SUSPENDED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 31, 7 February 1933, Page 11

SUSPENDED.

WOMAN TEACHER.

SYDNEY CONTROVERSY.

SCHOOL STRIKE ATTEMPTED.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, February 1. 1 Headers of these notes will probably have seen references in New Zealand newspapers to the case of Miss Beatrice Taylor, a Sydney school teacher, who has got into difficulties with the Education Department. Miss Taylor is a member of the Workers' Educational League, which is, according to its own account, "a body of school teachers, and is not linked up with any other organisation whatever," and she obtained leave (due for long service) to go on a visit to Russia last year. . Having delivered a lecture on Soviet Russia after her return, Miss Taylor was asked by the Education Department whether she was the person advertised to deliver this lecture, and whether she was a delegate of the Workers' Educational League. Miss Taylor declined to answer the questions, on the ground that elie regarded the questions as "an infringement of her rights as a private citizen." _ She was then suspended* by the Director of Education, and her case has come before the Public Service Board this week. " Wilful Disobedience."

Miss Taylor's case has been taken up by a large number of public organisations, chiefly industrial unions, which profess to be con'cerned for the principle of "freedom of speech" and are all apparently inclined to be sympathetic towards the strange industrial hierarchy now established in Russia. Various sections of the Public Service are also anxious about the "civic rights" of their members, and altogether the Lducation Department and' its director will find some difficulty in answering the case made out against it entirely to the public satisfaction. | It may be pointed out that Miss i Taylor has been suspended not because ! she went to Russia or lectured about I the Soviet system, but because she declined to answer questions which the Department thought that it had a right to ask. Her offence is put down officially as "misconduct and wilful disobedience," and no doubt the Public Service Board will decide how far these charges are justified. In the meantime the public agitation in Miss Taylor's favour grows apace. A meeting was held at the Town Hall this week, attended by many hundreds of delegates from more or less militant organisations and addressed by Mfss Taylor and by several politicians who have been prominent among the "left-wingers" of the Labour party. Crusaders and Slogans. One of the most characteristic features of this strange little melodrama was the attempt to work up a strike among the children at the Paddington School, where Miss Taylor was employed. A conference held, appropriately enough, at the Railway Institute —where "Red" sympathies are always in order— and addressed, again appropriately, by women speaking for the City Socialisation Unit and the Friends of the Soviet Union—both Communistic bodies—advocated this course, and on Tuesday, when the public schools reassembled, an attempt was made to carry the plan into effect. "Men and women bearing on coats and hats cards inscribed with various slogans: "Reinstate Beatrice Taylor" and "They shall not sacrifice Beatrice Taylor," paraded about the school precincts, but were headed off by the police. Handbills were scattered from over the fence among the children— "Tubby Stevens sacked our teacher," "We won't go to school till our teacher's back," and so on. But these expedients and even the personal intervention of enthusiastic crusaders, adorned with red berets and red ties, left the children cold, and, what was more to' the purpose, the police, callously indifferent to these passionate outbursts of enthusiasm for "liberty ol speech," kept the outside public "moving on" while parents brought their youngsters to school in hundreds in the ordinary way. So the threatened school strike was a fiasco. But lam wondering if the Workers' Educational League which sponsored Miss Taylor's mission to Russia, is one of the numerous bodies affiliated to the Communist International—or not.