Maple Avenue Evening High School - Progress Yearbook (Los Angeles, CA)

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not only neglected the education in a common language so essential in a democracy, but we have also permitted the immigrant to form his ideas of our national life by contact with its worst phases. Trickery, chicanery, poverty, dirt, vice, governmental inadequacy, industrial instability, treachery to our government--all these he finds expressed only too Well. So seldom does he meet the organized forces in society that are struggling to right these conditions that he often arrives at the conclusion that those activities do not exist. The only avenue by which they may travel to him and through which he may arrive at them is the language of the country. That he must learn. ' ' , This process by which adults acquire a second language is educa- tional. The nature ,of the process thus determines the social agency that must undertake the task. There is only one such agency in a democracy- the .public school. If it is now inadequate to the task, then it must be rendered adequate. ' And even the most casual observer of the signs of the times can perceive that the public school must be about that business quickly. ' f Sewing Class ' 4 Y ' Page Sixty-nine ,.1h.z:.r' '

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struggles with productiong organization nullifies initiativeg racial group contends with adjacent racial jealousiesg everybody is fighting somebody about something. And the only peaceable remedy Call the professional re- formers to the contrary notwithstandingj is conference. There has been no Way devised on earth among men whereby struggling humanity may settle its differences, save only two-exhaustion by war and adjustment by conference. Of war we certainly have had enoughg it remains for us to devise practical ways of talking things over. Nationally speaking this can not be done so long as the attempts to reconcile the diversified groups are based on mutual scorn and contemptg reconciliation must be derived rather from an intelligent comprehension. This need not attain to the strength of friendly understandingg a mere intellectual compilation of the issues at stake and the opposing points of view will suffice as an initial step. A problem clearly stated is half solved. No adequate degree of such neighborly comprehension, however, can exist between American groups and immigrants in periods of storm and stress like the present for reasons easily apparent. Compelled by cir- cumstances over which they have no control, the newly-arrived strangers tend to agglomerate into colonies. Alien groups are necessarily adjacent to American institutions but not of them. For a very fundamental reason this occurs. Any human creature appears to disadvantage in an unfamiliar environment. The cow-boy sel- dom functions Cexcept in the motion picturesb as a model of correct and conventional procedure in the drawing roomg the genius of finance is a shining bit of human ineptitude when removed from his desk and placed on the back of a bucking broncho. The immigrant, by the same token, often appears dumb or stupid in the face of unaccustomed surroundings. As a matter of fact he is something infinitely more pathetic and serious -an intelligent human creature caught in the net of alien experiences which he does not comprehend and about which he may not ask and concerning which his neighbors are prevented by one great obstacle from offering any explanationg and that obstacle is the one thing that must be cleared away no matter what else may or may not be contributed to the general task of democratization. Indeed it is the factor that deter- mines most largely the thoroughness of democratization. There is small hope of sufficient social interpretation between groups until those groups possess a common medium of expression. , . .To furnish this one first .thing the nation has made no unified, comprehensive attempt. Indeed, we have been so remiss that we have Page Sixty-eight 7

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What ls Progress? Taken from an article in the Thirty-third Year Book of the Inter- national Printing Pressmen, written by former President Woodrow Wilson. I am forced to be -a progressive, if for no other reason, because we have not kept up with our changes of conditions, either in the economic field or in the political field. We have not kept up as well as other na- tions have . All progress depends on how fast you are going and where you are going, and I fear there has been too much of this thing of knowing neither how fast we were going nor where we Were going. I have my private belief that we have been doing most of our progressiveness after the fashion of those things that in my boyhood days we called tread- mills ,-a treadmill being a moving platform with cleats on it, on which some poor devil of a mule was forced to walk forever without getting anywhere. Elephants and even other animals have been known to turn treadmills, making a good deal of noise and causing certain wheels to go round, and I dare say grinding out some sort of product for somebody, but without achieving much progress. Progress!. Did you ever reflect that that word is almost a new one? No word comes more often or more naturally to the lips of modern man, as if the thing it stands for were almost synonomous with life itself, and yet men through many thousand years never talked or thought of progress. They thought in the other direction. Their stories of heroisms and glory were tales of the past. The ancestors wore the heavier armor and carried the larger spear. There were giants in those days. Now all that has altered. We think of the future, not of the past, as the more glorious time in comparison with which the present is nothing. Progress, development-those are modern words. The modern idea is to leavethe past and press on to something new. Page Seventy -1