Do Our Schools Breed Mediocrity?:
FERGUSON, DELANCEY
WRITERS and WRITING Do Our Schools Breed Mediocrity? The Age of Conformity. By Alan Valentine. Regnery. 170 pp. $3.00. The Diminished Mind. By Mortimer Smith. Regnery. 150 pp. $2.75. Reviewed by...
...The educators themselves may be able to spell, or to hire secretaries to do it for them, but they cannot write...
...College candidates for teacher-training must devote a full quarter of their undergraduate program—thirty hours—to "education" courses...
...Many present instructors are neither advocates nor examples of humane culture...
...Of these thirty hours, perhaps nine are really essential...
...Smith's is limited to our public education...
...A reiterated view of the professional is that, since not more than 40 per cent of high-school students go to college, the high-school curriculum should be aimed at "life adjustment" for the 60 per cent...
...Our schools] are largely in the hands of the culturally limited, the intellectually second-rate...
...Smith gives some gruesome examples of what that mass level would be if some of the extremists had their way...
...Few of them can compose as much as three consecutive sentences in crisp, idiomatic English...
...Valentine's indictment includes all phases of American life...
...These educators, however, admit that progress toward such goals is slowed by the misguided opposition of parents who still think that their children should be able to read, and of employers who still want their clerks to be able to spell...
...If she wants advancement, she must take "refresher" courses—always in methods, never in her subject-matter...
...they have trained and controlled the principals who do the hiring...
...Their catalogues state in effect: 'If you are going to be educated while in college, you must do this, and this, and this...
...They control the boards which certify teachers...
...As one widely circulated textbook puts it, "the school of tomorrow must accept the fact that general education in a democracy must be for the masses...
...On that subject, the two see so nearly eye to eye that Smith could have used some of Valentine's sentences as chapter-mottos...
...If Mark Hopkins, Horace Mann and William Graham Sumner were to return and seek employment as teachers, they would be rejected...
...Part of the curriculum of a Maryland high school is devoted to group discussions on such abstruse problems as successful dating...
...A less extreme, but more influential, theorist—Harl R. Douglass of the University of Colorado—appears to agree with the people who hold that foreign languages and mathematics, if they are taught at all, should be deferred until college...
...Reviewed by DeLancey Ferguson Former Chairman, Department of English, Brooklyn College THE AUTHORS of these two books are deeply concerned with what Brooks Adams called the degradation of the democratic dogma...
...But the stranglehold is real...
...There are reputable colleges which have established the requirements for their AB degree at a high level, but which make a specific exception of the teacher-in-training...
...The brighter the student, the harder she (or he) finds it to endure the teacher-training routine...
...her principal and supervisor will see that she doesn't...
...A principal of a junior high school has openly advocated abandoning the effort to teach all children to read and write...
...Since, in too many American communities, the teacher has always been a second-class citizen, it is little wonder that fewer and fewer of the best students look forward to teaching as a career...
...And they would know too much about their subjects...
...For instance: "Schoolmen have concentrated so heavily on one essential of democracy —equal opportunity for all—that they have neglected the second essential—exceptional opportunity and recognition for the exceptional...
...In other words, since the 40 per cent who go to college will furnish most of tomorrow's leaders, we must make every effort to reduce their minds and training to the mass level...
...The charges which Valentine makes in these general terms are built up in detail in The Diminished Mind, largely by citations from the educators themselves...
...Harold L. Clapp of Grinnell College was blunt about it: "The appalling fact is that our most poorly educated college graduates are our teachers...
...If you are going to teach instead, less is expected of you.'" If the candidate wishes to teach in the public schools, there is no escaping the educators...
...Part of their stranglehold on the American school system is due, in fact, to their writing so dully that nobody outside the racket can read their stuff, so that the public at large is unaware of what is going on in the realm of educational theory...
...When she gets a job, she will not be encouraged to try her own ideas in the classroom...
...They would lack training in "methods...
Vol. 37 • November 1954 • No. 44
