"Quackery in the Public Schools": An Answer

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IN the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly, there appears under the title “Quackery in the Public Schools” an article by Albert Lynd, who is referred to in the foreword as “an ex-teacher now happily established in business in Boston.” Mr. Lynd, Harvard A.B. and A.M., delivers himself of an omnibus of complaints regarding what he considers to be fundamental and damning defects in the current American public education picture. With much of what he contends I am in sympathy, but with his interpretation of the implications, causes, and solutions of these educational shortcomings I am in sharp disagreement.

Education has become a tremendous enterprise in our country. If one were to add the number of students in all our schools to the number of teachers, administrators, supervisors, and other educational functionaries, and if to this were added, on a pro-rata basis, the number of workers from other fields involved part time in school activities (for instance, time given to textbook publication by general publishers or time given to school building programs by architects and contractors), we would arrive at the staggering conclusion that something like two sevenths of the total workday effort of our entire population is being devoted to educational pursuits. Nowhere else in the world or in all history has there been anything comparable to this.

Our educational enterprise has inevitably become extremely complicated. Our school ladder has been going down through the elementary grades to the kindergartens, the nursery schools, and now the pre-nursery schools, while on the upper rounds of the ladder we are extending educational service in the field of adult education to include attempts (in at least one adult education program) to help actual seniles in making better adjustment to the very last, stages of life experience. Along with this vertical expansion has gone a bewildering increase in the kinds of educational activities, both curricular and extracurricular, on all grade levels in public schools. A great deal of this much maligned “enrichment” has been forced upon the schools through the failure of church, family, and various social institutions to perform as they once did in guiding youth. The problems created by the growing complexity of our environment have also had to be reflected in our schools.

Our school population has become more and more heterogeneous and the enforcement of our compulsory school attendance legislation has brought into our high schools whole segments of the population not represented there even one generation ago. The near-moron and the maladjusted child who dropped out of school in the lower primary grades in the “good old days” now persist as problems in the secondary schools.

To contend that all this educational activity can be efficiently conducted without many kinds of specially prepared professional personnel is to be unrealistic in the extreme.

The professional field of Education, née Pedagogy, is still a relatively young entrant into the academic circle. Like all the other numerous additions to the big four of the medieval university professional curriculum, Theology, Civil Law, Canon Law, and Medicine, it has had a hard struggle to win acceptance. Education has been confronted with more than the usual resistance because of the manner of its introduction into many of our liberal arts colleges and because its content cut across so many of the traditional fields. What many have failed to realize is that the liberal arts colleges of this country up to about the period of the First World War had, on the average, approximately 45 per cont of their graduates entering teaching either with a career objective or for temporary employment to clear up college debts. Most of this teaching was done in public secondary schools.

When state laws and state Department of Education regulations requiring the completion of certain education courses as a prerequisite to the granting of teaching licenses were put into operation, these colleges were confronted with a problem. Courses in education had to be offered so that the liberal arts graduates would not be at a disadvantage in seeking teaching positions. All too often the college president would scrutinize his faculty personnel and select a victim who could be easily, even gladly, spared by his departmental colleagues to meet the emergency. This worthy would be told that thenceforth, willy-nilly, he was to be a Department of Education and teach whatever courses were required for teaching licenses. His students were usually from the lower half of their respective classes and had as little enthusiasm for these required courses as he did. For materials the instructor frequently had to turn to texts originally designed for the old two-year normal schools and wholly unsuited for senior college use. The dismal results of this combination of untoward elements were inevitable.

In the period following the First World War, however, there emerged a corps of educationists with adequate general background and demonstrated competence in their professional spheres, and today any school board or institutional president wishing such professional service has available a wide choice among personnel who have excellent cultural backgrounds, first-rate professional training, and adequate, successful public school experience. They are capable of preparing teachers, conducting serious research, organizing surveys, administering educational programs, and providing a wealth of specialized staff skills.

There has also been a commensurate improvement in the quality of content in education courses. Besides, to qualify for a teaching license in most states, the liberal arts college student actually does not have to take very many education courses. This requirement has been grossly misrepresented to the public by those trying to lay the blame for such shortcomings as our public schools may have upon the educationists. Ordinarily four onesemester courses out of the typical forty-course undergraduate curriculum suffice. History of Education, Philosophy (or Principles) of Education, Educational Psychology, and Methods of Teaching constitute the usual requirement. Of these, at least three can be so organized and taught as to be no “dilution” whatsoever of a bona fide liberal arts program. Surely the History of Education, as now taught in first-rank institutions, represents a much more significant aspect of historical background than much of the array of splintered courses currently offered in many Departments of History. A similar argument may be offered in support of the Philosophy of Education and Educational Psychology. Naturally, the quality of these courses is dependent upon the backgrounds and abilities of the instructors. There is also a trend toward the requirement of a graduate period of practice teaching or internship under close supervision (usually part time for a year), but the practicality involved in this requirement is so obviously related to the protection of school children as to need no defense.

