Growth Toward What?

Connecticut Author Mortimer Smith (The Life of Ole Bull) had four children of school age, but like most parents, he had never bothered to find out much about the public schools they were going to. Three years ago, he became a member of the regional high-school board for the towns of Newtown, Woodbury, Southbury and Bethlehem, and "Oh my," says he, "how my eyes were opened."

The eye-opening process began when his board started interviewing candidates for the superintendency. Most of the candidates, he found, were "more interested in soap, towels, bathrooms, ventilation, and machines for waxing floors than they were in basic subjects." When they did speak about education, "they were all stamped out of the same die, following the doctrines and dogmas of the educators" in blind obedience. What sort of education were those dogmas leading to? Smith decided that it was high time parents found out. This week, in his "primer for parents," And Madly Teach (Henry Regnery; $2), Mortimer Smith reported what he had learned.

How to Drive. He had not found it easy to study the writings of today's educators; most of them, says he, "sound as if they had been badly translated from the German." But out of them had emerged a picture in which Mortimer Smith found almost nothing he liked.

For one thing, he decided, the modern school is trying to do too much. In its insistence upon educating the "whole child" it is acting as if the home, the parents, the church, and everything outside the classroom had no existence at all. Over the years it has added course after course to cover everything short of "how to come in out of the rain"--courses in "socioeconomic problems, home care of the sick, driver education, safe living, industrial hygiene, community health," all the way down to "personal grooming [and] hospitality." The result of all this, says Smith, is that "while the scope of the school is thus being greatly enlarged, we expect less and less from the student in the way of genuine educational accomplishment."

No Bookishness. The world of modern education, as Smith found it, is one in which drill and discipline are taboo, and teachers have become abnormally afraid of boring pupils or straining their abilities. In worrying about such matters, they have long belittled what they call "verbal intelligence" and "bookishness," forgetting that "by far the greater part of man's wisdom is stored up in books."

In its insistence on keeping courses "up to date," says Smith, the school has done its modern work at the expense of basic knowledge. Smith discovered schoolchildren who knew quite a bit about the organizations of the League of Nations and the United Nations ("a meaningless parroting of their elders") but had no idea, for instance, where Geneva was.

Inkspots & Removers. These unhappy trends, by Smith's analysis, have their beginnings in the teachers' colleges, where teachers are exposed to a thorough indoctrination of modern pedagogy, without which they could not hope for promotion ("Socrates himself would find it extremely difficult to be certified"). They waste valuable years taking courses in everything from the Rorschach inkspot method of diagnosing personality to the problems of student personnel administration. But what is education really for? The teachers' colleges, as far as Smith could determine, do not say.

Meanwhile, the school administrator is so busy worrying about inkspot removers and paper towels or boning up on articles in administration journals ("Master Lists and Suggested Methods of Storage of Equipment for the Course in High School Physics") that he has no time to think about education either.

The Higher Loyalty. To Layman Smith, the trend is clear, present, and dangerous: in their anxiety to adjust the child to his environment, modern educators have actually forgotten the child for the environment. As the American Association of School Administrators put it in its own brand of pedagoguese, education should aim not at educating "the individual in his own right to become a valuable member of society," but at preparing him "for the realization of his best self in the higher loyalty of serving the basic ideals and aims of our society."

To Smith, there is something faintly "unAmerican" about making collective society so all-important. To him, the most important aspect of education is "just that intellectual and moral development of the person as a person which these educators believe is now outmoded." But Smith also found another tyrant besides society: science. According to modern educational dogma, science should be the final test of all action; all things outside it--"man's ingrained habit of setting up ethical and moral ideals, his belief that his own life must mean something and that the universe should 'make sense'"--are "prejudices."

Concludes Mortimer Smith: "We have been going along now for some time on the theory that education consists simply of experience and change and 'growth,' and this theory has not... furthered the millennium to any startling degree. Perhaps we need to set up some ends for education; perhaps we need to ask, 'Growth toward what?' "

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