DELINQUENT PARENTS

...In school after school," the Reader's Digest reports, "she was startled by the titles of textbooks: Having Fun with Grammar, Adventures in Arithmetic, Spelling Made Easy, Peppi?ig Up Punctuation . . . She believed that American educational experts had made the error of equating interest with entertainment, and had thus gravely underestimated the brains and ambition of the American child...

...It means that colleges will be freed of the drill session, and the "liberal" and "high" of liberal and higher education will signify more than slogans...

...The remedy is to bring knowledge in assimilable form—it took a genius to pictorialize a molecular structure, but any child of ten can comprehend a picture of knobs held together by lines—within the reach of young children...

...Needs of schools have been publicized in a single form: the need for schools...

...not graduate schools piled on graduate schools, turning out a race of hypertrophic brains in science-fiction craniums, but the knowledge of our time served to those who need it when they can absorb it best...

...From above, the assignment of skills undreamed of a generation ago, that must be implanted...

...The folklore must be re-charged, by design...

...As for understanding, it is theoretically impossible for a two-year-old to be learning a language, yet learn it he does, for he is ready to learn— the way a two-year-old learns...

...There are risks, but unless we face them we shall gradually fall behind the rest of the world...

...There will be plenty of opposition...

...By the age of six, every normal child has mastered the chief patterns of his language...

...Almost as many nigh-school graduates now go on to college as do not...

...Education for everyone is a revolutionary concept that we have brought close to reality...

...Some educationists will object that the proposal overlooks the successive periods of a child's readiness to learn...

...When we are willing to learn with them, the learning that children do at home will remain a family affair, and control will stay where it belongs, with the parents...

...It is a need that cannot be met fast enough...

...No conscientious parent will be happy with this verdict, but there is not much he can do about it...

...Here is the pinch that educators feel today...

...To train a college teacher requires a doctor's DWIGHT t. BOtlNGER, chairman of the Department of Spanish and Italian at the University of Southern California, has taught at every level of American education—elementary school, secondary school, junior college, liberal arts college, university, and graduate school...

...degree, two or three years more, with the prospect, after he has earned it, of commanding a salary less than that of his students who go directly into business or industry...

...And what a tidel In 1935, American mothers were turning out new consumers at the rate of fewer than two and a half million a year...

...To put all our energies into augmenting the content of college courses is molding clay that has begun to harden...

...Try as we may, we can never acquire by working with a second language the precision that we acquired by playing with our first...

...The evils are evils of omission...

...If he learns one from his father and another from his mother, the difference becomes simply one more of the distinctions he must make between the male and the female parent...

...Educators have noted that for young children the dualism does not exist...

...But there is no way to prefabricate a teacher...

...The editor of the Ohio State Monthly writes that "with a doubling of Ohio State's enrollment by 1970, the 'spoon feeding of illiterates' will be a luxury we can no longer afford...

...Mother is likely to object to daughter's having to sacrifice many hours to homework...

...According to a prize-winning letter of the Mt...

...Our state universities may be required by law to accept the graduates of accredited high schools, but they are not required to keep them...

...Parents have compounded the educators' mistake by thinking of childhood as a circus and adulthood as a treadmill...

...Bilingualism is the best example because it is the one instance of multiple learning that happens often and under ordinary circumstances...

...Particularly very young parents— biologically best equipped to have children but culturally less so— should make a virtue of their immaturity by learning along with their children...

...What they see you do, they will want to do...

...Rachel Thomas came to this country from India to study our ways of making childhood learning attractive...

...As society grows more complex, there is more to learn...

...There are other ways of presenting written symbols...

...We want the best for our children, but fear it...

...If what I am saying sounds Utopian, remember that American education is Utopian right now...

...A child can thus double or triple his communicative range, without consciousnaw of "work...

...We cannot appreciate the intricacy of these patterns until we try to learn those of a foreign language...

...A proper training for a high-school teacher requires the equivalent of a master's degree—four years of college plus a year of special courses and practice teaching...

...More students are staying for advanced degrees...

...At Ohio State, two out of every three students enrolling in the fall of 1955 were deficient in mathematics, and had to take the remedial course (the figures for the College of Education—our future teachers!—were even worse: 82 per cent...

...Make sure of it by giving him what no money can buy— an attitude toward learning diat will carry him past all the barriers that overcrowded colleges may set up...

...they can re-tool, speed up, and sell more...

...The worst opposition is from ourselves...

...We make a big thing of this, and make nothing of language, because language is part of our folklore and musical composition is not...

...Like other simple remedies this one collides with some imagined difficulties...

...Reading both sides no more tells us that work should be made fun than that fun shoidd be made work...

...But the children's wants are a result of what they are given, and by contrast with what they are natively able to assimilate, what they now get is a pathetic fraud...

...A child who is unready to read print on a page is not necessarily unready to read...

...The industry they run cannot be automated...

...The makers of diapers, bathtubs, and toothpaste are delighted...

...I come now to two propositions and two proposals...

...The gap between our new knowledge and our folk knowledge must be closed if we are to save the day for education...

...Even if we could recruit, we could never train in time...

