Live & Learn

In his 81st year, William Heard Kilpatrick is still a formidable figure to U.S. educators--a courtly, silver-haired scholar who next to John Dewey has been the nation's foremost apostle of progressive education. Some schoolmen have revered him and some have damned him, but all have felt his influence. Last week scholars and educators from all over the U.S. assembled in a Manhattan ballroom to celebrate his fourscore years. And last week, in a new biography by ex-Student Samuel Tenenbaum,*readers could learn just what his influence has been in the U.S. school system.

Fame & Flurries. The son of a Baptist minister, William Kilpatrick first began to be known after he joined the staff of Columbia University Teachers College back in 1907. But even before that time, he had already proved that he was a rebel at heart. As a grammar-school principal in Georgia, he had stirred up flurries of controversy by doing away with report cards and never punishing his pupils. Later, as a professor of mathematics at Georgia's Baptist Mercer University, he stirred up more controversy by admitting that he did not believe in the Virgin birth. After a three-day theological trial before the trustees, he was forced to resign. Some months after that, he headed north to Columbia.

At Teachers College, Rebel Kilpatrick found a permanent home at last. "Everything seems to center here," he once wrote, and to a large extent he was right. Under the leadership of such men as Philosopher John Dewey and Psychologist

Edward Thorndike, the era of the modern pedagogue had begun. The traditional classroom was being attacked from all sides. Like Dewey, Kilpatrick held that there are no philosophical absolutes, that "criticized experience is the final test of all things." That being the case, education had to be designed anew.

Action to Action. The important thing about learning, Experimentalist Kilpatrick insisted, was not the subject but the child. He saw no point in mere textbook education which, fed to passive students, "reduced man to mind, and mind largely to memory." A child learns by living, said he; and therefore education must be based on action, every action leading to better action: "Thinking, unless it works, isn't worth anything . . ."

Over the years, educators began to listen closely to the live & learn philosophy. And so many students' fees poured into Teachers College because of Kilpatrick that he came to be known as the "Million Dollar Professor." In school after school, teachers began to turn away from traditional subject matter, adopting in its stead the Kilpatrick "project method." His books were translated into seven languages; "activity programs" began cropping up in classrooms all over the world, stressing creation over memory, interest over coercion, how to think over what to think.

But in spite of such widespread acceptance of his theories, William Kilpatrick soon found the pendulum swinging the other way. At 80 he remains an incorrigible rebel, but in revolt against a counterrevolution, started by men like the late William C. Bagley and Robert M. ("The Great Books") Hutchins. His critics in education have long sought to repeal him, insisting that in trying to breathe life into the schools, he has merely blown away their substance.

"We learn what we Jive," Kilpatrick declared. "The stronger we live anything, the stronger we learn it." The U.S. would not soon forget that Kilpatrick had lived. It had still to decide how much it liked of what he had learned and taught.

-William Heard Kilpatrick: Trail Blazer in Education; Harper, $4.

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