Are Our Public Schools Doing Their Job?

by AGNES E. MEYER

1

IOWE to the New York City public school system four years of the most thorough formal and formative education. I went to Morris High School when it was first opened. And a more brilliant group of teachers I have never encountered anywhere. Dr. Denbigh gave me a love of mathematics which it took three whole years of college teaching to weaken. Miss Davis taught Latin so well that I passed my Freshman exams with a minimum of effort. Miss Bates and Dr. Tildsley, our teachers of ancient history, and Mr. Pyne, our Greek teacher, made of the classic world the liveliest possible discipline. And in all of these studies we were so well prepared that we public school graduates acquired a fine contempt for the less severe training of the private schools.

Ours was, to be sure, a strictly academic program. Our alert young minds absorbed it much as a blotter absorbs ink. And not until we had been out of college several years did we realize that it was not the best of all preparations for life in a troubled world.

As a trustee of Barnard, my own college, I now have another link with the educational world of New York City. This responsibility makes me very conscious of the fact that right under the northern windows of Barnard College, of Teachers College, of Columbia University, of Union Theological Seminary, there exist the most horrible living conditions to be found in any of our American cities.

While Columbia’s scientists contribute to the world’s knowledge in their laboratories; while the sociologists lecture on racial tensions and the economists tell their classes how the world should be run; while the leading educational experts of our country encourage their pupils to write doctors’ theses on pedagogy — which nobody ever reads — and our most liberal theologians expound the doctrines of Christianity, a swarming mass of neglected, illiterate, undernourished American citizens, as well as many cultured families who are cooped in this black ghetto because of the color of their skin, have made of that great university something like a besieged bastion of professionalism, intellectuality, and learning.

I cannot give a more dramatic picture than this of the truth that education has fallen behind in one of the central problems with which our democracy must cope; namely, the split that exists in our civilization between science and society, between our accumulation of expert techniques and our spontaneity in applying those techniques to the problems of everyday living.

To be sure, not many situations present in such glaring extremes the gap that exists in our country between the promise of education and its achievements. But that gap between the school and the local environment is always present in some degree, and the school curriculum should be concerned primarily with narrowing it.

What, after all, are we trying to accomplish today in the broad field of social endeavor, in which public education is our greatest single resource? We are in a life-and-death struggle for survival with competing ideologies, competing systems of government, and competing systems of economic organization. Furthermore, the fear is widespread lest a third world war annihilate our civilization. Therefore our prime need is undoubtedly international stability and peace.

But our international position depends largely upon our strength, both physical and moral, here at home. The central problem of our nation is the stabilization of family and community life in an orderly society so that the individual will feel firm ground under his feet. Then and only then will the fears that breed hatred, rivalry, crime, and fanaticism be assuaged by a profound sense of security. And the only nation-wide instrument for establishing the unity, order, and security that are the moral imperatives of the day is undoubtedly our public school system, We must agree with President Conant when he says: “The chances of a non-revolutionary development of our nation in the next fifty years will be determined by our educational system.”

Thus, the specific problem of the public school and its curriculum is to bridge this gap between our immense resources of knowledge and the social maladjustment that stares us in the face whether in our great cities or in our rural areas.

The obvious necessity of adapting the school curriculum to community needs, in order that we may build a better world, is already felt in the modern trends of curriculum-making. What are they?

1. Educational methods in the lower reaches are becoming less formal in ways of learning and in human classroom relationships.

2. The teachers are aware that the curriculum must be centered on the problems of the environment.

3. The curriculum is aimed at making the school a greater power for good in the life of the community.

Because of these existing trends in the school curriculum, many of our schools claim that they do reach the community. But they don’t. In New York and other large cities the problem is particularly difficult because the community is not always clearly defined, and even when it is, the teachers do not live there. Under the most favorable circumstances, in the average American city or village, the function of the school in its relationships with the community has not yet been clearly defined. And that affects not only the curriculum but the methods of imparting it and the role of the teacher in our society.

The first difficulty we must face is that our teachers are hampered by theories of education that have no meaning in this revolutionary era. A great many of our teachers would do a far better job if they were free to do so. Theories about education are useless unless they are taken over into experience.

The great mistake which our school administrators make is that they are too much concerned with verbalizing the school objectives instead of relaying upon the teacher to formulate them. Many administrators also feel it their duty to implement their abstract programs. But they can’t possibly do this. The implementors are the teachers, and the program can go no further than the teacher can go and is free to go. In other words, the top echelons of the educational world exaggerate their function and are tempted to become dictators. After all, what is the curriculum? It is never better than the teachers; and the schools that think they can live on inflated manifestoes and rigid administration are fooling themselves.

