Parents

From the back of the hall, at one of those meetings of parents where nothing new is said, a figure rises, strides forward and speaks his piece with fluent impudence. Its net: the schools are in a mess, and the professional educators are in a dead-heat disagreement about why, and they are too entrenched for their judgment to be trusted anyway; public schools ought to be run as the public wants, and it is long past time the parents took over and did something about it.

This irreverent proposal is the meat of a new book called Schools Without Scholars (Houghton Mimin; $3) by John Keats, free-lance writer and rebellious parent (of three) who has spent two years studying schools, lists as his only other qualification the note that he owns a typewriter. Keats's notion is that if the public wants better education, it should form "citizens' grand juries"--school boards frequently are too secretive and P.T.A.s too social to be useful--to make calm and exhaustive investigations of local schools. Then suggestions should be made and enforced.

Discipline or Driver Training? The question such a Keatsian grand jury should ask itself: Does it want the oldfashioned, facts-and-mental-discipline sort of education, or does it want life adjustment, "to make children unselfish and interested in others"? Keats is for facts and discipline first. Throughout the book he scores against the life adjusters, who do not believe that mastery of a subject is very important, who give "open-book tests" in basic courses and proudly call their high schools "cafeterias of learning," who offer such dessert courses as "sewing, cooking, interior decorating, teaching, garage repair, driver training, dress design, fashion modeling, home budgeting and marketing, gardening, farming, carpentry, electrical'repair, machine tooling, mechanical drawing, first aid, chorus, tap. ballroom and square dancing, fly casting and how to conduct oneself on a date."

Keats asks and answers other searching questions: "Do we want the school to be a doctor's office, workshop, church, psychiatrist's couch, family counseling service, athletic association and brain-trainery all rolled into one? Are there no other public agencies in our town that might not minister to some of those needs? Do not ask whether a home economics course is necessary, but rather ask this: Is ours the kind of society where the girls best learn from their mothers? Must we ask the school to offer courses in driver training, or could the same end be accomplished simply by asking the local constables to be more choosy in the granting of drivers' licenses? What, exactly, is our school's job? Is it not to meet only those educational needs which cannot be as well or better met somewhere else?"

"Ask Us First." Keats's book is full of prickly opinions, sure to produce uproar and perhaps even thoughtful debate; e.g., football costs too much, physically educates the boys who need it least; school administrators should run things only from day to day, and "ask us first" if they want to make changes.

But the opinion that should be debated the most thoughtfully is Keats's basic premise: that in education the customers are always right--or at least have the right to get exactly what they ask for. He cites New Canaan, Conn, as a community in which the grand-jury system' worked well, produced better schools and better scholars. But in Houston recently, a band of diehard lady patriots called Minute Women succeeded in browbeating a publisher into reprinting an eighth-grade geography and omitting references to the U.N. Under Keats's grand-jury rules, they were as justified as the New Canaanites, and so, he admits, were the Tennesseans who passed the law that still makes illegal the teaching of evolution in the state. If Americans are unable to swallow the idea of a single national curriculum--and most Americans cannot--there are two alternatives: trust the professional educators, many of whom happen now to be life adjusters; or follow Keats's uneasy conclusion: There is nothing to do except "be careful not to move to Tennessee, and try not to make too many mistakes ourselves."

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