Dear Editor

...In geography I learned the name of every state, its capital and principal cities, and every state or body of water which bounded it...

...There are limiting factors in what we are willing to try to accomplish...

...Your authors avoid jumping on the bandwagon of current fads and similarly avoid a blanket condemnation of all existing programs and personnel...

...Perhaps Miss Bell could use a refresher course from Miss Thistlebottom to spare her future readers from participles dangling over Bottomless Canyon...

...This means that art and music and history and social studies programs must be available...

...Reston, Va...

...Theodore M. Jones Deputy Director, Office of Program Development, Office of Economic Opportunity I particularly liked the articles by Nathan Glazer and Oscar Handlin in your special issue on education, but my overall impression was that not since before the time of Horace Mann have we been so confused, as a nation, about what we want from the schools...

...If someone were to develop a design for schoolhouses that would in and of itself guarantee excellence in education, we would not be willing to tear down the obsolete school-houses we now have and invest the billions of dollars needed to build new ones...

...Even more so, because his statement of concern for their welfare—acknowledging that "their earning power frequently locks them into marriages that are degrading to their individuality"—might lull women into accepting his curriculum for them...

...We have not achieved a universal or unanimous answer to any of our societal problems...

...One necessary ingredient is a much greater emphasis upon "guidance" than we have provided...

...Across the country there are many, many writers and editors who would never, never split an infinitive, end a sentence with a preposition or use "over" rather than "more than...

...A supercilious purist or self-congratulatory snob of a copy editor could red-pencil many passages in the article for precisely the sort of semantic woolliness that so bothers Mrs...

...The future of some children lies in the intellectual area, and offerings and facilities should be available that will enable them to develop their skills in line with their interests...

...The salable skills Pitts proposes for female students are by and large those with low in-tome and low status (don't think I haven't understood the point of teaching manual skills), and will do nothing to free women from the degrading dependency Pitts believes exists...

...Jordv Bell Insurance Berating I can't help commenting on Calvin Trillin's review of Tony Hillerman's The Fly on the Wall (NL, December 13) because it is so atypical of your usual standards...

...Washington, D.C...

...But he spends the rest of his turn at bat hitting foul????not Fowler????balls...

...Today, in a new phase, the kind of instruction my children received not long ago is fiercely assailed as repressive and archaic by nostrum-obsessed zealots whose successor schools would reject both roots and intellectual rigor...

...This relatively stable knowledge and—perhaps more important????early study habits have remained with me...

...Increasingly we are aware that nonschool factors play a dominant role in the educational process...

...nursing, group child-care (qualifying her to direct a day-care center), laboratory analysis, dressmaking, cosmetology, and of course typing...

...It does call for a reshuffling of emphases and a wiser use of the facilities already at hand...

...By the same token, our facilities in so-called vocational education should be available to those whose future will be in more manual fields of work...

...Many passages" is insinuation, not argument...

...My own reflections on the aims and means of education began in 1928, when a book editor incongruously selected me to represent the student generation, alongside John Dewey, George A. Coe and other leading educators of the time, with an essay in a long-forgotten volume entitled Am 1 Getting an Education...

...When will history books begin to call Martha Washington the "mother of our country...

...Secondly, as one involved in the company end of the insurance business I was appalled by Trillin's offhand implication of the companies' dishonest practice and collusion with the Louisiana Insurance Commission...

...My eldest child attended esteemed private schools in London, Geneva and Paris (one was a Pestalozzi school...

...Brooklyn, N.Y...

...The facts he presents seem to be gleaned from a careful examination of Drew Pearson's columns on the subject...

...Even with the 50 per cent increase (applicable only to wind coverage and only at the beach areas), my company did not feel it could afford the risk of another Camille and has withdrawn from this region entirely...

...Shapiro has a sharp eye????that participle does indeed dangle and i will spend the next hour writing mea culpa on the blackboard 500 times...

...Perhaps this must be so...

...While this does not excuse the school from making its maximum contribution, it does mean that there is no single, uniform answer to the question...

