• U.S.

Education: Teaching in America

3 minute read
TIME

“Education is indeed the dullest of subjects,” remarks Jacques Barzun in his newly published Teacher in America (Little, Brown; $3), “and I intend to say as little about it as I can.”

Author Barzun has little indeed to say about Education, i.e., the vast, vague “phantasmagoria,” the “sulphur-and-brimstone nebula,” the “overheated Utopia” that is popularly expected to “make the City of God out of Public School No. 26.” But about Teaching he says plenty. His brisk, irreverent, earnest book will ventilate a good many stuffy rooms in the U.S. schoolhouse.

Jacques Barzun, 37-year-old son of a French scholar, was only nine when he taught his first class. That was in France during World War I, under the so-called Lancaster system, by which older pupils teach the younger. He followed his father to the U.S., found himself advanced enough in French, mathematics and philosophy to start a small tutoring business, worked his way through Columbia by ghostwriting on the side. Graduating in 1927 at the head of his class, he was promptly hired to teach at his alma mater and has been at it ever since; he is now assistant professor of history.

From his years on the platform, Teacher Barzun draws one sober conclusion: teaching—properly done—is one of the world’s hardest jobs. “An hour [of it] is certainly the equivalent of a whole morning of office work. . . . Sabbatical leaves are provided so you can have your coronary thrombosis off the campus.”

Some other Barzun observations:

¶ Hokum has become an occupational disease of teachers.

¶ Readers should be spared the half-buzz-half-hush of libraries, “which is distinctly worse than overhead riveting.”

¶ “Science teachers may be said to contribute the greatest proportion of backward-looking, anti-intellectual, mechanic-minded members of the faculty.”

“[The 100-best-books] idea tries to do in college what the educated man should be expected to do for himself ten or 15 years after his graduation.”

¶ Grants to colleges have misguidedly subsidized materials oftener than men. The Ph.D. degree has become the “union card” of the U.S. college teacher; good non-union teachers are passed over for “wolves wrapped in sheepskin.”

Good teachers, concludes Teacher Barzun, make facts live by relating them to their living sources. Thus they make their students the masters, not the slaves, of facts. “If teaching and learning have a practical goal,” he declares, “it is this: to keep the men who run our national plant from being run by it.”

Professor Barzun was not alone last week in suggesting that the U.S. does not possess the best of all possible educational systems. From three other sources came briskly critical cracks:

¶ Said Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell, didactic Episcopal churchman: “The modern American university . . . will not face fundamental moral issues. . . . It ignores God and thinks and acts as though man is a creature who only needs to know the right in order to do it. The result . . . is an academic befuddlement which makes American university education today not a guide out of confusion into order but only an additional source of confusion.”

¶ Allen B. Crow, president of the Economic Club of Detroit, reported that almost all of 200-odd business and professional leaders he had questioned consider U.S. higher education a waste of time & money.

¶ Said Dr. Allan V. Heely, headmaster of New Jersey’s Lawrenceville School: “American education is . . . aimless, unorganized and purposeless.”

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