Education: Religiosity & Palaver

• Share

In his 69 years. Historian J. Frank Dobie, onetime "Professor Pancho" of the University of Texas, has sounded off on everything from the writing of Ph.D. theses ("transferring bones from one graveyard to another") to a onetime U. of T. president ("a flunky of the Laval pattern"). Last week he was off again when a reporter from the Houston Post asked him to say a few words about U.S. education.

"For a long generation now." Dobie began, "the professional educators in America have been holding school without much respect for cultivated mind.' All the public school superintendents and a great many college presidents hold degrees in education spelled with a capital E. They are johnny-on-the-spot wilh Rotary Club optimism, football teamwork. Dedication-to-America Week, and such as that: but many of them don't know [a thing] when it comes to a real teacher of English, history, geology or any other branch of knowledge. Despite their degrees and positions, they are puerile-minded. Nearly all of them are stuffed with religiosity—which is not religion.

"If the universities and colleges that are always crying for more money cut out 85% of the education courses and 98% of the journalism courses, they would save an enormous amount of money and at the same time advance knowledge. Of course, howls going up would make the mountaintops rock. The superfluous always howl when their milk is cut off. For the academic year of 1957-58, the education department of the University of Texas lists 351 courses. They are all to make teachers more banal-minded. God pity your pupils; don't blame them for not being educated. What a teacher needs, aside from having sense and character, is basic knowledge in history, science, languages, literature, the fundamentals. All a would-be teacher gets out of education is palaver."