...In 1954 only a little more than half as many bachelor of arts and first professional degrees were granted as in 1950...

...We forget that new learners have no old fallacies to scrub off the slate...

...More are demanding to stay longer...

...Folklore is that great repository of the ways of the race from which every child draws...

...Most of you expect the schools to supply not only the learning but the interest in learning, forgetting that first attitudes are planted at home...

...How to do the job must be found by experiment...

...Proposition I: You as parents have been expecting the schools to shoulder responsibilities that belong to you...

...It is not that Johnny watching a murder on TV will want to commit murder, but that Johnny watching a murder on TV is wasting his time...

...His answer is to "regard some of today's children as non-educable on the college level...

...Playing tag is fun...

...Proposition II: Most parents and many educators have made a wrong assumption in the psychology of learning...

...Besides, the universities have what the U.S...

...They are radical, maybe visionary, but I am sure that to meet the crisis bearing down on us some radical thinking has become imperative...

...We have reached the point where our whole scheme of education has been pressed into a single continuum, in which there is no logical reason why the high-school senior and the college freshman should be more different from each other than the college freshman and sophomore—yet our thinking is still premised on the old division into three hermetic units, an elementary school for everybody, a high school for the qualified, and a college for the few...

...Proposal II: Our mistakes can be rectified by harnessing childhood's innocence of the difference between work and play...

...But the real torrent is coming for the colleges...

...But in our day the gap has been deliberately widened by organized science...

...As to our educators, listen to a critic from outside the system...

...He can lobby for laws to keep everyone in the classroom for four years, a senseless remedy...

...Dad encourages football practice at the expense of geometry...

...Do we infer an innate capacity for only a single language...

...They have come so fast that the bulk of our own learning of them has taken place fairly late in our lives, when they were "hard" to learn, and we have stigmatized them as hard and come to believe that they are really hard by nature and hence ought not to be taught to young children...

...From below, unhappily, the assignment that has been passed on from schools too overcrowded to do some of their tasks as well as they used to...

...2. The accumulation of assignments, pressing like a vise from above and below...

...Both parents typically encourage television-watching and regard good reading, particularly for entertainment, as at best 'odd.' Until the parents of our children are willing to treat learning as a career, no change in the institution can bring the educational process to the level that our nation deserves...

...We have been frightened by empty tales of the super-specialists that future society will demand...

...Proposal I: Give your child the interests that will help him in school by cultivating them in yourselves...

...As a result, half of the energies of your child's teacher must be spent in the "motivation" you fail to supply...

...To prove that they are in part imaginary, I draw on my experience as a linguistic scientist...

...You want that boy or girl of yours to have the best education that money can buy...

...Do it by example, by displaying that attitude yourself, by leading him—and most of all, by accompanying him in his great intellectual adventure...

...In 1955 they had raised this to more than four million...

...The question is not whether the savings account or the educational insurance policy that you laid aside for Junior will buy as much as it would buy today—it assuredly won't —but whether there will be a market in which to spend it...

...Young learners understand less about what they learn, but learn it more efficiently...

...Games are on one side, tasks on another, like a comic-tragic mask, and parents cannot free themselves to see that the mask was a hoax perpetrated on their childhood...

...Morris, Illinois, P.T.A., "the general orientation of parents of school children is unwittingly but strongly anti-intellectual...

...Television can reach the mind of the child almost as early as the parent can reach it...

...More pupils are mobbing the doors...

...They identify as fun the things you enjoyed as children, and attach absolute values to them...

...As for adults, they may be right...

...Under less ordinary circumstances, we find children with accomplishments that we attribute to "prodigy" or "genius," yet are of no greater magnitude than learning a second language...

...With our every act we impress our image...

...His only course is to re-assess his "thinking about education from top to bottom...

...It is the store of knowledge by which he learns to handle a spoon, blow his nose, tie a knot, dress himself, and, of course, talk...

...In 1956-57 it stands just under three million, six per cent more than a year ago and the fourth successive such increase...

...If we can, deliberately, contrive a childhood environment in which what now has to be worried at in the classroom will become as natural a part of everyday living as hide-and-seek or speaking one's native tongue, then formal education, which starts too late ever to be completely painless anyway, may be relieved of some of its burden...

...Our mass communications are practically all-enveloping...

...Reading one side of the coin, some have concluded that for work to be acceptable to children, it must be made fun...

...Helping Mother is fun—our children are eager to join in our lives and we cheat them when we refuse their clumsy efforts in our power workshops and our Youngs-town kitchens...

...The answer is that readiness affects not the content of what we learn so much as die way we learn it...

...Education is our largest industry and the one most pregnant with the future...

...We have had the children, and we must foot the bill, but it is one whose paying will bring rewards beyond imagination...

...We cannot save education by simply doing more of the things we have been doing all along—more schools, more teachers, more equipment, more administration...

...On the formal side it deserves an investment commensurate with its importance, and a society that annually spends more for guns than for schools will sooner or later need more guns than it can produce...

...But our folklore has dwindled in proportion to the total amount of learning that a child must compass...

