Needless to say, in a city where $10 is not safe anywhere, the schools are hideously overcrowded. There is a new building program, amounting to thirty million dollars, and this hurts the plutocracy even to think about. So one day, after a school board session, the kept press of Chicago exploded all over the front page with the news that the school board had discussed a wonderful plan to save all that money, and put half a million children on half time, and hire eleven thousand new teachers, and get double service out of the schools by running them nine hours a day, six days a week, twelve months a year on the “platoon system” as it exists in Detroit. The first thing to be got clear about this newspaper story is that it was a simultaneous lie. The school board had not considered any such plan, either at its regular meeting or at any committee meeting. The Chicago Teachers’ Federation keeps a court stenographer at every session and has a complete transcript of every word that is spoken—this just because of the newspapers’ habit of shameless lying. But for some reason not easy to guess, the board members failed to make a formal repudiation of this published false news; the papers went on day after day outlining what the board was about to do; and so it was plain that some power behind the scenes was setting out to force the hand of a new and supposed-to-be-liberal school board. The Chicago teachers decided to find out for themselves about this new Detroit system and how it is working. They sent a committee of nine class-room teachers, who did not wait the convenience of superintendents, but went right into class-rooms at the opening hour, and spent several days wandering about in the great assembling plants for goslings. They found Detroit teachers in secret revolt against the new system—and incidentally much puzzled to learn that it was being boosted in Chicago as a saver of money and building space. The members of the school board in Detroit had been having rows, and calling one another impolite names because of the costliness of the system; and as for space, one Chicago teacher asked: “Why aren’t you using the platoon system in this school?” The answer was: “We haven’t room enough!” If it is not money and not building space, what is it? To quote the report of the Chicago teachers: “All special work is outlined, standardized, and supervised from some central authority, so that children derive no benefit from the originality and experience of the individual teacher, or from her knowledge of their particular needs. The teachers know the names of but few children in each group, because of the large numbers with which they deal.” Again: “If fatigue and inability to give attention are features of modern life, the children are certainly experiencing life.”