What is method? John Dewey has given us the best definition. “Method is ihe adjustment of subject matter to the nurture of I bought.”If you want to have modern methods, you have to begin with a modern teacher. If you want a curriculum that is flexible and nurtures thought, you have to have teachers who are flexible and who are free to think. Teachers, therefore, should be chosen for their intellectual spontaneity rather than for ability to memorize things they have read. And flexible teachers having been found, they must be part of a school system that not only allows them to remain flexible but encourages them to grow more so. To the extent that administration is concentrated on developing the teacher, her personality, spontaneity, and growth, it is exercising its most important function.

But at present too many administrators try to show teachers with long experience that what they are attempting to do is wrong and hopelessly out of date. This effort to transform an entire group along theoretical lines is doomed to failure. The average teacher — and the average teacher has no greater share of talent than the average member of any other profession — if left to devise her own means of handling the new social, psychological, and moral problems of community relations, will find more constructive solutions than if her personality is thwarted by the imposition of new methods, however good, from above, Just average experienced teachers growing in awareness and insight can do the jobs that now confront them, in and out of ihe schoolroom, if they are encouraged by their superiors.

We must face the fact, however, that the present school staff, which is already overburdened with large classes, cannot take on all the new functions that we expect of them. It is sheer folly to think that our overworked teachers with oversized classes can carry in addition family and community contacts; adult education; health, recreation, and guidance programs. It just can t be done. The concept of the number of teachers we need in our schools, if they are to function successfully as the bulwark of our society, must be radically changed. To be sure, that will be expensive, but revitalized schools will more than justify their cost by strengthening our whole social structure at a period when we are in a life-and-death struggle for survival.

2

ALL that I have said presupposes a very different status for our teachers from that which they now enjoy. It implies that our educators are real leaders of community life and entitled by virtue of their high responsibility to confidence, respect, and a good salary. Because of our long preoccupation with purely material objectives, our industrialized population has forgotten that the teacher is the school and the school is the heartheat of our organic society. As a result the role of the public school teacher in our society has been minimized. Too long have teachers the country over been oppressed by members of Boards of Education and school administrators, who have looked upon them as mere employees.

This contemptuous attitude is a by-product of the businessman’s uncivilized belief that respect is due only to those who “have met a payroll.” Well, these businessmen must now learn that there are several roles in life far more important to our nation than a payroll, and the role of the public school teacher is one of them. They must realize that, thanks largely to strong state organizations and labor union membership, the days when educators were content to be symbols of underpaid virtue are gone forever. Let’s have no more “Goodbye, Mr. Chips!" sentimentalism about the meek, self-effacing teacher. Let’s kiss Mr. Chips good-bye forever. Why should academic freedom be reserved for college professors? Let us emphasize that our schools can be no better than our teachers, and that our teachers can carry out their high function only in an atmosphere of freedom, dignity, and an appreciation that expresses itself in good salaries as well as social consideration.

Then and only then will the teachers be able to do the honest job of individual guidance for their pupils which is now essential. This counseling cannot be entrusted wholly to the so-called experts. It is a matter of applied common sense which every experienced teacher possesses. But if guidance is to be effective, the teacher must be free to tell the truth about the shortcomings of our defective society. Our schools, for example, are expected to inculcate American ideals, uphold our system of democracy and free enterprise, and teach more American history. Nothing but skepticism, aggression, and delinquency is aroused in pupils if what they hear in the classroom has no relationship to what they see all around them. You cannot inculcate ideals in the school if they are brutally contradicted by the actual life of which the child is a part.

Whatever the curriculum of the school may be, whether the subject is history, civics, geographv, or just plain reading and writing, it must be related to the social climate in the most frank and honest manner. Teachers should no longer hesitate to criticize our local economic, social, and moral shortcomings in the light of our American ideals, especially when the environment is a glaring illustration of these shortcomings. Our traditional aspirations for freedom, justice, and equalily cannot be given a fortifying reality unless the teacher is free to point out that in spite of obvious failures in many directions, there are honest and valiant forces in our country that are laboring toward the rectification of the injustices created by our rapid industrial expansion. Then the child, instead of being discouraged and even outraged by our so-called ideals, will develop a determination to join the forces that, are trying to shape our future society nearer to the heart’s desire.

Above all, the child, however impoverished his environment may be, must be made to feel that the public school is the open door to equal economic and social opportunity and the greatest influence to prevenl the stratification of our society; that it is not only the key to a rich and fruitful life but the means bv which our nation preserves and buttresses and expands the possibilities for individual freedom. Then the overworked word “democracy “ will again become a vital realitv for our children; they will become more discerning of propaganda that tries to break down their faith in our free enterprise system; they will understand the social and biological importance of the family; their devotion to democracy will find outlets for community service: and they will believe that all minority groups and all the disinherited can and must share in the privileges and the responsibilities of democratic living.

