The Coated Pill

In early September 1949, few people in New York City could have looked forward to the future more eagerly than 21-year-old Joan Dunn. A graduate of The Bronx's College of Mount St. Vincent, she was beginning her career as a teacher of English, and as she walked toward the Brooklyn high school to which she had been assigned, she felt an "excitement in the air, that particular sharp-pencil, clean-copybook, brand-new-eraser crackle in the ether that made me walk a little faster."

Four years later, Joan Dunn quit teaching forever. Last week she told why, in a new book called Retreat from Learning (McKay; $3)--a disturbing glimpse of big-city high-school life at its worst, and an outraged indictment of modern educational theories from one who has seen them in action.

Author Dunn's complaint is not that she had to work too hard (often ten hours a day) or that she was paid too little (take-home pay of $40 a week). She admired most of her colleagues and was deeply attached to many of her students. But somehow, from the first roll call each morning and the distribution of the various questionnaires that floated down from the upper bureaucracy ("Are there any defective electrical sockets in your home? Check Yes or No"), her day became a fight against exhaustion.

"So Who Cares?" All too often she found that her students had no desire to learn. Whatever wit they had, they directed mostly to thinking up excuses for being late ("I was dreamin' about ya, Mrs. Beal, an I didn' wanna wake up"), and finding ways to resist vocabulary drill ("So who cares? I say a woid like dat an all my frens laugh at me. Nobody know what dat woid means"). Almost every class had its sullen and defiant pupils who would yawn, lounge, drum, stamp, and wander about at will. Whether they worked or not, they knew that the law would keep them in school. Nor did they hesitate to tell "the teach" just what they thought of her. Such students, says Author Dunn, "know your exact place and sooner or later make it known to you. I once requested a student to take off his coat while in class, and he answered precisely: 'You can ask me to take off my jacket, but you can't tell me to.' "

To the girls in their tight slit dresses and the boys in custom-made pistol pants, the "school is a clubhouse, a place of amusement, a convenient place for getting cheap lunches, meeting friends." It is also the haven of the problem child, to whom some schools become completely geared. "He is petted, excused, and studied out of all proportion. He is the man of the hour, and he knows it ... I think that many children made themselves problem children simply because they saw how important they could become."

"We Teach the Child." Author Dunn agrees that poverty, broken homes and indifferent parents must share the blame for the plight of the bad big-city school. But after four years, she also decided that the modern educational theories with which she had been in sympathy at first have been a wasteful failure. The experts talked an incessant stream of sentimental nonsense ("We don't teach the subject. We teach the child"). They spoke of the dangers of a "fixed curriculum," and of the necessity of making education "meaningful" by relating every subject to the children's interests.

Some thought that students should be in charge of their own discipline; others thought the pupils should manage the classwork. One teacher gave as an example of "brilliant and provocative teaching" a class in which his students had decided that Lincoln was a dictator. Another male teacher told Teacher Dunn that she would never be any good at discipline because she had gone to a parochial secondary school (a few months later he was beaten up in the cafeteria). When Teacher Dunn challenged some of these tenets in her night class at a local school of education, she was told that if she did not conform she would not get her degree.

"Don't Sign Anything." All in all, ex-Teacher Dunn paints a bleak picture of a top-heavy bureaucracy, riddled with chattering experts and with teachers deprived of authority and afraid to differ ("Don't ever sign anything," one teacher advised). For objective truth, the educationists had substituted the pragmatist's sliding scale; for discipline, student whim; for teaching, a catering to interests that were for the most part sex, noise and violence. "This new methodology," says Author Dunn, "has raised a breed of child afraid of no one, awed by no rule or regulation . . . School . . . has become [these children's] toy, and they cannot understand a teacher's refusal to let them play with it ...

"The prevailing idea regarding texts is that if one is too difficult, get an easier, more 'modern' one . . . The print gets larger, the pictures more numerous, and I fear that the next and final development will be the substitution of pictures for words. Language faces a similar dissolution . . . And the niceties of thought will disappear with the words to express them and the books in which others have expressed them before. Unfortunately, many educators today are delighted with such developments, for they feel they are getting 'to the people' at last. It is rather the people who are getting at them, with the results that are to be expected . . . The educational level sinks to the lowest common denominator, and, ironically, no one benefits, not even the most ignorant, for he finds his ignorance accepted as the norm. All those more intelligent, those capable of being intellectually advanced, find formal education less and less of a challenge. I suggest that youth never knew that learning was such a bitter pill until it was so elaborately coated."

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