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WHY is it that nearly all public school teachers, when they wish to improve themselves as teachers through additional study, find themselves doing this work in Schools or Departments of Education? Why aren’t they candidates for advanced degrees in other fields? In the answer to these questions we begin to see this whole educational picture more clearly.

First I should like to relate an experience of my own in this connection. After my first year’s apprenticeship as a teacher of American history in high school, I decided to improve my background in the field by taking a graduate course at a near-by university. Arrangements were made for me to spend my afternoons and some evenings for an academic year in a research library working with colonial news letters and primary source data dealing with colonial trade. The instructor was (and still is) rightly considered one of the two or three ranking scholars in the field. I gathered enough evidence during the year to support a five or six line paragraph on the triangular rum, slaves, molasses trade in a monograph being written by the instructor and was given a certificate indicating that I had completed a twelve-hour doctoral minor in American Colonial History. I had gained some insight into the so-called scientific basis for history writing and a few odd facts, but so far as the relationship of this experience to my work as a secondary school teacher was concerned, the results were practically nil. A few evenings reading in general history texts would have given me much more benefit.

The point I am trying to illustrate is that, in many areas, the highly specialized courses offered in most university graduate schools have little relationship to the sort of service properly expected of public school teachers. They are designed for research scholars who have altogether different objectives. The schools of education recognize this situation and plan offerings accordingly.

Another difficulty presented by the graduate schools is that they are in general organized to serve full-time graduate students who can participate in the regular day-schedule of class offerings. Although no one has ever been able to establish any correlation between the time of day or year and scholarship, graduate deans shy away from offering or recognizing work to be done in the evening or at summer schools. The public school teacher, operating on a low salary, cannot afford leaves of absence for full-time graduate study. The teacher’s work schedule carries well into the afternoon. This leaves late afternoon, evening, and summer vacation periods available. The schools of education provide for this need. A number of the graduate degree programs offered jointly by Departments of Education and Divisions of Arts and Sciences have collapsed because the Arts and Sciences Divisions simply do not provide the so-called “content ” courses at times convenient to in-service teachers or cater to the teachers’ interests in the treatment of the courses.

Elementary teachers have to teach in all the subjects of the elementary curriculum; few of them can specialize. The curricula of teachers’ colleges are adjusted to this. High school teachers usually must teach two or three different subjects, sometimes in wholly unrelated fields. In practice, the applicant for a high school job frequently must have competency in a major subject, a minor subject (minor to him), a third subject which he can teach if necessary, and some knowledge of an extraclass activity which he can supervise. He is not much interested in one-eyed graduate specialization.

The more one considers the problems of the publie school teacher on the one hand and the objectives of university graduate schools on the other, the more apparent it becomes that they are poles apart. There is obviously much more difference between the traditional graduate programs and what is called for in teacher preparation than there is between the graduate study of political science and the professional study of law, the graduate study of biology and the professional study of medicine, the study of English and journalism, and so on. With this in mind, the emergence of the professional teachers’ colleges and schools of education becomes a logical and necessary development.

Mr. Lynd contends that some of these teacher education institutions are diploma mills. Unfortunately, some of them are; so are many colleges and universities in general. It was hardly a half generation ago that the bulk of the old two-year normal schools, which had been doing a creditable job in preparing elementary school teachers, were converted by legislative enactments into four-year degree-granting teachers’ colleges preparing high school teachers in addition to those for the lower schools. Too many of these schools simply were not ready for this abrupt expansion at that time; but as a group, the teachers’ colleges have steadily improved, with some in the East, the North-Central area, and the Far West now having better academic performance than many of the liberal arts colleges in their localities. These teacher-preparing institutions have had to expand on a desperation basis during much of their history because of the phenomenally rapid growth of our school population. And training schools have had to deal with people willing to teach in spite of microscopic salaries and miserable working conditions. Now conditions are improving somewhat with respect to the attractiveness of public school teaching, so that we may look for better possibilities in the way of teacher pro paration.

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WITH regard to Mr. Lynd’s contention that there has been far too much multiplication of specialized courses in education with resultant superficiality, one has to agree; but in this respect, as in others, it depends upon the institution and the field. Certain schools of education have gone hog-wild in committing this offense, while some university Departments of Education have been so restricted in offerings as to be unable to meet actual demands from teachers in their localities. Some consideration perhaps should be given to disadvantages which attach to certain education courses and activities simply because of their titles, which deal with the applied or utilitarian character of the course content. To take an extreme case, a term paper dealing with school plumbing, even though (as actually has happened) its findings may be decidedly valuable in reducing educational costs and improving school conditions, would be immediately subjected to ridicule, while a classical scholar’s paper on the details of old Roman baths would be regarded with veneration. Probably differences in the quality of plumbing are culturally significant.

