The Act of Learning
Jennings, Frank G.
The Act of Learning The Necessary Revolution in American Education, by Francis Kep-pel. Harper & Row. $5.95. The Reforming of General Education : the columbia college experience in its national...
...Few men have earned the right to commit wisdom in public...
...6.95...
...320 pp...
...We view the future in terms of our understanding of the present, and this vision is a skill that is learned from those among us who are capable of wisdom...
...Reviewed by Frank G. Jennings HPhrough education man learns to be human...
...we more clearly comprehend the process of education than heretofore...
...Racial ghettos have stunted the reach and warped the vision of citizens who should have the fairest of prospects...
...For there are changes both in circumstances and in knowledge that impose constraints on and give opportunities to the teacher in each succeeding generation...
...The administrations of half a dozen Presidents be-seeched the citizen to treat our land as a cherished heritage, belonging as much to tomorrow as to today...
...City slums have choked the children's gardens that "the schools should be...
...Columbia University Press...
...It is in this sense that education is in constant process of invention...
...Bruner notes that: we have been increasing our knowledge of man as a species...
...Although Professor Bell is concerned with the role of Columbia College in all of its uniqueness, his explorations and his commentary go to the heart of the problem of general education, which is the concern of every college in the nation...
...We must respond to the needs of children in Cairo—Illinois or Egypt...
...3.95...
...Bruner's book is a mosaic of essays arranged with compassionate skill, speaking out of the great tradition of William James...
...May he in his new and more private assignment contribute as richly to the improvement of learning...
...We must attend to what happens in Ankara...
...The United States is not alone in the world, nor is it possible any longer to pretend that this is so...
...Specialization can lead to a narrowing of vision and an over-concern with vocation, but if that specialized knowledge is acquired in a context of inquiry, rich in philosophical and methodological presuppositions, and if a student learns not 'received doctrine,' but the modes of conceptual innovation, then special learning can be as liberalizing (i.e., in inducing a critical spirit and an independent temper) as the study of the humanities...
...It is his contention that ". . . the college can still be one of the few places of broad intellectual adventure, the place where one can resist, momentarily, the harness that society now seeks to impose at an earlier and earlier stage on its youth...
...The high schools, it is claimed (often with little actual proof), have so improved their performance as to preempt the first two years of college, while the demands which the graduate school makes for specialization have shrunken the field of exploration that once was the special domain of the latter half of the undergraduate program...
...Three generations after the public schools truly went "public," there remain barriers to the ill-favored and "basely-born...
...What has all of this to do with education...
...The voice of the committee stutters through Keppel's earnest book...
...In his new book, Toward a Theory of Instruction, Jerome S. Bruner, of Harvard, who has contributed with such wise ingenuity to the improvement of American education, makes the point that it is ". . . self-evident that each generation must define afresh the nature, direction, and aims of education to assure such freedom and rationality as can be attained for a future generation...
...The second revolution, through which we are now coursing, deals with equality of opportunity: every child from every sector of society is to be provided with as much education as he can encompass...
...Bruner's point is well taken...
...It is an unnecessary valedictory by the most effective U. S. Commissioner of Education this country has ever had...
...The Reforming of General Education : the columbia college experience in its national setting, by Daniel Bell, with a Foreword by David B. Truman...
...The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press...
...We have created within our educational institutions some powerful engines for the management of "the forces of nature," and in so doing have generated a technological revolution which has ignited "the knowledge explosion," which in turn has confronted the schools and colleges with what some have called "the run-away information crisis...
...Toward a Theory of Instruction, by Jerome S. Bruner...
...It is this last point which provides Francis Keppel with the theme for his book, The Necessary Revolution in American Education...
...176 pp...
...How, indeed, can we enunciate aims of education when some of its seekers cannot find the target...
...It conserves what has been learned in the past, the better to manage the present and assess the future...
...Because of this man creates education as his sovereign invention to do what his genes cannot...
...The products of a pharmaceutical laboratory in West Germany can mangle the bodies of a thousand unborn infants, here as well as there...
...A society," says Jerome B. Wiesner, "can be viewed as a giant learning machine...
...Our society, festooned with a dozen lovely adjectives, not the least of which is "affluent," is a harsh and foreign country to the Negro, the Mexican-American, the Puerto Rican, the American Indian, and the Appalachian white...
...The "necessary" and imminent revolution concerns quality: this means that kind of education which assures the widest opportunities and the fairest options for each child to achieve maximum development in every human aspect...
...It should be read at one sitting and then studied through a season...
...These brave words are generalizations crying for specificity...
...He conducts his educational enterprise at the campfire site, in the totem hut, before an altar, or within a school— wherever his society dictates...
...No teacher of any child at any age can afford not to know this book well...
...Bell points out that "it has been stated that because the college is no longer the terminal educational experience, it has lost its distinctive function and is becoming simply a corridor between the secondary and the graduate school...
...And the key word is "learning...
...With all of the troubles abroad in the world, with the sense of crisis that trembles through our current social legislation for the great society and in the war against poverty, there is a nagging notion that some things are lacking...
...And still our forests are depleted, our streams are befouled, and even the Grand Canyon becomes an object of entrepreneurial interests...
...Any discussion of education has to take into account fundamental changes within society...
...we are expanding our understanding of the nature of individual mental growth...
...It has to do with citizenship...
...Three generations after the magic lamp was lifted beside the "golden door" there are huddled American masses "yearning to breathe free...
...Daniel Bell, chairman of the department of sociology at Columbia University, has undertaken such a selection and has come out of the task with a brilliant book and a fair prospect...
...and, finally, the rate of change in all aspects of society is so rapid that we are forced to redefine the ways by which we will educate a new generation...
...The Reforming of General Education is a report of "a committee of one" appointed to look upon the undergraduate program at Columbia College and to assess if possible the ways by which its relevance to contemporary society can be enhanced...
...Commissioner of Education observes that the first revolution in American education was one of quantity: "Everyone was to be provided the chance for an education of some sort...
...The former U.S...
...The enterprise of the automotive industry can turn our cities' skies into atmospheric cesspools...
...While neither of these claims has overriding validity, there is in practice much that one can look upon as destructive of the idea of the college...
...Nothing is built into his organism that assures a sense of beauty or guarantees a safe choice of food and shelter...
...Daniel Bell has...
...What significance does this have for what goes on in the schools...
...The "idea of the college," as represented by the liberal arts tradition, has been under severe and increasing attack...
...We have been reforming American education in most of its parts and with ever-increasing urgency since the end of World War II...
...How we conceive the nature of human nature will determine how we will act, toward ourselves and others...
...Although he addresses his colleagues at Columbia University, what he has to say must be attended to by all who have the responsibility to make the college years productive...
...The demand for copper and iron ore can justify the destruction of ten thousand acres of farm land...
...It has to do with values, of what men learn to cherish and to protect...
...There is so much more to know—and the act of knowing itself seems nearly to double the field of knowledge—that the problem of selecting what should be taught, and how, threatens to suffocate any attempt to select priorities...
Vol. 30 • September 1966 • No. 9
