Pattern of Necessity

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A few minutes after 8 on weekday mornings, a sturdy and businesslike man with rimless spectacles and iron-grey hair strides into the School Administration Building in the heart of Denver and heads for Room 212. Superintendent of Schools Kenneth Oberholtzer usually has a cheery "good morning" for anyone he meets on the way. And if he notices that either his secretary, Miss Cordier, or his receptionist, Mrs. Hendryson, has the sniffles, he invariably stops to commiserate and give a little advice on cold remedies. But last week, affable Superintendent Oberholtzer was a trifle pressed. From all over the U.S., a thousand of his colleagues were about to descend upon him for one of the important educational conferences of the year.

The conference had a forbidding title: the Fifth Annual Meeting of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. But to Denver's Kenneth Oberholtzer and to the other top-level U.S. public schoolmen he represented, the long-winded words meant simply that the professionals were getting together again to talk about the gristle of their jobs. By & large, they were the men & women who were making U.S. public education policy A.D. 1950--with the advice & consent of the U.S. public when they could get it, without it when the public refused to be interested in the problem of education.

Extended Mission. For the professionals, the debates and discussions of the three-day session were a chance to bring each other up-to-date. It was not the time to speak of old complaints: of bulging classrooms, worn-out buildings and meager, if rising, paychecks. Instead, the teachers and principals and superintendents would be hashing over the latest trends in teaching, the latest gadgets, the newest films, and the most recent classroom experiments going on all over the nation. Unfortunately, much of their talk would be meaningless to nonprofessional ears. At a time when U.S. education had extended its mission to embrace more lives and for a longer time than ever before, it had paradoxically moved farther & farther away from the public grasp.

It had started simply enough. "Preach, my dear sir, a crusade against ignorance," Thomas Jefferson had cried; but the crusade was to roll and swell beyond even Jefferson's wildest dreams. The nation passed through the age of the one-room district schoolhouse, of the birch rod and the rattan cane, the primer, Noah Webster's famous speller and the Me Guff ey readers. Ever since the indefatigable Horace Mann had stormed through Massachusetts preaching the cause of better schools ("In a Republic, Ignorance is a Crime!"), successive generations of young Americans had been learning the three Rs as Dart of their birthright.

The nation had wholeheartedly committed itself to the proposition .that every boy & girl should be educated. But in the 20th Century, another question became dominant: How should everyone be educated? To some, the old rules of teaching were enough--spooning out each day's lessons with little regard for what made children remember or forget them. Then such educator-philosophers as Pragmatist John Dewey began to broadcast new theories. To them, children could learn as much from experience, from solving real-life problems and from doing, as from drilling out of books. The curriculum, said Dewey, must be elastic, the school a miniature society; education was "living and not a preparation for future living."

Meanwhile, the psychologists were adding their own ideas. Columbia's Edward L. Thorndike developed ways of measuring intelligence and aptitude. To his disciples the millennium seemed at hand. At last, they announced triumphantly, there was no longer any need to follow oldtime curriculums blindly. Since memory, ability, interests, and even personality could be measured, educators could refashion their programs scientifically.

Too Refined? Education rolled off Mark Hopkins' log for good. It became a world of controversy--of Dewey's progressives who saw only limited good in the measurement movement (how, .they asked, could character be measured?), of the measurers who denounced the traditionalists ("I am," said Thorndike, "suspicious of educational achievements which are so subtle and refined and spiritual that they cannot be measured"), and the traditionalists who denounced them both.

U.S. education became a laboratory of endless experiment, an industry tuned to mass production, and an officialdom with more official channels than an army. The art of teaching became the science of pedagogy, with a technology and a labyrinthine language all its own. Yet out of the conflicting currents there began to emerge a pattern of sorts--a pattern of necessity, to cover not only the overflowing numbers of pupils, but all their varied talents, hopes and needs as well. What sort of pattern was it? This week, as many of the nation's educators met in Denver, the theories they were discussing were being hammered out in practice all about them. The Denver school system, running under the kindly eye of Kenneth Oberholtzer, was a good example of what modern education was trying to do, with all its virtues and all its failings.