Another point on this matter is that multiplication of courses, with consequent fragmentation, is one of the commonest crimes committed by all departments of instruction in all our colleges and universities. When a new departmental member arrives on a campus, the temptation is to allow him to give a new course in his doctoral specialty although the entire content of his thesis is seldom more than can be handled properly in a single class meeting. When this instructor leaves, his pet course is continued and another new course is added by his successor. If courses can be camouflaged by the protective coloration of technical jargon in their course titles and descriptions, they usually escape criticism. All departmental offerings of all schools ought to be critically examined periodically by a hatchet committee with someone like Mr. Lynd as chairman.

The teachers’ colleges can probably best be improved through the work of strong accrediting associations operating after the pattern set by the American Medical Association. Such action should begin to make itself felt before very long, but we must remember that the medical profession, with centuries of experience behind it, was still wrestling with diploma mills within our own day.

Mr. Lynd suggests that the teacher preparation program of France with its École Normale Supérieure is much more desirable than our own; but one must consider that a country which will not enact a mild Federal Aid to Education Bill because of minority objections would hardly submit to the directions of a national minister of education in a national system such as France has. The national baccalaureate examinations and the concept of a national corps of teachers under strict bureaucratic central control are all part of the picture in which the École Normale Supérieure functions. Moreover, when one regards the effects of the French system on the population as a whole, the picture isn’t quite so attractive. The undemocratic character of most European education probably had more to do with the collapse of Europe than is ordinarily realized. We need to be much more critical than we have been in evaluating European education.

Mr. Lynd’s final recommendation deals with the private schools. He feels that the parents who are at all able to do so should withdraw their children from the public schools and send them to “one of the good private schools.”

If there is a continual drain from our public schools into the various kinds of private institutions, there will be a loss of interest in and support of American public education by some of the very people who exercise influence far beyond their numbers and are most seriously needed in the improvement of such education. Various kinds of ability grouping and differentiation in curricula can be devised to care for the needs of any group without disrupting our public school organization.

Private schools are of many varieties (I assume Mr. Lynd is not referring to church schools). Some of them render an excellent educational service, particularly to specialized kinds of student personnel not yet adequately provided for in public schools. Some of them are worthless. Many of them aren’t much of anything except expensive. Much of the vaunled superiority of certain private secondary schools is based upon the prestige-granting value of their diplomas rather than on any superior educational contribution. Fair objective comparisons between topflight private preparatory schools and public high schools, in which such student factors as scholastic aptitude, family background, and educational objectives are equated or “controlled,” tend to disprove the alleged superiorities of private education.

Not too many years ago an analysis was made of the student enrollment at one of the most famous of these private schools. The study revealed that more than 80 per cent of the boys had fathers who were professional men, managers of important enterprises, or outright owners of large business establishments. A considerable portion of the graduates of this school had established no little of the prestige value of this famous institution largely by following a familiar pattern. Each entered the same Ivy League college that had been attended by his father and grandfather. In his freshman year he took the required courses, which were a repetition of those he had taken the previous year in the preparatory school (and not by accident). Amazingly enough, he passed these courses and with the assistance of his club members he made a shrewd choice of his elective courses and graduated. Upon graduation he started, in true Horatio Alger fashion, at the very bottom of the economic ladder, as vice-president of his father’s factory or corporation. When his father retired, the boy fought his way into the presidency and Who’s Who. At this stage, his former teachers could point to him with pride as a product of their superior educational disciplines.

The work of the masters in these private preparatory schools is quite different from that of the teacher in the public high school. The highly selective character of the student body automatically simplifies the educative process. Some of these masters are excellent teachers in this setting. They have acquired effective skills over the years and are in a position to render exceptional service.

Many of these men, however, could never stand the gaff of public school work and would be the first to admit it. Hearing recitations in the highly artificial, sheltered environments of some of these private schools, from students who will learn in spite of anything done to them in a narrow memorydrill curriculum, is something quite apart from the harassing problems of discipline, motivation, and adaptation that confront the typical high school teacher. Heavy teaching schedules, with classes that are random samplings of all the children of all the people, with infinite varieties of ability, interest, and need, require the utmost in professional preparation and resourcefulness.

In his first paragraph, Mr. Lynd laments the prevalence of a type of high school principal who, though he may be able to lead “an enraptured class discussion in A Democratic Solution of Our Traffic Problem,” has difficulty in deciphering the Latin date on the cornerstone of his school building. Such a predicament, of course, is too bad. But even though Mr. Lynd has a point here, I still feel that if one had to make a choice of a school administrator on the basis of even such trivial abilities, I’d favor the man interested in today’s traffic problems, which involve life, limb, and the pursuit of happiness. The Roman system of number symbols was a clumsy arrangement that effectively blocked Roman mathematical progress for centuries and perhaps ought not to be on a modern high school building. After all, we are in Anno Domini MCML face to face with the mathematics of the Atomic Age.