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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| The Defeat of the Schools |
| 2009-04-19 |
| Hat tip Jerry Pournelle for this 1939 article Most people--certainly most laymen--would be apt to think that the chief business of the schools is to give pupils at least a modest working knowledge of the subjects of the curriculum. Not a few students of education, it is true, consider that this is a misconception, and that the true purpose of schools is to bring about an adjustment to social demands for which the various subjects are at best only means. Nobody, however, who surveys the conventional working apparatus of courses of study, textbooks, recitations, examinations, and marks can have much doubt that in practice the schools are making the mastery of the curriculum an end in itself. Whether in theory they ought to or not, this in fact is what they are manifestly trying to do. But they are not succeeding. About that there is no room for theorizing. Nor is their failure sporadic, and confined to a few places where management is unusually bad. It occurs almost universally, in the cities and in the country, in large institutions and in small. The schools go through an elaborate, costly, and exasperating set of motions called teaching natural science, foreign languages, English, and so forth. Yet what is contained in textbooks and syllabi obstinately refuses to transfer itself to the minds of the patrons and stay there. In the grand struggle to get subject matter off the page and into the head, the schools are suffering a spectacular and most disconcerting defeat. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |