A strident trumpet took up the what's-wrong-with-our-colleges refrain. New York University's Professor of Philosophy Sidney Hook, in a new book (Education for Modern Man, Dial; $2.75), blew a sweet note for John Dewey and experimental education, a sour blast for Chicago's Robert Hutchins and the classic tradition.
Says Hook: "Whatever a liberal education is, few American colleges offer it." Only "educational quacks," Hook adds, share the St. John's and Chicago faith in the classics as a storehouse of answers to man's perennial problems. It is "hazardous ... to lay down an ideal education for all men, at all times, everywhere."
Hook calls narrow...