...The trustees of the University of Illinois have decided to drop the remedial courses in English that have been in force for twenty years: "From now on, the students will either have to master college English courses from the start, or flunk...

...We can get the buildings...

...The educators are frightened to death...

...Some of you regard the elementary school as essentially a babysitting institution, a safe place to store your children while you and your spouse hold down full-time jobs...

...It will cost childhood nothing, for children are incurable romantics and will romanticize whatever they touch...

...It tells us simply that for very young children work is fun and fun is work...

...But we are lagging...

...No reform will do any good that fails to take into account that this division no longer exists, that America is committed to popular education all the way to the top, and that what is to help one part cannot be performed at the expense of another part but must be applied to education as a whole...

...We want them to have a better chance than we had, but resent their being too much unlike us...

...Meanwhile, there is no need for you as a parent to wait for the millennium...

...while the elementary schools (and to some extent the high schools) still enroll the same proportion of pupils as before and consequently have had to absorb only the increase in birth rate, the colleges, farther downstream, are in for a flood from two tributaries: 1. The increased popularity of higher education...

...If we really believe in education we can, with sympathy but with firm insistence, make mass communications the vehicle of those things which are as axiomatic in our culture as language—we can use them to teach reading and arithmetic before the age of six, to say nothing of implanting attitudes of tolerance, understanding of other ways and peoples, cooperation, and all the things that schools work so hard now to overlay on what often turns out to have been contrary attitudes learned previously...

...Fun comes in all sizes and shapes...

...2. College and university faculties are shrinking...

...Educational administrators are already building their defenses, and they bode ill for many parents' hopes...

...It is a carry-over from our puritanical dualism between work and fun...

...Any change invites it...

...and new and better-trained teachers, teaching in cellars and attics if necessary, are the real need...

...Briefly, my proposal is this: to engage in an Operation Bootstrap to supercharge the folklore and take advantage of early childhood's unlimited capacity to learn...

...Peter F. Drucker estimates that we are losing ten thousand a year through death, retirement, or resignation, and recruiting not more than six thousand—a deficit of four thousand annually at a time when the prospects of our needs are for an increase of a quarter of a million in the next twenty years...

...Our prejudices of race, our idiosyncrasies about food, our preconceptions of politics, become theirs...

...No, for if a child must use two in order to get along with relatives and playmates, he will learn two, and will be, as far as we can tell, equally fluent in both if he uses them equally and no social stigma attaches to either one...

...Time was when the folklore took care of itself...

...To let an outside agency modify our advantage arouses a resentment that we must control if we love our children...

...And the educators themselves, above all those who are, so to speak, the machine tools of the industry, who educate the educators, are survivors of the depression-impoverished generation of the Thirties...

...At the very time when the educational machinery is least able to cope with a normal load, it is charged with its heaviest load in history...

...But in addition the informally educative forces of our society must organize themselves to help the family bring the child's world to the level of the age in which he lives...

...and his feelings about other people (again we reformed the lore, ever so little, when we changed the second verse of Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo...

...It would be tragic if an expanding birth rate should destroy it or reduce it to half-education for everyone and education for none...

...The weapon is the report card...

...This affects both what is actually folkloric in the pre-school sense, and what is taught in school to very young children...

...The new things that we have learned, about mental hygiene, social relationships, and the nature of the universe, have been piled on at the top...

...The only catch is our willingness, which calls for an open-mindedness toward new knowledge that not every parent is capable of...

...The high schools are now being taxed with a million and a quarter more students than in 1953...

...If need be we can prefabricate them...

...Here are figures that should give pause to parents who have children coming of college age in the years ahead (and remember that this year's freshman class is still from a low birth-rate year): 1. The college population doubled between 1920 and 1930 and, with time out for the war, has been increasing ever since...

...And since it is an educational displacement at the bottom, it means a displacement all the way up...

...Colleges have had to create special courses simply to make students ready for college training...

...If it is to be narrowed, that, too, must be done deliberately...

...The youngster who at six composes music or works differential equations has had the benefit, probably accidentally—such is our mysticism in these matters—of an environment that opened other channels of communication...

...Our power to mold them is unlimited...

...New knowledge came slowly enough to be assimilated...

...The people in the communications industry, whom we desperately need as our allies, may reason as they have in the past: "The public wants entertainment, not enlightenment...

...From it he shapes his picture of the world— round today, for all his playmates know it is round and he can "see" its roundness in pictures, but flat not so long ago (we have accomplished this much in the way of changing our folklore...

...Let the experts work them out...

...For the first time in history we have the means...

...He can vote billions for more classrooms and teachers: this will help, but it is too late for the help to be adequate...

...We can both provide learning and avoid the necessity of unlearning if we start early enough...

...So far the sad results of diluted education—oversized classes, half-day sessions, part-time teachers— have been mainly visible in the elementary schools, whose population has increased a million a year since 1953 until it reached just under 28 million last fall...

...This is a serious need, of course, but it is not even half the problem that educators face...

...Office of Education calls an "increased holding power...

...What everyone has to do is commonplace, what only a few do is a sign of genius, even though in point of com-plexitv of the patterns to be learned, the commonplace may represent the greater accomplishment...