Lavender Gloves. Public education began in Denver on a hot August afternoon in 1859, when a strange figure in black broadcloth, a glossy plug hat and lavender gloves appeared driving a span of oxen down the dusty main street. The newcomer drove expertly, shouting his commands in Latin, until finally and inevitably he came to a stop outside Uncle Dick Wootton's saloon and general store. His first statement to the townsmen was in English, not Latin, though they would have understood it in any tongue. It was: "Set 'em up. The drinks are on me."

Owen J. Goldrick had come all the way from County Sligo, Ireland to prospect for gold in the West. But when the boys in the back room heard him talk and listened to his flow of Latin, they dubbed him "Professor" there & then, took up a $250 collection, and told him that he was going to open and teach the town's first school.

Three months later, he opened the Union School, with two Indians, two Mexicans, and nine sons & daughters of the pioneers. He got his first textbooks by writing to a professor in Boston, who was delighted to oblige. "Imagine," purred the Bostonian, "my arm extended with the speed of thought from this cradle of the free school on the Atlantic shores, over the Alleghenies, over the 'Father of Waters' to give you a cordial greeting ... on the frontier of civilization . . ."

Denver was not a frontier for long. By 1902 it had 37 schools--and its rising school population was beginning to outgrow them. Stately Superintendent Aaron Gove added sewing and cooking to the still rigid curriculum; roughriding Lucius Hallett bulled through a $6,000,000 bond issue to build three new high schools and enlarge ten other buildings; under able Jesse Newlon, teachers finally won a single salary scale. During the 1920s the city saw 26 new schools rise up all over town. But the race between the rising buildings and rising enrollments never seemed to stop. When 43-year-old Kenneth Oberholtzer appeared on the scene in 1947, the school plant was lagging far behind.

Creamed Chicken. In many ways Kenneth Oberholtzer is a schoolman's schoolman. The son of a Western school superintendent, he was a mild-mannered boy, so shy and studious that his hearty father eventually gave him the same nickname that early Denver gave Sligoman Gold-rick, "the Professor." School was his life. In the fifth grade, he fell for his first girl, a curly-headed classmate named Florence; 14 years later he married her. At the University of Illinois he decided to make education his career, later went on for a Ph.D. at Columbia University's Teachers College, the nearest thing to Mecca in modern education. There, the winds-of doctrine blew about him, from the fiery progressivism of Deweyite William Kilpatrick to the suave conservatism of William ("I'd rather be right than Progressive") Bagley. As Kenneth Oberholtzer proceeded on his career, he found his own philosophy "somewhere in between." By the time Denver got around to picking him for its $18,500 top school job, he was the popular school superintendent of Long Beach, Calif.--the youngest superintendent of any city of 100,000 population or more.

Denver liked him at once. And Oberholtzer felt right at home in the life of superintendent, eating creamed chicken out of patties at Rotary Club luncheons, chatting at P.T.A. teas, eating high-school meals served by home-economics students. Through it all he moved diplomatically, remembered janitors' names, shook hundreds of hands, and answered smilingly to "Dr. Oberholtzer," "Kenneth" or "Ken" as the case might be.

In Tuesday conferences with his three assistant superintendents, he was a casual but cautious chairman. "Let me ponder that for a while, fellows," he would say when a ticklish problem came up. Often, chin in hand, he would seem to be thinking out loud ("Now, I'm just supposing that . . ."). Then, when he had weighed all the facts, he would make his decision.

Meals & Mopes. The domain he inherited includes five high schools, eleven junior high schools, 63 elementary schools, a special school for crippled children. It is a $40 million domain that comes alive each morning with the shouts and cries of 56,000 schoolchildren flooding through its classrooms. On the surface it is a casual world of blue jeans and T-shirts, sweaters & skirts, bobby-sox and loafers, of jalopies, motor-scooters, bikes, and a litter of candy-wrappers inside almost every desk. Pupils call each other "meal" or "mope," .tell each other not to be a "squeegie" or a "sizzle." They slouch through the halls, let their legs sprawl out under desks. As for chewing gum, said one teacher, "If I tried to stop them I wouldn't have time for anything else."

Beyond this world of pupils is the world of 1,958 teachers; and to every two of these there is one administrator or nonteaching employee. Denver no longer has a teacher shortage, and out of its $17 million school budget it boasts a fairly generous salary scale with a $3,640 average (average U.S. teacher's salary: about $2,890).

