Cinderella Waits

...In one place he states, "I have never seen a Problems of Democracy class of any distinction whatever," but a few pages later he allows that perhaps the "problems" approach would be suitable after all at the junior high level in schools "populated largely by unlucky children, the very poor, the caste-oppressed...

...Improvements in social studies teaching are desperately needed in the schools, where coaches and bus drivers double as history teachers and where, from time to time, vigilantes roam like coyotes...

...Many teachers who know they should do better and who wish they could, have neither the time nor the materials...

...Mayer believes the extent of the usefulness of induction in social studies is "an open question," but to many such an approach seems promising...

...Despite all this, some reform is taking place...

...He deplores the "foul dragon of community ignorance and bigotry that devours so many of our schools," and he pooh-poohs concern with "values" and "citizenship," but he condones the exclusion from the classroom of certain controversial topics—police brutality, U. S. military intervention in Panama, Mexico, Cuba, and the use of the A-bomb at Hiroshima—because "children should think well of their country," a jingoistic dodge that would be applauded by the Birchite "sex-starved housewives and the little old ladies with umbrellas" he pretends to gun down five pages earlier...

...Thus, the timidity of the foundations is understandable...

...as the mathematicians and scientists practice it," Mayer says, "is a process of successive approximation...

...Martin Mayer, the author of Madison Avenue, U.S.A...

...Several foundations have been tempted to try the Prince Charming role, and a number of people—some of them amateurs—have, with varying degrees of difference, made attempts to develop new social studies courses and to assemble new teaching materials...

...Reviewed by Peter Schrag Qocial studies teaching in Ameri-^ can schools has been a kind of educational Cinderella, maligned by a variety of self-serving stepmothers, abused by association with "social adjustment" and "citizenship training," and now in a state of waiting for the Prince Charming who will put the waif on a par of affluence with her glamorous stepsisters among the natural sciences...

...And yet, if the many smaller projects now underway are not encouraged, a great opportunity will have been missed...

...Yet, since the educational optimism of the Thirties was shattered, nothing overwhelming has happened to improve teaching in this area, partly for lack of funds, partly because every school committeeman thinks himself an authority on American history, and partly because many teachers are so incredibly incompetent...

...Induction...

...This the book does very well indeed...

...A child need not be told that his answers are right or wrong, because he can feed them back into the problem himself, see how they work out, and hunt around for the reasons for error...

...new materials are being produced, and many teachers as well as academic social scientists are eager to start work if someone will only give them half a chance...

...And yet social studies is not physics...

...Should Mayer's book generate such encouragement—and that means money—then it may turn out to be a most important contribution to the teaching of social studies...

...Mayer analyzes a number of promising new ventures but he gives only scant attention to what may at this time be the best of them—an ambitious experiment with new history materials headed by Edwin Fenton of Pittsburgh and supported by the Mellon Foundation...

...At least some of the people Mayer interviewed, including this reviewer (who is working on a Mayer-blessed project to improve the teaching of American history), had no idea that what they thought was a foundation survey would also show up as a book...

...Mayer's intent, clearly, is to point out the need for the application of new ideas and to demonstrate the stultifying effects of the usual textbook-survey method of imparting history or geography...

...The real question raised by this Carnegie-sponsored book (with its inane jacket endorsement from a Carnegie officer) is what the foundations are going to do—or indeed what they should do...

...the area is broad and undefined...

...Back in the Thirties, Carnegie laid an egg by financing a massive social studies teaching outline that no one seems to have followed, and recently the Ford Foundation bit, then escaped from the hooks of an ambitious but over-promoted project directed at reform in all twelve years, beginning with anthropology in the first grade...

...it already has too many "experts," touches too many sacred cows, and is the fief of an establishment which shows little zeal for reform...

...Mayer's concern with this neglect and with the catalogue of stupidities that pass for economics and history and geography bring him to intelligent discussions of some attractive experiments with archeology and anthropology and of the possibility of using the new physics course developed by the Physical Science Study Committee (PSSC) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a model for social studies reform generally...

...But it has, and although it sometimes becomes infuriating, it is not bad...

...And yet— Mayer peppers his work with personal observations and opinions on the teaching of everything from archeology to economics, and he shows a remarkable fondness for pontifical pronouncements and Olympian judgments without being consistently clear about what he likes and what he doesn't...

...and The Schools, was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation and the American Council of Learned Societies to survey the state— mostly sad—of the teaching of social studies in primary and secondary schools and to report on any significant departures from conventional course organization and teaching techniques...

...Despite such flaws and contradictions, the book is eminently worth reading (and getting angry about) if only because Cinderella cannot yet afford to be choosy about her suitors...