It happened once that Henrietta met Mrs. Tildsley at a reception, and there was a discussion. “If you don’t like the way the schools are run, why do you stay?” asked the superintendent’s wife; to which Henrietta answered: “I stay because I am not willing to leave the children to Dr. Tildsley.” To me she said: “I have enlisted as if for a war. I am furiously patriotic; I believe in the future of America with all my heart and soul, and I am going to make freedom a reality here. I am going to stick to the death.” She did this. We were sitting on the little roof-garden of the Civic Club one spring evening, and there were six or eight teachers in the group. I could not see their faces in the darkness, but I could hear their eager voices, their murmurs of assent to Henrietta’s statements. With a pencil and pad I noted down in the dark one after another of her sentences: “Tight mindedness and fear are the occupational diseases of teaching.... In the business world there is no such thing as unquestioned obedience; that belongs only in teaching.... There is more kowtowing in our schools than anywhere else in the world.” She told me how she had been assigned to teach “Americanization” classes. There was a class of union painters, foreigners who had asked for help; naturally, they wanted a union teacher, and they chose Henrietta. But the superintendent in charge said that she was a dangerous radical, and they could not have her! Here was a school system with twenty-two per cent of its children, more than two hundred thousand, according to official statistics, coming to school suffering from malnutrition. According to the director of physical training, more than half the children who come to the high schools have physical defects. And if you try to do anything whatever about these conditions, if you have any sense of public responsibility for the poverty, the exploitation and neglect of children—why then, you are a Bolshevik and a social outcast! A young teacher spoke up, a girl who had just begun work. The principal had given her mimeographed directions as to how to teach. There was a book containing all the problems, and day by day she read from these sheets; she was merely a phonograph. They would hold a stop-watch on her pupils to see the number of words per minute they could read, and they would rate her according to that. They figured what they called the “pupil load” of a teacher. Every teacher had to carry a “pupil load” of 710; that was the minimum, and they never let you get below it. There was supposed also to be a maximum, but they never minded driving you above it; they would report the extra pupils as “visitors.” Another teacher spoke up; she was teaching typewriting, and they had gone through the books and cut out a sentence of Emerson’s attributing to society some responsibility for criminals. That was radicalism!