"Does It Matter to You?" When Kenneth Oberholtzer moved into Room 212 and sat down at its old rolltop desk, he wasted no time finding out what Denver needed. In his conservative blue suits and quiet ties, he went around to P.T.A. groups, called meetings of teachers and principals to talk things over. He persuaded the University of Denver to make a survey of his schools, then got a committee of 100 leading citizens to determine how much money the schools needed.

Finally he launched into a campaign of speeches on every lecture platform he could find, including that of the Roman Catholic parochial school system, whose superintendent, Father Edward Leyden, was plagued with building shortages of his own. He used no oratory, but he had a load of facts & figures to throw at his audiences in talks of precisely 15 minutes. In 16 years, said he, Denver had built enough new schools for only 2,500 pupils, but enrollments had gone up 10,000 . . . More than 5,000 pupils were in schools over 60 years old ... more than 9,500 in schools between 50 and 60 years old ... 20,000 in patched-up buildings . . . 14,000 in schools with no libraries. Oberholtzer's challenge to the parents and the other taxpayers was always the same: "Does it matter to you?"

Gradually Denver took up the challenge. For the first time in city history, the chamber of commerce and labor union leaders began working together for better schools. For the first time, the chamber indorsed a proposed school bond issue, and for the first time the real-estate owners' association did not oppose it. The bond issue was for $21 million; Denver citizens voted for it 7 to 1.

It was a victory for Oberholtzer. The last time Denver had voted on a bond issue was in 1938, when the city had a chance to get matching aid from the federal PWA. For $3,700,000 of its own money then, Denver could have got essentially what was later to cost $21 million. But Denver had voted it down.

In the fall of 1948, Kenneth Oberholtzer began his building program. He started building five new elementary schools, buying property to make room for more. The rest he refurbished from top to bottom, painted their classrooms in bright and cheery colors, soundproofed their corridors, lighted them with fluorescent lamps. He also threw out the old rolltop desk in his own office, installed a shiny semioval one and a spanking new carpet.

But no sooner had Kenneth Oberholtzer won this first triumph than a storm broke over his head. Having solved the problem of how its schoolchildren should be housed, Denver had progressed to a more important problem: how they should be educated. The whole school curriculum came under fire.

For Every Type ... Denver schoolmen have given their curriculum the sweeping term of "general education." It is a vague but usable handle for the vast new burdens educators have felt obliged to take upon themselves.

Their schools must prepare boys & girls not only for college (an average of 32.6% of Denver high school students go), but for earning a living and learning a trade. The U.S. public school must teach the rich, the poor, the bright, the slow, those who read, those who don't, those who will drive trucks and those who will run banks. For every type of pupil and every type of future, Kenneth Oberholtzer insists, "We must make the schools make sense."

To make sense, say the educators, the school must prepare pupils for the Dewey-ite ideals, how to "live in a democratic society," to be "adjusted to their environment," to understand "the world about them." It must teach everything from chemistry to cooking to how to apply for a job.

The school is responsible, not only for the minds of their charges, but for their characters, personalities, and, with the arrival of staff psychologists and consulting psychologists, even their subconscious as well.

In Denver high schools some courses are specifically labeled "general education." In these, pupils learn about boy & girl relationships, safe driving, general safety practices and health. They read books called Sportsmanlike Driving, Learning To Live with Others and How to Read a Newspaper. They discuss divorce, crime, labor relations, family living and, in segregated classes and with parents' written permission, sex. General education is, says Oberholtzer, "a summation of those things pertinent to everyone in his day-to-day living."

No Silos. Through all Denver's grades and all its classrooms, the spirit of "general education" is present. Youngsters learn to count by playing grocery store; if a child happens to bring a toy fire engine to class, the teacher is quick to make up an arithmetic problem about fire engines.

Courses are no longer rigidly restricted to subject: they can and do roam into many other fields. "Nowadays," says Assistant Superintendent Roy Hinderman, "history teachers teach spelling, biology teachers teach spelling, and spelling teachers teach spelling." But such matters as spelling, or math, or writing, are only the beginning. Taken alone, they are, insists Kenneth Oberholtzer, just "silo education, or storing up facts." Subjects must be related to each other and to life around them. What good is history, the educators ask, unless it is tied in with current events, or with what's going on in Denver?

