The Case of Henry Aldrich

Bernard Iddings Bell is a personable man, but he has never tried to be a popular man. For 40 years, in books and articles, from pulpit and lecture platform, he has been irritating churchmen, ruffling educators, cracking complacencies and smugness. A canon of the Episcopal Church, and onetime warden of New York's Episcopal St. Stephen's College (now Bard College), he calls himself a radical independent. As such, he has become one of the most caustic critics of the manners & morals of his day. There is scarcely a sector of U.S. civilization for which Bell has not tolled at least once.

This week, partially retired and 62, he was tolling again. His latest book, Crisis in Education (Whittlesey House; $3), rang the changes on U.S. culture as Bell has seen it in a lifetime of observation. Whether readers agree with all of it or not, the book is unmistakably what Author Bell intended: "a challenge to American complacency."

Indecent & Undisciplined. Actually, says Bell, Americans have very little to be complacent about. The most accurate mirror of their civilization, he contends, is the Henry Aldrich radio skit; the typical American boy is no longer Tom Sawyer or Penrod, but Henry Aldrich himself. He is "almost indecently adolescent . . . undisciplined, self-assertive, bewildered by life

... He has acquired no facilities for arriving at judgments social or artistic and he is apparently without religion of any kind." His sister Mary is no better, nor are his parents. They, too, are adolescent, "not free men and women but base mechanicals . . . the products and patrons of mass management ... of a standardized press and radio, of slick magazines and book clubs, of an overly vocationalized education, of pressure salesmanship."

Worse still, the typically American Aldriches are also unhappy. The goals that the "Aldrichian civilization" respects (wealth, pleasure, power, or that sort of empty erudition acquired by "departmentalized pedants hiding in the holes of research") answer no essential needs. The Aldriches remain petulant and predatory.

Unfortunately, says Author Bell, modern education, of which the Aldriches are typical products, is less a cure for modern immaturity than a cause of it. This, he asserts, is not the age of the Common Man, but "the Century of the uneducated Common Man, of the Common Man unskilled in the art of living. Untaught in the wisdom of the race, he is competent neither to rule nor to be ruled ... blatantly vulgar, ill-mannered, boorish . . ." Instead of educating the Common Man to take his newly acquired place of leadership, U.S. schools and colleges have slung him a "mess of servile pottage." Merely to offer more & more of such education to more people, says Bell, solves nothing. The only hope for U.S. civilization as Bell sees it: "Rediscover . . . that democratic education must be not only democratic but also education."

Rewards & Quests. As an example of failure, Bell cites the modern college freshmen as he sees them. "They cannot look at a thing and tell you what they see; listen to sounds and know what they hear; by the touch truly perceive form; sense how others feel and why; read, write, speak with any sure knowledge of how words are to be handled . . . think in general terms as distinct from specific and concrete particulars."

Canon Bell holds that the fault lies with secondary-school teachers who are more interested in coddling young minds than in maturing them, more anxious to "orientate" children than to teach them to think. Their students, lacking either drill or discipline, turn into "demanding dabblers, impatient alike of labor and logic," who think they can have "the reward without the quest . . . Heaven without probation ... a master's prestige without a master's skill." The colleges, he thinks, do no better.

What sort of education must the U.S. have to make the Henry Aldriches grow up? The elementary and secondary schools, says Bell, must begin the task. They must somehow give children "some knowledge of the basic wisdom of the race [not merely] teach their pupils what the pupils wish to learn." They must insist on teaching the discipline of word, number, and form, on restoring a respect for good manners and a pride in "craftsmanlike achievement." Above all, they must impart a reverence for God, for "Americans will never become mature if all they recognize as real are the things of this and now, and as long as they deal forever with what and never with why."

The colleges have even a tougher job. First, they must single out those who are potentially intelligent ("It is they whom we now neglect"). The select student should study "everything he can lay hands on which throws light on man and his behavior . . . He should study history, political and cultural; biography; literature, especially poetry, in which man reveals himself more fully than in prose; the fine arts; philosophy, [especially] ethics." He must learn to understand the true goals of life--"a contemplation of greatness and an imitation of it; a seeking of truth and beauty and goodness for their own sake, without care for any other reward . . ."

Methods Y. Morals. The Common Man will never be anything but common, says Bell, unless educators cease worrying so much about the methods of educating that they forget the moral purposes behind it. When these purposes have been established, U.S. colleges will then be giving the sort of products that President William R. Harper of the University of Chicago used to talk about, when Bell himself was a freshman:

"Young gentlemen ... an educated man is a man who by the time he is 25 years old has a clear theory, formed in the light of human experience down the ages, of what constitutes a satisfying life, a significant life, and who by the age of 30 has a moral philosophy consonant with racial experience. If a man reaches these ages without having arrived at such a theory, such a philosophy, then no matter how many facts he has learned or how many processes he has mastered, that man is an ignoramus and a fool, unhappy, probably dangerous. That is all. Good afternoon."

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