The Super-Professionals

There was a time, Albert Lynd remembers, when "next to the minister, the high-school principal . . . was the most learned fellow in town." Today, says Lynd, onetime educator and now a Boston advertising man, things have changed. The local high school may well be in the hands of "a brisk Kiwanian" whose teaching experience comes, not from the arts and sciences, but from auto driving or basketball and who earned his doctorate by "researches into the theory and function of a school cafeteria." "Who or what," Lynd asks, "was responsible for the change?"

Once a history teacher at Stanford and later at Harvard, Adman Lynd decided that he had solved the mystery after taking a closer look at high-school education from his chair on the school board in Sharon, a small town near Boston. Last week, in the Atlantic Monthly, he described the sort of academic "quackery" he found in control of U.S. public schools.

Patient Lobbyists. The fact is, says Lynd, that "an educational revolution is being put over ... on which [the taxpayer] has been neither consulted nor candidly informed." It is not the fault of parents, school boards, or even the teachers. It is the work of "the super-professionals who determine the kind of education to which your child must submit ... the professors of education in the larger universities and teachers colleges."

Lynd's super-professionals are powerful men, who "by patient lobbying over many years . . . have so influenced state and local laws, that their training courses in teaching theory and method are virtually essential to the eligibility of any candidate for a job in your schools." But the super-pros do not stop there. To gain promotions, a teacher must keep coming back summer after summer to take mor courses.

Thin Drippings. Except for some "thin drippings" on cultural subjects, says Lynd the summer curriculum consists mostly of the so-called "professional" courses, which spin out "the simplest teaching procedures into astonishing lists of redundant offerings." Teachers College of Columbia, for instance, gives no fewer than ten course; in Audio-Visual Education, with an eleventh in "Administering the Use of Audio-Visual Materials." Says Lynd: "There seems to be a transcendent mystique of administering anything in the schoo world more complex than a pencil."

Such inventiveness, Lynd ruefully concedes, requires ingenuity on the part of the super-pedagogues, but there is plenty of ingenuity there. "Thus, your daughter in her high-school sewing class, may be getting the benefit of any 'enriched' teaching her instructor may have learned from this offering at Columbia:

"SOCIAL, PSYCHOLOGICAL AND ECONOMIC FOUNDATIONS FOR THE ENRICHED TEACHING OF TEXTILES AND CLOTHING (Clothing 225)."

Bargain Basements. To Lynd, it seems obvious that today's schoolchildren lack culture, and that it is due to the lack of culture in their teachers who are trained by the professional schools to treasure "enriched teaching" and "social orientation" more than the subjects they teach. Says Lynd: "The faculties who operate these intellectual bargain basements are the men who are quietly running the educational program in your school. It is more than a possibility that they are also running intelligent and literate young people right out of public education."

What can a parent do about all this? Lynd, himself a graduate of California's public schools, has only one pessimistic suggestion: "Mortgage your house and put your youngster in one of the good private schools, where the best teaching today is being done by high-quality liberal arts graduates for whom the professors of education are only an inspiration for humor in the Masters' Common Room."

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