The Big Kindergarten

"The American school system, from first grade through college [has become] a huge kindergarten." So last week declared self-exiled Schoolmaster Philip Marson. who quit famed Boston Latin School last June after teaching English there for 31 years. Marson's reason for walking out: "I could then say what had to be said without gloves."

Marson's bare-knuckled attack on U.S. education made the front page of the

Boston Globe. "I watched, with increasing alarm, the lack of fundamental information possessed by the pupils who entered the high school, and the disappearance of standards demanded of them by the colleges when they were ready to leave. The elementary schools, by misapplication of the theories of Dewey and Freud, had eliminated unpleasant work and had substituted play . . . The colleges had so diluted their entrance requirements that they ceased to function as incentives to scholarship."

Those Who Only Breathe? "In terms of numbers and competition," Marson later admitted, "it is, of course, now harder to get into college. But this is a relative thing. Scholarship requirements are much more lax now than they were 20 years ago. In fact, admission criteria have nothing to do with scholarship. They are based on tests that do not test scholarship. In the state universities, it's even worse. All you have to do in most of them is to breathe to gain admission."

By entrance exams that dodge scholarship. Schoolman Marson means "objective" tests that ignore the classics and seldom require an applicant to write a complete sentence. Says he: "The experts may come up with figures which say that the students are better scholars now than they were. But I don't believe them. These figures are based on percentiles--on the student's relative standing."

Is Education Fun? In his generation at Boston Latin, a public high school that has been one of the most respected secondary schools in the U.S., Marson always practiced what he now preaches. His boys knew precisely what they would get from their round-faced, jovial schoolmaster: hard work and solid teaching in the fundamentals of composition and literature. Marson scoffed at curve-grading (the clod-coddling marking system that is based on the class average), insisted that his boys measure up to definite levels. One bright boy who measured up: Composer Leonard Bernstein, who still talks of Marson's lectures on English poetry. Says a Boston Latin colleague of Marson: "Phil never pretended education was fun or that there was any substitute for hard work. He was the ideal secondary-school teacher."

At 65, Self-Exile Marson is finding plenty to do away from his classroom. He is writing a book and a pamphlet expanding his attacks on the nation's schools. This summer, as he has for the past three decades, Marson will run his boys' camp in New Hampshire. But next fall, his critique of American education squarely on the record. Schoolmaster Marson hopes to be back in a classroom giving his fact-packed lectures on Shakespeare and syntax that so well prepared his Boston Latin boys for college.

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