Читать книгу The Goslings: A Study of the American Schools онлайн

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For months the “Times” continued its denunciations of the “teachers’ soviets”; and, of course, they succeeded in crushing the hydra-headed monster. There come a hundred thousand new people into this community every year, and these people know nothing about local matters except what they read in the “Times.” When the “Times” tells them day after day that there is a band of secret conspirators, in sympathy with Moscow, trying to undermine the school system and destroy the morals of the children, they really believe it, and go to the polls and make their little “x” marks on the ballot, according to the pattern set before them in the “Times”! And so it is that four thousand highly trained experts are denied all opportunity to have effective say concerning the education of the children.

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There is an election of the school board in Los Angeles every two years. The Black Hand laid their plans to elect a complete board in the spring of 1923; they went at the job in grim earnest, sparing neither trouble nor expense, and the story of what they did reads like a chapter from a muckraking novel.