Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS Are Our Schools Doing Their Job? By William Henry Chamberlin The extent and vehemence of current discussion indicate that something is wrong with the state of American...
...These are: (1) Today's schools are not as good as those of the past...
...By William Henry Chamberlin The extent and vehemence of current discussion indicate that something is wrong with the state of American education...
...high schools offer physics, while the proportion of students who take it when it is available has dropped from 22 per cent in 1895 to 5.5 per cent in 1948...
...Was there any parallel then for the mass vandalism that apparently goes unpunished and is regarded as good clean fun in some crowded urban areas today...
...If some indictments of our public schools overshoot the mark, so do some statements by their defenders...
...She is not completely growth-oriented, but her adaptability shows signs of interrelating...
...2) private schools are always better than public schools...
...The groans of the young instructors in colleges who have to mark the papers of incoming freshmen from public high schools tell an unmistakable story of lax preparation in fundamentals of study and self-expression...
...This is particularly disturbing at a time when Soviet schools are turning out large numbers of well-trained engineers and technicians...
...A weird hodgepodge of vocational subjects which should be taught in special trade schools but have no place in a system of general education...
...Along with this goes a good deal of fussing about the "psychological adjustment" of pupils, of which Newsweek recently offered the following precious example: "Mary is doing somewhat better with her peer group...
...My preparatory-school work was divided equally between the Camden-High School and the Penn Charter School of Philadelphia...
...But if these are not to be nullified by qualitative weaknesses and failures, it is high time for our professional educationists to explore methods by which more gifted students in our high schools can be safeguarded against the downward pull of the mediocre and downright unfit and given courses of study serious enough to bring out their full capacities...
...3) European schools are superior to those in America...
...As to point (1), was any book like The Blackboard Jungle ever written about our schools in the early years of the century...
...What has taken the place of the tough mind-building courses in the classics and natural sciences...
...American education has achieved tremendous quantitative gains in the last half century...
...There has been an almost equally marked decline in the teaching of natural sciences and in the proportion of students who take these courses when they are offered...
...As to point (2), of course it would be foolish to say that private schools are "always" better than public schools...
...The high-school-age son of an American journalist in Berlin before the war told mo after returning from America that the requirements in our high schools were like a holiday after the stern drill of a German Gymnasium...
...On point (3), personal experience again would not lead me to the conclusion that European schools are inferior to American...
...The director of the school said she was caught in a constant crossfire of criticism from American parents who found the school too hard and French parents who insisted it was too easy...
...Teaching of modern languages is so perfunctory and inadequate, as a rule, that it is virtually a waste of time...
...When my daughter, then 12 years old, entered a French-American school in Paris, she found the going cruelly hard after four years in an American-type school in Tokyo...
...The Camden High School (and this was more than forty years ago) taught a large hodgepodge of subjects superficially and badly...
...Equally suggestive of deterioration is the marked decline in those courses which offer basic mental discipline...
...There is, I think, abundant evidence that American primary and high schools are not doing the best possible job even with existing resources...
...For instance, Dean Ernest 0. Melby of the New York University School of Education, in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine, brushes aside as "fallacies" three statements which I would regard as substantially true...
...How many public high schools now give courses in Latin and Greek...
...But if "usually" were substituted for "always" I think the statement would stand...
...Her motivations seem joyful, but her adjustment to environment gives some doubt as to her readiness for proximate life experimentation...
...The problem goes deeper than the material defects —shortage of school buildings and trained teachers, inadequate teachers' salaries—which could be cured by larger state or Federal appropriations...
...General Maxwell D. Taylor, Army Chief of Staff and a keen student of education during his term as Superintendent of West Point, is authority for the statement that less than half of U.S...
...While gibberish like this is fashionable, the Marys and Johnnys are not being taught such prosaic things as how to read and write and spell and cipher...
...The Penn Charter School taught a few basic subjects thoroughly and well...
Vol. 39 • August 1956 • No. 34
