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In the course of discussion before a board Committee, Mr. Bettinger made so bold as to give his definition of education: “to aid in the unfoldment of a human mind.” Colonel Copp was so furious that he was hardly able to keep still until Mr. Bettinger finished. “Education?” he cried. “I’ll tell you what education is! Education is getting a lot of young people into a room, teaching them a lesson out of a book, hearing them recite it, putting down a mark in figures, and at the end of the year that’s their record. That’s what education is, and we are going to have that and nothing else in Los Angeles.”

Judge Bordwell had gone to New York to put the problem of the Los Angeles schools before the great mogul of plutocratic education, President Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia. He came back with Albert Shiels, a product of Butler’s educational enameling machine, who was to make a survey. Shiels was an accountant, not an educator; also, under the charter of the city, he was ineligible for superintendent, not having lived a year in the state. But a little thing like a charter provision would not be allowed to block the will of Judge Bordwell. Dr. Shiels was made superintendent and started publishing anti-Bolshevik propaganda in the teachers’ paper, and circularizing the teachers with such literature. He published in President Butler’s “Educational Review” an article assailing the Soviet government, which article contained no less than one hundred and twenty-four misstatements of fact. Challenged to debate this issue, Dr. Shiels wrote to me: “I believe it is contrary to good public policy to place Bolshevism and its practices on a par with debatable questions.”