Spinsters and Australia

Cornell University's outspoken Professor Otis Freeman Curtis, a plant physiologist, has long wondered why educated people are such easy marks for propaganda and hokum. His patience has been taxed beyond endurance by the radio drivel of professors of astrology, by antivaccination and anti-whatnot laws, by a science professor who became a Faith Healer and let his son die of appendicitis without consulting a physician. Last fortnight Professor Curtis' patience finally boiled over.

In Science, he concluded that the reason for the gullibility of U. S. university graduates is that U. S. universities teach science atrociously. He proceeded to flay his fellow science teachers for trying to cram their dogmatic opinions down students' throats, giving them no notion of what Science has to do with the price of eggs. Most horrible example: A certain chemistry professor who admitted that he often sneaked into his laboratory after hours to rearrange his students' apparatus so that their experiments would be sure to come out right.

Professor Curtis' outburst was applauded by many another science teacher. This week a group at Columbia University's Teachers College, led by venerable Progressive Samuel Ralph Powers, began a campaign to reform U. S. science teaching. They published the first of a series of Rockefeller-financed books intended to make Science more sense-making to students: Life and Environment, by Oberlin College's famed Botanist Paul Bigelow Sears.*

Paul Sears (Deserts on the March, This Is Our World) believes that the U. S. is playing ducks & drakes with its natural resources, may wake up stony broke one fine day. His book explains the physical basis of contemporary civilization, "the interrelations of living things." Not too solemn about Science, Professor Sears illustrates his discourse with such examples as the famed connection between the number of elderly spinsters in England and the prosperity of Australia. Spinsters like to keep cats, cats kill field mice, preventing them from destroying bees, which pollinate clover, whose seeds Australia must import from England to fertilize its soil.

* Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University ($1.85).

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