POINTS IN THE WORK OF THE HIGH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY Issued each month of the school year to all teachers in the High Schools of the City of New York. Published by the Board of Education, 110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, New York. Books concerned with educational matters may be sent for review to Mr. A. H. Lass, Fort Hamilton High School, Shore Road and Eighty-third Street, Brooklyn, New York. School textbooks will not be reviewed. The columns of HIGH POINTS are open to all teachers, supervising and administrative officers of the high schools. Manuscripts not accepted for publication are not returned to contributors unless return is requested. All contributions should be typewritten, double spaced, on paper 81⁄2" by 11". They may be given to the school representative or sent directly to the editor. HENRY AHEARN Central Needle Trades. MILTON DICKMAN East New York Vocational ELIZABETH DOBBINS Jamaica Vocational.....ANNE R. Lawrie Food Trades Vocational. MARY K. GANLEY Jane Adams Vocational. MARY A. RIORDAN Chelsea Vocational.. MILDRED C. PASCALE Machine and Metal Trades High School MARGARET ROBERTSON Manhattan Aviation Trades JAMES NAIDICH Manhattan Women's Garment Trades RUTH G. MINSKY Metropolitan Vocational. FRANK H. PAINE McKee Vocational........MARY SEESTED Murray Hill Building and Metal Trades MORRIS J. DEUTCH New York Industrial.... BENJAMIN STERN New York Printing.. .JOHN J. HASSETT Queens Vocational.... MARCELLA NOVOTNY Industrial Art......S. ALEXANDER Shear Yorkville Women's Service Trades FREDA L. ALEXANDER Samuel Gompers..... HARRY SHEFTER Brooklyn Women's Garment Trades NORMA ROMER Central Commercial. CATHERINE B. DWYER Woodrow Wilson Vocational DAVID L. GOLDWYN Cover by Morris Brodis and Layout by the Art Department of the Abraham Lincoln High School CHARLES E. SLATKIN, Samuel Tilden High School The old term "Western Civilization" no longer holds. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT Of the many regrettable moments in the movie masterpiece, Mrs. Miniver, the most distressing, from at least one point of view, was the scene in which the British gentleman of that name takes up his copy of Alice in Wonderland to read to Mrs. Miniver as their cottage is being seared and rocked to its foundation by enemy bombs. The choice of bedtime reading seemed vaguely familiar and one's memory stirred uneasily as it reached back and suddenly alighted on that earlier hero of World War I, in R. C. Sherriff's Journey's End, tenderly drawing a copy of Alice out of his breast pocket and with simple piety intoning its mad-hatterisms as the din of bombs rose in a shattering crescendo that spelt annihilation for the platoon. The repitition of title, scene, and situation after a quarter century was lurid. Did this 1942 version derive from some quaint parallel of circumstance or coincidental invention, or was it a deliberate and purposeful borrowing? Either way, the moral was patent enough: the British subject, we were being asked to believe, simply prefers, generation after generation, to sustain his superior charm and insouciance in the face of annihilating blows from a ruthless and barbaric enemy through the simple expedient of opening a copy of Alice and exorcising an evil world by invoking with meticulous diction his old friend the Jabberwock. It was a prime instance of primitive ritualism wistfully preserved. One sees Mr. Miniver after this holocaust is done, quietly putting up his copy of Alice, not too far out of sight, but rather near enough to be as quietly recovered, dusted off and read again at the appropriate moment in World War III. So far as one can discern, there appears to be no appreciable difference between the first two world wars; the intervening decades appear to have shed little if any light on the recurring calamity. British and Amrican films by implication would have us believe that the hero has learned nothing from his past experiences-or that there is nothing to be learned except perhaps that one ought to buy a copy |