The School Crisis
The Revolution in Education by Mortimer Adler and Milton S. Mayer. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1958. 224 pages, $3.75.
A Fourth of a Nation by
Paul Woodring. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., Inc., 1957. 255 pages, $4.50.
Schools without Scholars by John Keats. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958. 202 pages, $3.00.
The great debate over American education rages, and,
unhappily, raging confuses rather than clarifies issues. Two calm and coolly
reasoned books are heartening current exceptions; a third, although arrogant
and sometimes irrelevant, has enough truth in it to warrant the attention of
the self-critical teacher.
Adler, the famous philosopher, and Mayer, an author and
lecturer, frankly admit that their book is “not trying to find the right
answers; it is trying to find the right questions.” In short, what changes are
needed to meet the unique educational situation of a democratic, scientific,
and industrial society like America in the past century? They urge all who want
to talk about education to distinguish between “principle, policy, and
practice,” and to keep in mind important differences in principle between
aristocrat and democrat, realist and idealist, and traditionalist and
modernist. A book guaranteed to minimize partisan polemics.
Woodring, a former teachers college professor of education
and now consultant to the Fund for the Advancement of Education, forever belies
the canard (implicitly by Keats) that educators have to be fuzzy and dogmatic. His book quickly disposes
of such false issues by showing how, just as some progressivists have been too
doctrinaire, so have some liberal arts proponents been illiberal and
irresponsible about the needs of teacher education. No “good old days” man
either, Woodring presents a cogent plan for an ungraded primary school focused
on skills, a triple-track high school, a nonprofessional college education, a
sensible fifth-year internship at two-thirds pay in lieu of practice teaching.
Keats unquestionably hits sticky, deserving targets when he
spoofs the worst excesses in vocationalism, life adjustment, and the inflated
piffle of much education. And there is a great deal of common sense in his
counsel, in this age of rampant curricular inflation and just as rapid empire
building, to keep the schools concentrating on a few things (chiefly
intellectual or humanistic) and to forego what other social agencies can do
better. He is also convincing in insisting that a school isn’t public until its
community determines curricular goals and keeps a committee eye trained on
school compliance with those values.
But Keats speaks too much of the very
literate communities not at all representative of American education (the new
suburbs of Maryland and Virginia or the wealthy suburbs of Connecticut) for his
book to have too much relevance for urban school systems. Moreover, when he
does discuss the typical community which falls for American sports and
anti-intellectualism, he arrogantly dismisses its inhabitants to the limbo till
then reserved for chuckleheaded (i.e., all) educationists. Thus Keats ends
social analysis where any penetrating critic would begin it.
More evidence of
the essentially descriptive and superficial picture he gives is the virtual
absence of analysis of how the mass media complicate the teacher’s role today.
Nor does he seem to know that the humanities are a changing body of insight in
his compulsive reiteration of the loss of Arthurian legend in the curriculum
shuffle. Finally, the questionable logic of his polarities (Miss Alpha and
Pragmatic Tech v. Miss Omega and Mental Prep) and his naïve assumption of
genius in liberal arts professors and mental incompetence in educationalists
seriously damage the fabric of his arguments.
Still his descriptions of
sentimentality and fuzziness in teacher colleges and their products deserve our
attention. Keats would profit just as much be observing Woodring’s urbanity and
wisdom, two qualities one would have guessed were the true hallmarks of a
liberal education.
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