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 revolted against this certitude, which had indeed grown more than a little ossified in its teaching methods. But history records no more egregious case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. "We agree," Dewey once said, "that we are uncertain as to where we are going and where we want to go, and why we are doing what we do." In a kind of country-club existentialism, Dewey and his boys genially contended that the traditional ends of education, like God, virtue and the idea of "culture," were all highly debatable and hence not worth debating. In their place: enter life adjustment.
The Deweyites thus transformed conditioning techniques into ends in themselves. Teachers' colleges assumed the dignity of lamaseries. Teachers were denied the chance of learning more about their subjects, in favor of compulsory education courses in how to teach them.
Within the schools, discipline gave way to increasingly dubious forms of group persuasion. "With teen-agers," one high school principal said proudly, "there is nothing more powerful than the approval or disapproval of the group. When the majority conforms, the others will go along."
It would not easily occur to the modern educationists that such blind fostering of group pressure is a travesty of free democracy. Such criticism honestly puzzles them, as do suggestions that they might concentrate more on dry "learning" subjects, like mathematics and languages, to the exclusion of teen-age problems, beauty care, fly casting.
The poor performance of their students has proved the educationists wrong. U.S. high school students are plain ignorant of things grammar school students would have known a generation ago. Years of barren discussion courses in English have made a whole generation chronically incoherent in the English language. Cut off from any but the most obvious contact with his tradition, e.g., an occasional project visit to the local courthouse, the student has lost his sense of history. Surely the history of the Crusades can give a young American a better grasp of the. problems implicit in the U.N. or NATO than dressing up as a Pakistani delegate in an imitation U.N. Assembly at school.