SCHOOLS & SCHOLARS
McKiernan, Eoin
Schools & Scholars EXTENDING HORIZONS, by Porter Sargent. Porter Sargent, Boston. 190 pp. $2. TWO SIDES TO A TEACHERS DESK, by Max S. Marshall. Macmillan. 284 pp. $3. THE SCHOOL IN AMERICAN...
...As the title indicates, Marshall tries to examine teachers, teaching, and educational practices from the student's as well as from the teacher's side of the desk...
...213 pp...
...It is not a definite treatment of anything, but a sketchy sentence-outline-kind-of-thing on the present condition of society, how we got that way, and what the future looks like...
...Instead of turning out scholars devoted at all costs to the pursuit of truth, our schools are turning out Winslow Smiths who pervert and rewrite history and the sciences for profit, Sargent says, quoting examples of the distorting influence of foundations, government agencies, and the Armed Services...
...1.50...
...The result is a harsh, sometimes witty, sometimes brilliant pillorying of all of them...
...Reviewed by Eoin McKiernan THAT day is lost in America, Dr...
...Controlling the schools has always been a dominant feature of totalitarianism...
...One learns how the teacher, principal, superintendent, and child share in the curriculum...
...Mead's book is the printed 1950 Inglis lecture (Harvard) and as such will be of interest to educators and serious students of education...
...2.75...
...Yauch explains in lay language the changes in educational theory over the past 25 years...
...Yauch's book, the one most likely to have the widest circulation, should stand high on every parent's reading list...
...That the schools are delinquent in this respect is the contention of Porter Sargent, epispastic critic of education...
...Some of Sargent's sting is continued in Marshall's book, Two Sides To A Teacher's Desk, though the emphasis here is on the teacher's personality shortcomings...
...With Margaret Mead's emphasis on the need for good teachers and good teaching, Wilbur Yauch in How Good Is Your School...
...In her study of the teacher within changing society, she underscores Sargent's demand that teachers fully utilize the newer social concepts brought to us by anthropologists...
...Our schools at present hardly justify the longstanding pride of Americans," he says, and elsewhere quotes with approval Canon Bell's: "Ours is the century of the uneducated . . . perpetually adolescent Common Man . . . unskilled in the art of living . . . The blame rests on the schoolmasters...
...Always seeking the cooperation of parents, Prof...
...Marshall's thesis is that teachers do not sufficiently individualize their teaching, being content to engage in a mass production effort that must fail simply because no two students are alike...
...The perpetual hand of suspicion held over students by teachers is one of education's most demoralizing influences . . . Students know that teachers do not know all, but many teachers feel that they must be omniscient . . . Students come to school expecting truth and education and they get dogma . . ." Margaret Mead's brief book, The School in American Culture, is deeply concerned with the kind of teacher we need for our schools...
...To achieve that end he starts with the admission that "good schools cost money, lots of it" but he is "confident that the people will willingly vote money for schools they understand and believe in...
...He then offers an itemized checklist of what the parents may reasonably expect from the good school...
...If you feel that the school is failing to give your child the best, now is the time to ask embarrassing questions...
...It is difficult, too, to say for whom it is intended: it's too superficial for the teacher, too flippantly distorted for the layman...
...He also takes the reader on a tour of an ideal elementary school with a day spent in a model first grade and another in a model sixth grade...
...Conant of Harvard reminds us, when one educational philosophy becomes uniform and compulsory...
...II These four books supplement one another quite well but each has its special appeal and its own limitations...
...The increasing concern of Americans with their educational system is, therefore, a hopeful sign that our schools shall remain free instruments of society...
...is in complete agreement...
...THE SCHOOL IN AMERICAN CULTURE, by Margaret Mead...
...48 pp...
...by Wilbur A. Yauch...
...Harvard University Press...
...Marshall's book tends too much toward the quippy statement and the erecting of straw men to knock down...
...He urges parents to demand "that they get something for their money...
...Written as a parent primer, it is propaganda for a point of view but nonetheless valuable for its hearty invitation to laymen to learn more of the school and its ways, to learn, too, something of that professional jargon which teachers are often unable to translate in their contacts with parents...
...But before you ask them," he cautions, "be sure that they will not be embarrassing to you...
...Harper & Brothers...
...Unless some "whole new institution of in-service training" can make this information available to teachers, she says, the teacher will fail to keep pace with a changing society, will become "stunted and distorted, between herself and her pupils, which is not a gap of chronological age but a gap of difference in period...
...HOW GOOD IS YOUR SCHOOL...
...Don't be satisfied with a job half well done...
...Sargent's book requires considerable background to interpret...
...Comparing the modern American teacher with three different models used by more static societies for the training and rearing of their young, Margaret Mead concludes that the teacher in our constantly evolving society must somehow reach a "synthesis" combining "respect and love for the traditional with a willingness to open new doors and send children forth on uncharted seas...
Vol. 15 • October 1951 • No. 10
