Throw Them Out

A U.S. public high-school class, many experts agree, invariably bogs down to the pace of its dullest and most recalcitrant pupils. What can be done about it? In the current Atlantic Monthly, Ohio High-School Teacher Caspar D. Green offers a remedy as drastic as any suggested yet. Says Green, in effect: throw the recalcitrants out.

Passivity & Protest. "The teachers I know," says Green, "agree almost unanimously in preferring to teach what may be called advanced academic subjects . . . The pupil takes these subjects because of some intellectual spark of his own." The required courses are something else again. Of 26 pupils in a tenth-grade English class, for instance, three might be outstanding students, 13 might range from "medium to poor." five may be "very poor," and five may be "incapable of doing anything that could properly be labeled tenth-grade English. They do not write a sentence; they do not know or care about capitals at the beginning or periods at the end . . . Their attitude towards school will vary from total passivity to active protest."

In spite of all a teacher might do, these students set the tone of the class. Yet "they cannot be invited to leave school: the school will not permit it, the community would not approve, and the parents would strenuously object." As a result, educators have tended to turn their courses into entertainments in the vain effort to make learning seem as much fun as dancing or basketball. When that fails, they add more and more practical courses. But chances are, says Green, that if a student gets an F in English he will also get an F in shop. "If students raise Cain in algebra, they break tools and bore holes in workbenches and cut off fingers." As for the much touted "valuable social experience" a pupil gets in school, "the values which are inculcated turn out to be largely these: a firm conviction that one can get by without working; an idea that quality of workmanship is of slight importance; a confirmed habit of disregarding instructions: a systematically cultivated indolence."

Primary Purpose. The school, says Green, should at last recognize that its primary purpose is academic, and that practical and social skills can be learned elsewhere. Every pupil needs and should get as much academic training as possible, but if he refuses to learn, he should not be allowed "to interfere with . . . those who want it . . . When any individual reaches the stage of interfering with the good workmanship of others, he should be withdrawn from school . . . A school should not be diverted from great constructive ends to picayune, sentimental, and retrogressive side issues; it should not sacrifice a major quality of civilization to an unrealistic concern for an unfortunate group which, although a real social problem, is not an educational one."

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