3

IN the development of its community relations, the public school must severely reject every responsibility which it cannot and should not attempt to carry. The trend in the last decades has been to dump every social problem upon the school. The schools have been blamed for crime, delinquency, sexual immorality, poor citizenship, and what not. They should never have permitted these accusations to go unanswered. One of the prime functions of the school, today, is to put these problems back upon the community as a whole, where they belong. It must educate the adults of the community to realize that these social problems are community problems, and that the school can merely help to devise ways and means of meeting them.

Child health, for example, is a critical problem before the child ever comes to school. Patterns of juvenile delinquency are often set at an early age. The school cannot decrease the divorce rate or mend broken homes. In fact, the more parents abdicate their responsibilities toward their children and surrender them to the public school, the more the home will be undermined. The children’s families must be drawn into the school orbit, in coöperative endeavors to solve these problems, so that the school and the parents will not be working at cross purposes, and so that the parents will come to understand more readily what the school can do for their boys and girls, and what only the parents can do for them.

Another major function of the school is to pull together the total resources of the community — its health, welfare, and numerous other facilities — into a unified pattern of childhood protection instead of the present segmented welfare approach which confuses both the child and the family. Our clutter of community services, in spite of attempts at better coordination, still wastes incredible sums of money and energy while human misery remains unalleviated. We must learn to defeat this growing complexity of community life and reduce it to a new simplicity. The public school is the only institution we possess that can bring this beneficent, unifying, simplifying, humanizing influence to bear upon the everyday life of the child. Only if we think of the community-centered school in such practical terms can we work out a constructive modern curriculum. And not until the school clarifies the thinking of the community can we make the salutary, even though limited, role of our public schools understandable as the harmonizing focus of all the conflicting elements of our democratic structure.

Since the public school has this primary mission to strengthen community solidarity, to stabilize family life and give all children a sense of brotherhood, it should refuse categorically to become the battleground of sectarian religious beliefs. It should flatly reject even the slightest responsibility for the sectarian religious training of the child. Just as it is disastrous to family life if parents abdicate their responsibilities to the school, so it is disastrous to the Churches to abdicate their responsibilities in however small a degree to the schools. The religious training of the child is the dual responsibility of the Church and the home. The attempt to make it a triple responsibility will only confuse the child’s religious life.

Those of us who grew up in the secular public school and loved it attained concurrently and independently of it a fundamental, systematic religious training all the more profound and lasting in influence because it emerged from close and reassuring ties between the Church or the Synagogue and our homes. Therefore those of us who date back to this benign and truly American era in which Church and State were rigidly separated, while remaining friendly, allied forces, deplore with nostalgic regrets the passions that have been inflamed by the entrance of sectarian groups info the peaceful, democratic cohesion of the public school atmosphere.

We cannot help feeling to the very depths of heart and soul that regardless of court decisions, the present conflicts between religious groups and between the Churches and the Supreme Court would never have threatened the nation’s peace of mind had the firmly established independence of Church and school never been shattered. But having discovered through bitter experience why our Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment, and suffering as we do from the animosities which the releasedtime program has inflicted upon our communities and our nation, how can anyone who is concerned about the welfare of our country still be for it?

What we now seek in this nation and what we must find is a common ground of humanitarian values and principles valid for all people and applicable throughout the world. We must achieve a social order that will harmonize all sectional, economic, and sectarian interests, or civilization will continue to crumble. The desire for unity and stability is the moral imperative of the day. Without the unity of a stable society in which variety can freely function, our various economic and religious forces will destroy each other in perpetual combat. And if this unity is not achieved, peacefully, through democratic coöperative endeavor, it will come through force simply because human beings will weary of their fears, their uncertainties, and their horror of conflict and disorder.

We have no time to lose in vain recriminations. The fate of Western civilization rests in our hands. No nation has ever faced so heavy a responsibility. It has no parallel in history. If we are not to fail in this sacred mission, we must first of all establish peace and good will here at home. That is the prime reason why we must make our public schools what they once were and should always remain: the strongest agency we possess for mutual love, tolerance, and forgiveness between all races, classes, and creeds.

This cannot come about until the released-time programs, of whatever nature, are abolished. Then, and only then, can we re-establish for our boys and girls that all-embracing spiritual unity which has always been the saving grace of democracy, that profound sense of brotherhood which nourished, fortified, and enriched our own childhood, and which will always be the real defense of this country against totalitarianism and all other forces that are hostile to human liberty.

