Nothing Less Than Failure

The U.S. public schools, says Historian Arthur E. Bestor of the University of Illinois, are now in the hands of "a narrow group of specialists in pedagogy [who are] utterly devoid of the qualifications necessary for the task they have undertaken." In a new book, Educational Wastelands (University of Illinois; $3.50), Bestor, a liberal arts scholar, summons his colleagues to take over the schools once again.

However great their contribution to pedagogy, the specialists are slowly throttling the intellectual content of the schools. "As a result . . . the schools are being more and more divorced from the basic disciplines of science and learning. Intellectual training, once the unquestioned focus of every educational effort, has been pushed out to the periphery of the public school program. Into the vacuum have rushed the 'experts' from state departments and colleges of education: the curriculum doctors, the integrators, the life-adjusters--the specialists in know-how rather than knowledge."

The Babble. These people, says Bestor, not only shun knowledge; they often seem to despise it. "There is an antique play on words that still seems to tickle the fancy of professional educationists. 'We do not teach history,' they say. 'We teach children.' " Instead of subject matter, they babble about the "real-life" needs of children. They talk on and on about the "problems of high school youth" (e.g., "the problem of improving one's personal appearance . . . the problem of developing and maintaining wholesome boy-girl relationships"), and they put these in the place of the traditional learnings, which they regard as "academic" and "aristocratic."

Indeed, "up-and-coming public school educationists are not talking about substituting one scholarly discipline for another . . . They are talking--as clearly as their antipathy for grammar and syntax permits them to talk--about the elimination of all the scholarly disciplines."

The Ostrich Way. As might have been expected, "the classical languages have virtually disappeared from the high schools." Worse still, "the modern foreign languages have been buried alive with them in a common, unmarked grave . . . Meanwhile, the U.S. Office of Education smugly reports that "percentage enrollments in algebra, geometry, physics and Latin have shown progressive decreases . . . since 1915."

Says Bestor: "It is a curiously ostrich-like way of meeting life needs to de-emphasize foreign languages during a period of world war and postwar global tension, and to de-emphasize mathematics at precisely the time when the nation's security has come to depend on Einstein's equation E=mc2."

All the talk about "life needs," adds Bestor, is making the whole school system look ridiculous. "Besides being ineffective, formal instruction in trivial problems of vocational or personal life is dangerously wmeducative in its effect. It generates in the student the belief that he cannot deal with any matter until he has taken a course in it. Timidity, self-distrust and conformity are pathetically evident among the graduates of American teacher-training colleges ... for many of these poor souls seem to doubt their ability even to open a schoolroom window until they have been told in a textbook . . . how high it should be raised."

The Mediocre. Not only should standards be stiffened all along the line and teacher training overhauled, but educational policy should once again be made by "the learned world as a whole . . .

"A citizen today needs an education, not a headful of helpful hints . . . The men who drafted our Constitution were not trained for the task by 'field trips' to the mayor's office and the county jail. They were endowed with the wisdom requisite for founding a new nation by liberal education . . . Until public school educationists acquire . . . sufficient intellectual humility to accept the guidance of past experience and of the considered judgment of the modern learned world, no amount of financial support can possibly raise our schools above mediocrity. And mediocrity, given the possibilities which America offers to public education, is nothing less than downright failure."

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