...I assume Trillin is old enough to understand that a man whose house has washed into the Gulf and is offered a settlement based on what the wind did to similar houses not so beautifully situated may be less than objective when describing his feelings about insurance companies...

...in arithmetic, to add and subtract in two columns of digits simultaneously...

...Bell, but why quibble...

...New York Ci.y Theodore M. Bernstein Consulting Editor, New York "Times" The American language is in a bad way indeed...

...New York City Max J. Rubin Member, N.Y, State Board of Regents You have posed the critical question and your contributors have succeeded in examining its social dynamics, but not in answering it...

...She believes that Miss Thistlebottom's "iron pedantry is as dead as Palmer penmanship.1' To put it bluntly, she simply doesn't know what she is talking about????or, as many copy editors would insist on saying, about what she is talking...

...when I read the dissection of a passage from the Village Voice...

...I hope this piece was just a mistake on everyone's part, since I respect your magazine and I am sure that Trillin writes to a high standard for the New Yorker...

...First of all, the piece reads like something from the New York Times Book Review...

...I make no claim that my education was better...

...But the teacher should be able to recognize the child's interests and encourage their development, as well as to expose the child to other areas of learning so that the ultimate emphasis is a sound one...

...But when she mentions my opus, Miss Thistle-bottom's Hobgoblins, she is myopic...

...Why must we specify a female accomplice in order to accuse Che of "fathering" insurrection...

...in history, the name of every President, his term of office, and one or more events while he served...

...Meanwhile, my skepticism grew as I observed new myths in the making...

...The pupil must also be given options to be exercised as his interests dictate...

...only that I benefited from it...

...We hope that subsequent issues will focus on some solutions to the enormous problems of contemporary education...

...We have not even found a clear consensus...

...It is not the responsibility of the teacher to determine the future of the child...

...Indeed, reading 'Politics and the English Language' in the 1970s, one of his remarks seems uncannily appropriate to this moment...

...Every child who is not mentally or emotionally handicapped is capable of learning these skills, without which we cannot expect them to develop into constructive and productive human beings...

...This ability can be gained through intensive in-service training...

...Emphasis mine...

...New York City Milton J. Gold Dean of Programs in Education, Hunter College You have rendered a valuable service in your special issue, "What Are We Trying To Teach Our Children...

...Nor are the romantic notions of the counterculture likely to diminish alienation and social maladjustment among the young, particularly those from disadvantaged homes...

...We cannot dismiss or ignore what he calls the "old verities...

...On the very day I read the Bell article, I received a letter from a West Virginia editor who was slightly horrified because I had begun a sentence with "but...

...I suppose there will be as many answers to the question you have posed as there are readers...

...J.B.] How Pitts can reconcile this list with what he regards as his sympathies to the problems women face in earning a living, only he could possibly explain...

...Staten Island, N.Y, Arthur M. Shapiro Pearl K. Bell replies: If, as Mr...

...Classroom instruction, then, should vary depending upon the nature of those external influences on the individual child or school...

...Those may have more value as ego trips for their writers than as viable bases for educational improvement...

...it won't do much for women...

...Lancaster, Pa...

...Stanley E. Honig Bell With the general thesis of Pearl K. Bell's article on "Creeping Gobbledygook" (NL, December 13), I could hardly agree more...

...Bell is elected to the Acadetnie Francaise...

...What emerges clearly is that we are unclear in our answers...

...That is, at least half of it is taken up with the reviewer describing something he has done and what a swell and clever fellow he is????which ends up sounding like a college freshman bragging about all the girls he has laid, and is just as interesting...

...It is fantasy to predicate a solution upon the premise that the overwhelming majority of teachers are exceptionally qualified and totally dedicated...

...His college may liberate the arts...

...Persuasive as Ivan Illich may be on an academic plane, disestablishment of the school is no solution to the problems of our time, which require ever higher levels of preparation and technical performance...

...Yet, heretical as it must be to the whole quarreling priesthood of education, I 'have come to the sober conclusion that in language and mathematical skills and in awareness of their heritage and the world they would enter, my children received learning opportunities which, if better than mine, were no more than slightly so...

