Illusions Unhugged

Princeton's Christian Gauss, 69, who started out to be a poet and ended as a famed, judiciously quizzical dean, emerged from retirement last week to wing a few cloth-yard shafts at the target of U.S. education. The onlookers at Princeton--about 75 secondary-schoolmen --had to admit that he hit the target with some smacking bull's-eyes. Said Dean Gauss:

"Much in American history happened before 1776 or 1492. The birth of Christ in Palestine still arouses a deeper emotional response in Americans than even the Fourth of July. . . . The Athenian Plato, the Spaniard Cervantes, the English Shakespeare, the German Goethe, the Frenchman Balzac, played a large part in shaping the American mind. By excessive emphasis on American history, literature and civilization, we are cutting ourselves off from the broader, deeper, more humane currents in our own American tradition. . . .

"We can no longer hug the illusion that our processes of selective admission bring us the ablest young men. . . . We are all rich men's colleges. Much as we hate to admit it, there is much less equality of opportunity for education in America than in the Soviet Union. . . .

"Our belief . . . that 'education is the salvation of democracy' has proved to be naive and fallacious. . . . The German universities were . . . among the best in the world. . . . It was the total absence of any [democratic training] that made it impossible for the Germans . . . to understand or to practice democracy.*

"Good manners, in a democracy, indeed anywhere, depend on a sympathetic understanding of all sorts and conditions of men. [Too many] graduates of our spiffy schools . . . do not have manners, they have only a manner . . . . Our high schools, particularly where there is no racial segregation, are our most effective training schools in democracy. . . . The truths of democracy are not difficult to understand. They are only difficult to practice."

Recommended reading in the 1918 S.A.T.C. at Princeton was Why We Went to War, a quickie book in which German-descended Gauss prophesied that the Germans would never have a revolution--three months before they had one.

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