Atlanta Daily World

BY WILLIAM GORDON
More Democracy Needed In American Education

The present movement now on to promote and widen the scope of American education will without a doubt have a profound effect on the rising generation of American citizens. This most essential factor which has become a definite part of every civilized society in the world today, is being encouraged by community leaders, businessmen, and labor groups growing out of the feeling that the world can't move forward without all society getting its share of training.

You will find that much more stress is being emphasized along the lines of practical education today. This means that it is absolutely necessary for people to be taught how to live and work among all human beings. Theory is all right, but it becomes out of place when man is unable to adjust himself to practical every day living.

Things like practical every day economics is getting into the classrooms of high schools today from New England to California and from Florida to Minnesota. This is not the old dead and dry economics of days gone by, but a vital, dynamic presentation that makes for understanding of the way we live.

This new movement in education is a postwar product, barely three years old. Like a chain reaction this new force is spreading as rapidly as teachers can be equipped with the objective knowledge they wish to impart. This new approach to education may be called one of the greatest trends in American life today.

But like many other things which are good and practical, even this idea of practical education is not reaching the sources it should.

The whole process lacks the real democratic approach. The hundreds of schools throughout this country today share this new educational process with certain races and groups. The large Negro population suffers from the lack of being admitted to these institutions which have the new and advanced education techniques.

It is without question that the American Negro and other minorities need the same educational opportunities as their fellow Americans.

Without these opportunities being provided, the whole educational process goes ill-supported and results in furnishing inadequate training for society as a whole.

An educational process should be designed to benefit democracy, making it possible for all citizens to appreciate and use.

Democracy will live if it works and will die if it does not work. Moreover, regardless of what democracy may do in the cultural and human relations area, if it fails on the economic front it will most certainly go down in defeat.

If we are interested in the survival of our way of life, there is no kind of education more important than that which seeks to make the average American intelligent about our total economic system and the way it affects all of us and not part of us.