Thirty years of "life adjustment" by the followers of Progressive Educator John Dewey have left U.S. education over adjusted, ill-equipped to quicken intellectual life. This week, in "The Deeper Problem in Education," LIFE takes stock of the situation.
CONFIDENT of their own established values in ethics, law and culture, the old-fashioned teachers deliberately set out to pass down these values as part of a living tradition. They held that it was all one cultural heritage—everything from Boyle's Law to Cicero's First Oration against Catiline—and the more of it you learned, the wiser and more mentally alert you would be.
Dewey and his disciples...