"Outfit"

Grim-eyed, stringy-haired, frumpishly virginal, the oldtime schoolmarm lived in a tradition as famed as that of the absent-minded professor. But frumps and dowds are not admired by present-day school teachers; "schoolmarm" is a fighting word. For anti-frumps there was sprightly reading last week in the sedate Journal of the National Education Association. Mrs. Lillian Gray, assistant supervisor of State Teachers College at Santa Barbara, Calif., had called together her teachers and posed the question: How can a teacher improve her personal appearance? Upon their replies she based an outline for the Journal. null to demonstrate what a chic abecedarian looks like, Mrs. Gray donned a smart brown ensemble, smiled gaily, pointed a trim toe and posed for a picture looking much like bridge-playing Mrs. Ely Culbertson (see cut). Mrs. Gray's pointers for well-dressed teachers:

Dresses: sport or semi-sport. Coats should be of fine material, smart design. "Nothing ruins an outfit like wolf, rabbit or cat trimming." Hats should be small, matching the ensemble, framing the face. Shoes should have Cuban* or French heels. "Flat heels cause an ugly ankle line." Beads: "The plainer, the better. Fancy savage-looking wooden or glass beads in loud colors detract from the face. . . ." Hair: "Hairnets are impossible. Wide, casual waves are best." Makeup: "Use enough to look healthy. . . . Wipe off excess lipstick. For those who still believe it wicked to employ coloring to [sic] the lips, a pomade stick is advisable as it is more conservative and yet adds the needed flesh tones." Wearing the clothes: "Stand straight, with stomach in and head up. Hold the shoulders proudly. Round shoulders will ruin the most carefully chosen ensemble." Conclusions: "It is better to have one outfit with all accessories matching than ten with no taste in combinations."

Having set a standard in dress, Mrs. Gray and her associates discovered seeming objections, answered them as follows:

"Teachers are intellectual rather than physical." (But intelligent ones will endeavor to look their best.)

"Teachers belong to the highest type of human being. . . ." They often stint themselves in order to support small brothers and sisters. (By adroit planning a teacher can dress well on a small outlay.)

Many feel that children are uncritical. (Untrue. Watch them brighten up when teacher appears in a smart "outfit.")

"Some teachers are uncritical themselves . . . lack high standards of dress." (Let them read style magazines, take special courses, gaze into mirrors.)

Ink, dust, chalk, clay, bad weather make teaching hard on clothes. (Use a whisk-broom, towel, shoebrush.)

"Some teachers, belonging to that docile remnant terrorized by old-fashioned school boards, still believe it wicked and frivolous to consider personal adornment." ("It is ridiculous in this day and age to think of the teacher as a 'being apart.' She has just as much right as her sisters to personal adornment.")

Education v. Instruction

Columbia University, Manhattan's vast mill of learning, prides itself on being well-organized, up-to-date. Its Nobel Prize-winning president, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, helps out not onl-- by organizing but also by getting in the public prints (Alumni Day next Feb. 12 will all but apotheosize him, celebrating the 70th year of his age, his 50th as a Columbia alumnus, his 30th as president). Last week Columbia was once more busy with what Dr. Butler calls "the newest type of university organization." Announced as opening next autumn was a New College, subsidiary of Teachers College. New College, which will have its own faculty but exist in Teachers College buildings, will be headed by Dr. Thomas Alexander who has been working on the project since 1920. Because Teachers College is for Ph.D. and M.A.-seekers. New College will be strictly undergraduate, limited at its opening to 90 students (male & female) in each of the two entering classes (freshman and junior). While New College students are busy taking academic courses and learning to teach, students from Teachers College will observe and try a hand at teaching them. Later, New College students will try their hands at teaching, spend a year's interneship in a public or private school before being given a B.S. degree.