4

I MUST come back to the gap I pictured between science and society. This was created to a great extent by the separation of what is allegedly vocational from what is allegedly cultural education. This cleavage has been responsible for some of the major shortcomings of our civilization. We failed to accompany vocational or scientific training with an appreciation of its function in society and its responsibility to society — in short, with that insight into human values which helps the individual to develop perspective, judgment, and discrimination in the formation of intelligent, purposes.

If our scientists and other professional experts forget why they do things and place their whole emphasis on techniques or how to do things: if they think too much about means and too little about ends, it is because their education in school and in later years failed to emphasize the connection of their skills with the larger purposes of life. If we have lost control over historical events, it is due largely to this split between science and the wisdom that is the fruit of a balanced development.

But the answer is not, as many people now think, in a flight from science to the classics or to metaphysics. To be sure, we need the classics. But we need as well far more vocational, professional, and scientific training that will produce vast numbers of experts who are educated and humane persons in the fullest sense of those words, and who will therefore keep their expert knowledge responsive to social needs.

To achieve a sufficient number of these humanistic or socialized experts of the high quality we now need, the public schools must give more attention and support to talented children. Our educational methods, like our health and welfare programs, are overconcentrated upon the physically handicapped, the mentally retarded, and the average child. Of course we must help the weak, but we must put more of our endeavor into helping the strong if our nation is ever going to develop its fullest human, civic, and ethico-political capacities. Our schools now have the problem of mass education on their hands, but if we are not going to debase our democratic culture to the lowest common denominator, our liberty must be the means of creating and promoting the superior individual.

Once our children begin to feel that they can get ahead in the public schools as fast as their abilities expand, it should also be possible to inspire them all with a renewed love of hard work. If our schools can be accused of laxness, it is because they do not demand enough effort and application from our boys and girls. We are bringing them up in an overprotected and coddled atmosphere. The parents insist that everybody should be promoted regardless of achievement and then they expect their children to become happy, well-adjusted citizens in a highly competitive economic world. As a result, of this equalitarianism in our schools, work is beginning to be looked upon as an evil in our society which everybody should avoid as much as possible.

It is high time the public schools deliberately counteracted this debilitating trend in our national psychology. Our children must be made to understand that just as there is no royal road, so there is no democratic road to learning. They must be made to feel the joy of work, of ambition, of continuous application and self-development, and learn that this joy can be earned only by the sweat of their brows.

Our nation is at a low moral ebb as a result of two world wars and the panic fear of a third. Certainly one way back to moral principles, self-discipline, and fortitude is to call into action from earliest childhood the resources of human energy for which the American spirit has always been noted. Our children would then realize that the moral force to be derived from strenuous individual and cooperative endeavor results in a sense of freedom, security, and power that no government can confer upon them and no government can take away.

To achieve the social orientation of our public schools and develop the new curriculum and methods which will emerge as a by-product, our public schools need the sympathy and active support of the local businessmen, industrialists, bankers, and other civic leaders. All local community leadership must now rally around our public schools as the one best hope we have for the preservation and growth of a democratic society and the maintenance of a free economy. The interest of laymen has always been a determining factor in good schools. But it was never more needed than now.

Moreover, if we are to live up to our ideal of equality of opportunity for all our children, we must take a state and nation-wide interest in education. We would not now have the serious racial and social problems in the overcrowded areas north of Columbia University if we had had the foresight and the humanity to help the South increase and improve its schools. The rich city of New York is appealing for funds from the Federal government to build more schools. It must also support Federal aid to education for all states, if only to protect itself from further floods of in-migration from our less productive areas. Communities in the State of New York spend as much as $6000 per classroom, whereas many a Southern school has as little as $100, an unbalance of sixty to one. A free society which permits such brutal inequalities is headed toward disaster, for freedom cannot be preserved where such injustice is allowed to continue.

Clearly the new orientation of our schools is a national problem and not merely a concern of the professional educator. It is indeed our number one problem, for upon its solution depends our intellectual, moral, and military defense throughout the “cold war" with a powerful and hostile nation which we shall have to endure for many years to come. Let us not play into the hands of Communism by confining ourselves to a defensive pattern of thought and action. We can take for granted the superiority of our free democratic life. What we dare not take for granted is the realization of our ideals. We need to extend our civil liberties to all alike, and to strengthen the institutions, especially our public schools, which are the foundation of those civil liberties.

The public schools have a long way to go before they can realize our ideals of equality, solidarity, and universal justice. But we can readily transform the quality and quantity of our public education if we use the invincible human forces engendered by coöperative living and prove that our democratic processes are more than equal to all the dynamic problems of the day.