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Today the charge is academic "softness." James Conant does not agree—or quite disagree. Some critics, he thinks, miss their target as badly as Pamphleteer Livesey. What everybody ought to know more about, he suggests in a forthcoming book; The Child, the Parent and the State (Harvard University; $3.50), is the history of a highly significant development —the transformation of the U.S. high school from 1905 to 1930. Those who thunder that Cicero molded young minds at the turn of the century are right. But Cicero's assassin was not John Dewey alone. It was a combination of child-labor laws, compulsory school attendance, the growing need for vocational training, and the Depression, which sent jobless teenagers scurrying to school for shelter. In 1910 thousands of 15-year-olds had full-time jobs; in 1930 about 90% were in school. Result: an entirely different breed of students, with widely varying abilities. No educational system in history has ever been presented with a broader job—or opportunity.
Noah's Ark. To criticize the schools in good sense, says Conant, the first rule is to grasp their astonishing diversity: "You can find almost any animal in the system. It's like Noah's ark." The pervasive U.S. cathedral is the "comprehensive" high school, which sends some of its students to college and gives the rest marketable skills. But hundreds of schools are "special." New York City has outright detention camps for delinquents—and it also has the exquisitely superior Bronx High School of Science (TIME, May 5, 1958). Some urban schools teach 90% of their students to be auto mechanics and beauticians. Some suburban schools send 90% of their students to top colleges.
Each has different problems. The mainly vocational school has to teach skills applicable to the local job market. The suburban school has to deal with many a boy not blessed with talents to match his parents' ambitions. Nobody can judge a school's performance without analyzing how well it serves the specific needs of its students.
Summertime. The first critic to stop being constructive after 1905 was a longtime guardian angel—the college professor who once took a proprietary interest in high school standards. When professors took a good look at the proletarianized high school, they left it to what they considered a lowbrow technician—the education professor. And to figure out how to run the schools, the "educationists" seized upon Philosopher Dewey's innocent theory that children learn best by being interested instead of disciplined. It fitted the educationists problems, muses Conant, "as a key fits a lock ... If
John Dewey hadn't existed, he would have had to be invented."