Because New College is practical in purpose, it is likely to come in for criticism from opponents of the pragmatic curriculum (courses in foremanship, machine design, journalism, et al.) which Columbia has widely publicized. The theory upon which New College is based--that education is practical training for useful pursuits--was violently anathematized a year ago, and again last month, by Dr. Abraham Flexner (TIME, Dec. 15, 1930; Dec. 14). From another educator last week came similar but more polite strictures in The Theory of Education in the U. S., by Albert Jay Nock (Harcourt, Brace: $2). But Dr. Nock, unlike Dr. Flexner, is a cordial admirer of President Butler, a graduate (1892) of Columbia's offspring, St. Stephen's College at Annadale-on-Hudson, N. Y., where he is now visiting professor of U. S. history and politics.-- Dr. Nock's book, delivered as the Page-Barbour lectures last year at the University of Virginia, is applicable to any U. S. university. Some excerpts:

Equality, Democracy, Literacy, says Professor Nock, are the bases of U. S. education--all of them misinterpreted today. Equality, to the masses, means that all people are educable. Democrat Thomas Jefferson realized that this is not so when he planned 20 grammar schools in Virginia, in each of which only one student per class would be allowed to remain a full six years, so that "20 of the best geniuses shall be raked from the rubbish annually." Out of these 20, only ten would be allowed to go to William & Mary College. But the Jefferson plan was not followed.

Democracy and literacy, as popularly conceived, have nothing to do with education. Democracy, says Professor Nock, "must aim at no ideals above those of the average man. ..." A 100% literate populace, creditable as an ideal, is of no use if the literates read nothing but the "garbage shot upon the public from the presses of the country. . . ."

Based upon false premises, U. S. educational theory has failed. "Practical application of it simply showed that the Creator . . . had for some unsearchable reason not quite seen His way to fall in with our theory." Today, education is mainly vocational. It is not education but training or instruction. Education, Dr. Nock stipulates, is "a general preparation . . . inculcating habits of orderly, profound and disinterested thought . . . giving an immense amount of experienced acquaintance with the way the human mind has worked in all departments of its activity." This, the Great Tradition, exists no more in the U. S. If it did? "The educable person is still here in the raw, and a few of his kind, as a finished product, would come in uncommonly handy at the moment. What has Columbia to say in the premises? What has the whole educational system to say?''

What Dr. Nock has to say: Education and instruction cannot be turned out. under present forms of organization, by one and the same institution. Accordingly, let U. S. colleges and universities continue as they are; they do good work in training the masses of ineducable persons. Private enterprise may some day found a series of educational institutions and take up once more the Great Tradition. Until then, says Dr. Nock, "there does not exist a university or an undergraduate college, in the traditional and proper sense, anywhere in the country. ... No such thing [as an education] is possible in any American institution with which I am acquainted." Author-- Professor Nock, born 59 years ago in Scranton, Pa., is a tall, rosy-cheeked pundit who has gotten out a biography of Thomas Jefferson and a definitive edition (with Catherine Rose Wilson) of Rabelais. He edited The Freeman, later contributed a column in its successor The New Freeman. During the War he was secretary to Minister to Belgium Brand Whitlock. Though he holds M.A. and LL.D. (Hon.) degrees from St. Stephen's and a Ph.D. from Leipzig, Dr. Nock dislikes being called "Doctor." Believing U. S. institutions too generous with doctorates, he calls his contemporaries (from the lecture platform) Mister Butler and Mister Flexner. He has, however, a Ph.D. son, English teacher at the University of Leipzig, who permits himself to be called Dr. Samuel Nock. Son Francis teaches German at New York University.

Poet to Fisk

Bagging poets for poetry's sake is a university practice which dates from the decline of what Professor Albert Jay Nock calls the Great Tradition (see above). Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell taught at Harvard; but they taught Romance Languages. Today Harvard has a Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry whose incumbent next year will be expatriate Poet Thomas Stearns Eliot, author of the muchdiscussed, seldom-read The Waste Land. At the University of Michigan, Robert Frost was Poet in Residence in 1921-23; the late Poet Laureate Robert Bridges took the post a year later. Poet William Ellery Leonard teaches English at the University of Wisconsin. Last week Fisk University (Nashville, Tenn.) snared a Negro bard. It was the first Negro university to do so. Created especially for James Weldon Johnson (God's Trombones, The Book of American Negro Spirituals) was the Adam K. Spence Chair of Creative Literature & Writing, founded in memory of Fisk's late professor of those subjects. Poet Johnson will sit in it this year, have leisure to complete his autobiography.

* A high straight heel, without the curve of the French heel.

* Dr. Butler and Dr. Bernard Iddings Bell, warden of St. Stephen's, issued an appeal last week for an immediate $1,000,000 for the college to carry on its "admirable work."

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