As the child proceeds through Denver's schools, he is not forced too hard to learn things he is not ready to learn; nor is he often kept back a grade. That, in the view of Superintendent Oberholtzer, would shake his self-confidence. Through high school, he has a special counselor who tries to adapt his curriculum as much as possible to fit his wants, abilities and needs. Explains Oberholtzer: "You can't give the same educational fare to all children, any more than you can give all Americans the same breakfast food every morning." Only by bending the curriculum to each pupil's needs, he argues, can the "schools make sense."

To some Denverites, this line of reasoning makes no sense at all.

No Nouns. One day last October, Mrs. Joseph D. Sitton, wife of a physician, mother of two boys and president of the county P.T.A., rose to say a word or two about what she thought about "general education." Said she: "I have been watching this thing with fear and trembling. I think it has gone too far. Theories are fine, but the schools are devoting too little time to the things children go to school to learn." Thereupon the battle began.

Parents began writing to the newspapers. "I was told not to let my daughter study for more than 20 minutes at a time because it was frustrating," one mother complained."Thus-she and I went through three very distressing years together." To assist his rebuttal, the Denver Post-opened its pages to Kenneth Oberholtzer for a guest editorial explaining what the school system was trying to do. But next day, three more mothers stormed before the school board. "My sixth-grade daughter doesn't know a complete sentence," said one. "She doesn't know states. She doesn't know that North Dakota is one of the states." At the next meeting, it was a father who rose up in wrath: "What I want to know is when my boy is going to get an education? He's a musician, but he doesn't know a noun."

History v. Headlines. To followers of modern precepts these were old, familiar complaints and Kenneth Oberholtzer had his defense on tap. Today's schools spend more time on the three Rs than ever before, he said, and they teach them better. "There are measuring devices called 'standardized tests' . . . that give us objective evidence of effectiveness in teaching . . . When these tests have been given in Denver, they have shown definitely that we are not 'neglecting the three Rs.' " But, says he, "if the child is taught only to read and spell, the schools have not done their job. The twig must be bent to democratic living." "Hell," declared easygoing, pipe-smoking Assistant Superintendent Hinderman, "nothing has been taken away from the schools, but a lot has been added. We can't have horse & buggy education in a hydrogen bomb age."

This week, as the 1,000 educators met, the Denver controversy still smoldered. A local businessman named-Cyril Reed announced that he was organizing a Committee for the Improvement of the Denver Public Schools. Its purpose: war against general education, a return to more concentrated teaching of the traditional basic subjects, which he and his group are convinced that Denver's schools neglect, no matter what else twig-bending Superintendent Oberholtzer and his teachers may achieve.

To Kenneth Oberholtzer's convention guests, however, all that would have a familiar sound. All over the U.S., critics had raised their voices to attack the educators and the basic pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey from which in large part their system sprang. There were also critics with a simpler question: Were the schools trying to do too much, and thus doing nothing thoroughly?

In attempting to be all things to all men, they indeed seemed to be losing the sense that one subject may be more important than another, that history, for example, is likely to be more important than the daily headlines, and science more important than sewing. They seemed to be cluttering up their programs with too many matters that should be learned at home, or in jobs and daily life after the school had finished its work in the basic essentials. Long ago, John Dewey himself had complained of the cluttered burden the schools had to carry: "The public school is the willing packhorse of our social system; it is the true hero of the refrain: Let George do it." If George were only less willing, he might indeed be more able.

If there was substance in that criticism, the remedy lay in good part with U.S. citizens. Few seemed to realize that fact more intimately than the dissenting parents of Denver and the superintendent himself. Said Kenneth Oberholtzer, for himself and for the whole mid-century profession of public schoolmen: "Our schools will be just as good as the citizens of a community want them to be."

* A turnabout on the part of the Post. In the '20s and '30s, Denverites most often found the Post on the side of the tight-purses when it came to school-expansion projects, skeptical to hostile when it came to teaching innovations. Publisher Palmer Hoyt, who has been running the Post since 1946, is a charter member of the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools, founded last year (TIME, May 23) with the sole aim of arousing more citizens to take a direct part in decisions affecting their local schools.

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