Education: Growth Toward What?

• Share

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.