Education: Shock Treatment

One day last week, a well-dressed woman popped into the offices of the Minneapolis Board of Education, pulled off a shoe, and tacked a funeral bouquet to the door. On the bouquet was a note: "With sincere sympathy to the people of Minneapolis, who would bury our high hopes ... by neglect."

The funereal feeling was general in Minneapolis. The day before, popular School Superintendent Willard Goslin had written the board: "I cannot lend myself any longer to the neglect and mistreatment of public education which continues in Minneapolis." And with that he resigned.

Willard Goslin's name commands respect among U.S. educators. Minneapolis had made him Man of the Year in 1946; his fellow school superintendents had recently elected him president of the American Association of School Administrators.

Goslin had ambitions for Minneapolis' schools, but never enough money to carry them out. In 1945 Minneapolis was still trying to run its schools on the same budget it had in 1930. Goslin had ended a recent strike of 1,100 Minneapolis teachers (TIME, March 8) by promising higher wages, but the city's new charter, which he had hoped would bring in the money, was declared void by the State Supreme Court.

At week's end, the Citizens' Committee on Public Education was trying to persuade Goslin to change his mind. It would also try to persuade Minneapolis to do better. Said Goslin: "I thought that my resignation would do more good than I could accomplish by staying on the job another year. It was a certain shock treatment, you might say. It appears to have had some effect . . ." But he wasn't going back.