"It is not possible to spend any prolonged period visiting public school classrooms without being appalled by the mutilation visible everywhere—mutilation of spontaneity, of joy in learning, of sense of self. Because adults take the schools so much for granted, they fail to appreciate what grim, joyless places most American schools are . . . what contempt they unconsciously display for children."
Such a jeremiad is not the conclusion of a radical school reformer but of a concerned FORTUNE editor who visited more than 100 schools during a 3½-year, $300,000 study sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation. Charles Silberman, 45, is the author of a perceptive summary of race relations, Crisis in Black and White. His new book, Crisis in the Classroom (Random House; $10), is likely to be as widely discussed as James B. Conant's 1959 report, The American High School Today. Silberman finds that even highly reputed schools are so preoccupied with order and discipline that they neglect real education.
No Questions. In a $3,000,000 suburban "school of the future," reports Silberman, promotional brochures describe the central-core library as the school's "nerve center." Yet during the school's first year of operation, children were allowed to go there only once a week, and then not to read but to practice taking books from the shelves and returning them. The second year they were not permitted to go at all because the part.-time librarian had returned to teaching spelling. Prejudice compounds primness, says Silberman. In one fifth-grade classroom, a black youngster raised his hand to ask a question. The principal, visiting for the day, snapped, "Put your dirty hand down and stop bothering the teacher with questions."
Equally depressing, writes Silberman, most of the reforms suggested by academics touting new courses and computers have left "the schools themselves largely unchanged"—chiefly because their proponents fall into the same trap that hobbles school staffs. "It simply never occurs to more than a handful to ask why they are doing what they are doing . . . What is mostly wrong with the public schools is mindlessness—a failure to think seriously about purposes or consequences."
Baking Cakes. Silberman's ideal of what schools should be doing is hard to fault: he is convinced that they can help "create and maintain a humane society" by making their first priority the production of "sensitive, autonomous, thinking, humane individuals." In a glowing chapter, he reports that his ideal is already close to reality in about half the primary schools in England, where orthodoxy is giving way to highly informal "open" classrooms. At first glance, they look like chaotic kindergartens: children move around talking; rows of desks are replaced by "workshop areas" arranged throughout the room and in nearby corridors.