Ends of Education
Cremin, Lawrence A.
Ends of Education The Revolution in Education, by Mortimer J. Adler and Milton Mayer. University of Chicago Press. 224 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Lawrence A. Cremin For a generation accustomed to...
...Democrats themselves, however, divide into two camps: democratic realists urge that education must be differentiated, particularly at the high-school level, to meet the needs of youngsters with varying abilities and vocational goals...
...Today, as if in testimony to his faith, 43,000,-000 Americans are enrolled in some sort of school, college, or university, and their number is expected to increase by at least ten million during the coming decade...
...Finally, the idealists themselves split, the traditionalists among them insisting that the best education for all men still consists in the cultivation of the intellect, the refinement of taste, and the development of character, the modernists arguing that liberal education can no longer afford to exclude vocational concerns from the purview of the school...
...RICHARD SCHICKEL is an editor and free lance writer...
...he was formerly legal counsel for the Office of Price Administration...
...THE REVIEWERS CARL AUERBACH is a professor of law at the University of Wisconsin...
...The present-day aristocrat, unlike his ancient ideological ancestor, may well hold that all men are equal as persons, but he firmly denies that more than a few are capable of education...
...What, after all, is the nature of education...
...Reviewed by Lawrence A. Cremin For a generation accustomed to universal education, it is difficult to comprehend how recent and radical a notion it is...
...Granted this, however, the volume is unfortunately dull and formalistic...
...The Revolution in Education is addressed to queries such as these...
...MARTIN S. DWORKIN reviews films regularly for The Progressive...
...ARTHUR SCHLE-SINGER, JR...
...For two thousand years Western philosophers had hewed to the classic Platonic dictum that only those of golden talents are worthy and capable of true learning...
...A useful bibliography is appended for those who wish to make their own assessments of our educational traditions...
...LUCIUS J. BARKER teaches political science at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee...
...More fundamental, perhaps, the authors assume that educational practices and policies must ultimately derive from certain "universal facts about the nature of man and society and about the nature of the human mind, of experience, of knowledge, and of learning and teaching...
...Mann's heresy was to proclaim that all could be educated—indeed, that a republic could ill afford otherwise...
...His democratic opponent responds with Mann that all men are educable...
...And should it be the same for all, or different...
...However prodigious this achievement, it has raised some of the thorniest public questions of our time...
...A solution will come, they warn, only when pedagogical protagonists abandon lurid rhetoric for the discussion of first principles, in essence, for true philosophic discourse...
...Ultimately, the authors view the last division as the most fundamental, since unlike the others "it enjoys the peculiarity of beginning and ending in philosophy...
...Only a century separates us from Horace Mann's dramatic crusade for free public schools, and the revolution he wrought has yet to run its course...
...The authors remind us that all of these issues have been raised before, and that whatever our loyalties in any current controversy, we ignore history at our peril...
...Some of us, less enamored of scholasticism, prefer to regard the making of public policy as more than the application of "universal facts" to specific cases...
...he is a professor of history at Harvard...
...Whether there are any such facts, and whether if they exist they can be discovered, is itself a burning philosophical issue which might well have been discussed as such...
...Running from Xenophon's Education of Cyrus to the much publicized Harvard Report, General Education in a Free Society, it is marred somewhat by the omission of anything from William T. Harris or G. Stanley Hall, commanding figures of late Nineteenth Century American pedagogy, and by the inclusion of such lesser works as Benjamin Fine's Democratic Education and Wilbur A. Yauch's How Good Is Your School...
...wrote "The Age of Roosevelt...
...democratic idealists flatly deny that any such differentiation is necessary...
...What must be its ends in a democratic, scientific, industrial age...
...Written originally as discussion material for officers of the Fund for Adult Education and the Fund for the Advancement of Education—both Ford-financed—the volume is frankly expository in character, aiming to clarify rather than to plead, attempting to pose alternatives rather than to choose from among them...
...One has the sense that a revolution in education—or anywhere else for that matter—ought to make for livelier reading...
...That they do so is probably their central contribution, for in recent decades educators and their critics alike have been notoriously prone to forget the past, thereby condemning themselves, in Santayana's words, to repeat it...
...Granted the millions in our schools, what sort of schooling should they have...
...How much education ought we to make available to all...
...LAWRENCE A. CREM1N is a professor of education at Columbia University...
...Adler and Mayer suggest that three "irreducible oppositions" sum up most contemporary debate concerning the goals of American education: the opposition of aristocrat and democrat, of realist and idealist, of traditionalist and modernist...
Vol. 22 • August 1958 • No. 8