...It seems all too often that educators await a Utopian solution rather than implementing programs they know to be better...

...We could not have made up our loss in more than 20 years...

...This does not call for a major investment...

...We need rational discussion on the level of this special issue rather than the hysteria and gaudy emotionalism reflected in recent "best sellers...

...With the contemporary deterioration of so many institutions????the family, the church, the judicial and penal system????the necessity is to strengthen the one institution that should be reaching all young people, the schools...

...My company and damned near every other one operating on the Gulf Coast suffered staggering losses from "Camille" and, like most other companies, paid tens of thousands of dollars for claims not covered under the contracts????specifically, both wave wash and high water...

...Paul R. Porter I am very unhappy at the prospect of how women will fare at Jesse R. Pitts' College of Liberating Arts...

...Dead as Palmer penmanship indeed...

...Other courses such as the arts, history, geography, and social studies must be subordinated to the requirement that every child possess the basic skills...

...They are also skills which tradition has hallowed as inherently "feminine...

...The list is very instructive on what roles women seem to be meant to fill...

...Perhaps someday this will become unwarranted pessimism, but certainly it is the fact of life today and for the foreseeable future...

...But New-speak isn't the only form of linguicide????the traditional forms, such as sloppy writing and fuzzy thinking, remain with us...

...One tentative conclusion our office reached is that many innovative programs such as Head Start, Head Start Follow-Through, Upward Bound, and others now being operated as demonstration or special compensatory projects could be institutionalized...

...The mandated learning should be addressed to the basic skills: reading, arithmetic and communication ????written and oral...

...Bernstein claims, Miss Thistle-bottom's pedantic acolytes are busy writing and editing across the country, their influence must be confined to local newspapers that I do not read...

...As Pearl K. Bell points out, it is losing good, meaningful words before the onslaught of jargon, cult words, and cant...

...In later involvement with complex matters as a negotiator, administrator or adviser I found it helpful to begin by committing a large number of essential facts to memory...

...If we look for a common denominator, Nathan Glazer's comments about the relationship between our system of education and work must be given very serious consideration...

...It is equally futile to come up with an answer that is dependent upon the use of facilities we will not pay for...

...I was a bit confused (or perhaps oblivious to the constraints of meaning...

...Still...

...my younger children were products of one of the nation's most celebrated public school systems...

...Perhaps after Mrs...

...Without the increase no company could have remained, and frankly I think those that did were foolish...

...Educational practice was radically different in the elementary schools my children attended...

...Moreover, Trillin's implication that insurance agents and insurance companies have identical interests further attests to his limited knowledge of the business...

...Later I was an elected school board member (as a Socialist) in a working-class city, did my stint in the PTA, and supported every school bond proposal submitted lo my vote...

...But it is good that we are concerned about the problems confronting us as we grope for answers that may well vary from community to community, from school to school, and from child to child...

...I received my elementary education in a one-room rural school by a method that is now scorned...

...I was talking about muddled imagery, not parenthood...

...One approach I have heard discussed in recent days would be something like this: At least at the elementary and secondary levels, the curriculum should be divided into two parts, mandated and optional...

...We live in different worlds...

...In attempting an answer, we must take into account the capacity of our educational institutions...

...What the New York State Department of Education really seeks is a common denominator...

...We also know from records of their Jives that their schooling inspired them with a devotion to the nation shaped by the heritage they came to know, and provided them with the resources to continue their learning...

...As for the excerpt from the Village Voice: He has missed the point...

...I was drilled (the right word) in vocabulary, spelling, sentence const met ion, arithmetic, geography, and American history...

...To all of us who value our schools enough to be contentious about them, it may be useful to ponder now and then that Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman were among the least schooled and best educated American Presidents...

...Teachers are ordinary people, like the rest of us...

...It is to be hoped, as Jesse R. Pitts' article suggests, that our society will abolish or lessen the class distinction between manual and intellectual labor...