(3 of 4)
I am disgusted by your repeated attacks on American education, of which your review of Lynd's book is just another example. All your "oceans of piffle" are based on the same hackneyed theme that if only John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick and their ideas had never existed, then education would be far better than it is ... Your war should not be directed against educators who are earnestly attempting to improve the profession but against conditions which foster substandard teaching . . . Substandard teaching has its origin in the community, not with John Dewey . . .
LESTER H. ROSENTHAL
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
Sir:
I am very grateful for the review of my book . . . but I am sorry you used the phrase "Oceans of Piffle" as the heading of the article. It is a felicitous one to describe much of the content of Educationism, but it is not original with me. In my book I quoted it, with credit, from Professor Harold L. Clapp of Grinnell College, a scholarly critic who discerned the shoddiness in Educationism long before I did.
ALBERT LYND
New York City
Sir:
. . . Permit me to say sadly, "How true, how true." The fact remains that despite all of this effort to try to make children happy in school, it leaves them uneducated for the most part . . . School should teach people how to study . . . how to read, how to concentrate on really tough subjects, to persevere in them and to conquer them . . .
As a member of the armed services, I am faced, for the first time in my life, with a group of men who are near illiterates. They do not read to enlighten themselves, or to inform, or even to entertain. If it hasn't got pictures, most of them are stuck. What is the result? In a first-class bureaucracy like the modern army or navy or air force, with its myriad regulations which one must be able to interpret and analyze to get along, we have boys who do not know what they are doing, or why, and never will . . .
DAVID W. BROWN
San Antonio
Sir:
The review brings to mind a comment from a teacher (in Texas) about some children from California schools, which have gone, to put it mildly, hog-wild over modern education: "They're pretty weak on the fundamentals—they can't spell, and they don't write legibly ; they can't read well, and they don't know much about arithmetic. But they're beautifully adjusted—they just know that they know everything" . . .
BARBARA MARSH
San Diego
The Ten Lost Tribes
Sir:
Whilst appreciating the honor TIME [Aug. 31] bestowed in featuring the teaching of the British Israel World Federation . . . I would like to correct the impression made by the use of the word "cult." As the Oxford Dictionary defines this as a "system of religious worship," the federation pleads "not guilty," for it is an interdenominational organization; it has no church status ... It is an organization ... of all the recognized Christian denominations . . . We believe in the Second Coming and the establishment of His Kingdom on Earth [and] in the continuity throughout history of the whole House of Israel from whom the Celto-Saxon race is descended ... It is not to be dismissed as a heresy or a spare-time hobby . . .
HAROLD E. STOUGH
Secretary
The British Israel World Federation