PUBLIC SCHOOLS, 1950
Burrell, David M.
Public Schools, 1950 AND MADLY TEACH, by Mortimer Smith. Henry Regnery Co, 107 pp. $2. Reviewed by David M. Burrell THIS IS the account of one man who served on a public school board and lived to...
...Social science is naively criticized because it is not "an exact and eternal truth...
...And it was Locke, not the good Saint, who provided the philosophical background for Mr...
...A child not torn by unconscious resentment and understandable aggressiveness against the inanities of adult control might well accept monogamy and the convention of the necktie more gracefully than Mr...
...Thomism was adequate to Aristotle and 13th Century science, but the whole Galilean-Newtonian revolution separates us from that period...
...At this point one wonders what the author wants for a nickel...
...Much as I disagree with most of this book, I commend it to you: if more people would get firsthand experience and write about it, we might break the death grip of the so-called educators...
...Likewise indicative of the author's either-or mentality is his fear that one can decide nothing unless the conclusion is first reached that it is absolutely good and the alternatives absolutely bad—a primitive word magic...
...Smith's free souls immersed in the metaphysics he loves so well and, withal, stand a lot better chance of understanding and getting along with someone brought up in a different culture...
...And, while fearing that the schools may teach official political doctrine, the author insists that they should teach his doctrine of morality with emphasis on Right and Wrong...
...Wanted: a few hundred Porter Sargents for the public school system...
...Completely beyond the comprehension of the author is the possibility that his moral law might be local and temporal and that it can be taught as a force or problem to be met without making it another spook...
...Completely within the author's grasp, however, is the colossal nonsense and political astuteness inherent in the greedy little beady-eyed educator who belongs to a union so tight that John L. Lewis looks like a cub scout leader by comparison...
...John Locke was adequate to Newton's science, and the author now and then accepts him...
...In strange contrast to this Lockian theory of the individual as an independent mental substance, we find a lament that there are no "ulti-mates or any timeless human values" in Progressive Education...
...Smith's conviction that the best society is one in which we find "an atmosphere of freedom—that is, when individuals feel they can think, investigate, and act, free of all arbitrary pressures...
...But not knowingly will he swallow the last revolution and the best thought that modern science can give us...
...The confused result is what one would expect from one who understands neither the roots of his own philosophy nor that every successful philosophy is only temporary and depends for its success on being adequate to the science of its day...
...This dichotomy characterizes Smith's approach to culture: The child either runs wild or is given the moral law in no uncertain terms...
...Elsewhere we find that ProdJtiF have Education is to be praised for its insistence that the child is im-portant "here and now...
...Not from Aquinas did the author get the idea that the schoolman's task "is to transmit to his charges an understanding of how humankind got this way...
...Worst of all, it seems a pity that the author should be so in love with the concept of Sin which has been the master spook through the ages and the principal method by which those in control—parents, teachers, politicians, preachers— have frustrated and enslaved a mankind worthy of a better fate...
...Problems 1950 will not be solved by conquest of the Heathen with missionary and gunpowder...
...The healthiest society is but a step removed from anarchy...
...Only out of that understanding and intelligence will come enjoyment of living, which is the real end of education...
...We can agree with the author in disliking the glorification of the state, but if he would dig into the problem a little deeper he would see that this is a religious phenomenon dependent on uncritical minds and anathema to modern science...
...Reviewed by David M. Burrell THIS IS the account of one man who served on a public school board and lived to tell the tale—a tale which includes some astute observations concerning the foibles of some schools of "Progressive Education," sound criticism of the educators as a class, and a potpourri of Albert Jay Nock's insistence that education is what he says it is plus a retreat into the Middle Ages under the banner of Saint Thomas, assisted by Jacques Maritain, Robert M. Hutchins, Mortimer Adler G Co...
Vol. 14 • April 1950 • No. 4
