Originally published in The Vidette-Messenger of Porter County on October 8, 1940.
Parents Get Spanked By Dr. Bradley
Over four hundred local citizens last night heard Dr. Preston Bradley of Chicago in a discourse, sponsored by the PTA Council of Valparaiso, that touched on war, government, politics, dictators, religion, education and philosophy.
In his address, the title of which was “Education and Life,” Dr. Bradley took occasion to reprimand parents as having missed the bus, in the education of young people. Youth, he said, has been treated like a bunch of guinea pigs, with the result that many have not been allowed to “grow up normally.” It is time now, said the speaker, to turn our attention to adults, find out where the older generation has failed, and instead of criticism for youth, offer boys and girls cooperation instead.
Nor did the Chicago pastor spare the schools. Our educational system, he charged, is under indictment by virtue of the fact that after 50 years of public education a national survey shows an average adult intelligence of 14 years.
The reason for this condition, according to Dr. Bradley, is that emphasis has been placed on knowledge as the goal rather than character and the ability to think for oneself. He offered as his definition of a well-educated person one who is so completely in control of himself that he can achieve victory over any given situation.
Touching on politics, the speaker said that in his opinion there is no single man in this nation big enough to wreck democracy. Our way of life, he said, will be wrecked from the bottom up, not from the top down, if it is to be wrecked. Elaborating on this point, he urged his audience to cease worrying about the presidential election and give thought, instead, to local party tickets. Representatives and senators, he said, are vastly more important to our political system than the president. He cited “land-slides” as proof that the national tendency is toward voting ‘straight’ tickets, a practice he deplored as un-democratic.
Dr. Bradley attacked dictators as the result of a condition in which the people of a nation lost their sense of humor. If the citizens of German, Italy and Russia had only laughed at Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin and had kept laughing, he said, these men would never have arisen to power. Inferentially, the speaker suggested that the world would be better off if dictators were dead. “We need a few first class, highly successful funerals more than anything else today,” he said.
Of churches, the speaker expressed his opinion that their atmosphere was too much that of a mausoleum. “Churches have lost their radiance,” he charged. “They need, more than anything else, the light of the midday sun.”
Rapping national hysteria over “fifth column” dangers, the speaker suggested that America’s real danger lies in an attitude that this nation’s problems can’t be solved in the American way. This sense of futility and ultimate totalitarian regimes.
Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln, he pointed out, would have met today’s problems head-on and would not have taken the “cry-baby” attitude that so permeates our national scene today. He debunked the theory of the indispensable man, either from a republican or democratic standpoint.
Dr. Bradley was introduced to the large audience by Mrs. Ray Dean, president of the Valparaiso Parent-Teacher council who said that America’s first line of defense is the home and that the object of the PTA is to raise home standards through parent education and child welfare.
Supt. R. B. Julian of the Valparaiso city schools, presented Mrs. Dean to the crowd and praised the PTA for the splendid work it is doing in this community to foster co-operation between home and school.
