Teachers and Communism

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23202, 13 December 1940, Page 8

Teachers and Communism

No opinion need be offered on the question whether the two teacher trainees whose political views have upset the Auckland Education Board are, in fact, Communists and likely to turn a -classroom into a propagandist celr. No opinion need be offered on the question whether they should be refused teacher certificates, as the board recommended the Education Department some time ago. These are questions which, adequate reason appearing, ought to have been investigated by a proper procedure. The comment that can fairly be made, however, is that the board’s procedure does not appear to have been a proper one and that its error of judgment is not corrected by the discreditable attacks on persons who protested and on the institution to which they are attached. In the first place, the board took action on charges conveyed in an anonymous letter: a sufficiently bad beginning. In the second, the inquiry seems to have been conducted with no great respect for judicial principles or the rights of persons under suspicion. Third, a discussion most damaging to them was carried on. in open meeting and a resolution which, in effect, was verdict and sentence upon persons without opportunity to defend themselves received the same full and damaging publicity. Nobody whose sense of justice remains unclouded will say that this process was fair, as careful and confidential inquiry and report to the Education Department would have been fair. But when 16 members of the Auckland University College staff and governing body

wrote to the board, protesting against the nature and origin of this process, members of the board paid no attention to the substance of the protest—not, at least, in open meeting—but used the occasion to denounce the .writers, whose names (one said) should be “passed . . . “on to the police,” and the college, which (the chairman said) was “ used as a place for the “ teaching of Communism.” These two quotations are typical of the hot and dangerous things said. It,is right to add that other members spoke more sanely and soberly. But the lesson of this as of other episodes surely is that patriotism must keep its head and must not let go of the essential principles of justice in searching out possible enemies of the nation’s just cause and in acting against them, There is no end but discord and terror to a movement in which public men forget the necessary restraints of their duty and then insult other public men who remind them of it.