually over one-half the population, while in many areas, barely one-fifth could read and write: but the Soviet Government is liquidating this illiteracy at the rate of over one million a year.

Speed-Up and War Preparations in the American Schools.

The stretch-out system is being introduced into the American public schools, and, of course, it is the workers’ children and the education workers who are suffering. Teachers’ and other education workers’ burdens have been increased by lengthened work day, larger classes, and the adding of new duties such as “extra-curricula activities.” In many localities, their pay has been held back because of “lack of funds.” The pressure for teachers’ conformity to capitalist dictates has tremendously increased, with school boards’ following open-shop and company-union policies. The growing ferment among this generally backward group of workers is expressing itself in various ways. Recently a teachers’ strike took place in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and the teachers of Bloomington have threatened to strike if their back pay is not forthcoming.

The capitalist class makes every use of the public schools to miseducate working class youth on all questions which vitally concern them, such as the role of labor in American history, unionism and the revolutionary movement, imperialist war, and the Soviet Union. This is done by legislative control of texts, firing of all teachers who refuse to follow reactionary instructions, and various means of propaganda used by the Power Trust, American Legion, Chamber of Commerce, and similar organizations. If space permitted, many concrete illustrations of how this is done could be cited. Religious organizations also have their opportunities to propagandize youth in the public schools, while approximately 150,000 working class children attend parochial schools, run by the Catholic Church, in which the most violent anti-red and pro-Catholic propaganda is advanced.

With the approaching imperialist war, the ruling class have increased their control of the schools and utilize them more and more as one means of preparing for imperialist war and war against the Soviet Union. Practically every state has made instruction in American History a compulsory subject, and the avowed purpose of this is “to inculcate sentiments of patriotism, to teach them the high duty of citizenship, both in times of peace and war.” Military training has been introduced into more than 58 high schools, and this movement is steadily gaining momentum. In Omaha, military training has been enlarged to include training for girls.

The ruling class have had the active cooperation of the A.F. of L. The teachers’ union, affiliated to the A.F. of L., is very weak numerically and follows a no-strike, pacifist policy. The socialists and Musteites have complete control of the union, and use it as the base for their political maneuvering with the fakers.

Working Class Struggle Against Imperialism’s Control of Schools.

The American working class, under the leadership of the Communist Party, must vigorously combat these capitalist devices. All the forces of the Party, the YCL and the Pioneers, must be mobilized, together with the T.U.U.L., including its revolutionary fraction of education workers. Working Class Councils of Education should be organized, as has been so successfully done in England, composed of representatives of all working class organizations, including wage-earning parents’ associations. An important political struggle can be waged by the C.P. against imperialism’s use of the schools, for abolition of the Jim Crow schools and all other forms of class discrimination, for adequate school facilities in working class areas, for free milk and lunches in the schools, for militant unionism of education workers, especially the most exploited section, and for the overthrow of the capitalist government and the establishment of a Workers and Poor Farmers’ Government, under which the American workers’ children will have, for the first time, a full opportunity for a genuine, working class education.

The Daily Worker began in 1924 and was published in New York City by the Communist Party US and its predecessor organizations. Among the most long-lasting and important left publications in US history, it had a circulation of 35,000 at its peak. The Daily Worker came from The Ohio Socialist, published by the Left Wing-dominated Socialist Party of Ohio in Cleveland from 1917 to November 1919, when it became became The Toiler, paper of the Communist Labor Party. In December 1921 the above-ground Workers Party of America merged the Toiler with the paper Workers Council to found The Worker, which became The Daily Worker beginning January 13, 1924.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/dailyworker/1930/v06-n313-NY-mar-08-1930-DW-LOC.pdf