Firing Wild

Today's high-school graduates are often poorly trained in the three Rs, and many are woefully ignorant of history, geography and science. Is inefficient teaching to blame? Probably not, University of Illinois History Professor Arthur E. Bestor Jr. told the American Historical Association in Washington this week. If educators have missed the target, it is because they have set their sights so low that no possible increase of efficiency can enable them to hit it. They are teaching the wrong courses; they are firing wild.

"The family, the church, the medical profession, the government, private business--each has something to do with meeting the needs of citizens, young and old," said Bestor. "The idea that the school must undertake to meet every need that some other agency is failing to meet is a preposterous delusion that can wreck the educational system without contributing anything to the salvation of society . . . The responsibility which the school may not sacrifice to any other aim, however worthy, is its responsibility for providing intellectual training--in every field of activity where systematic thinking is an important component of success . . .

Intellectual training is more essential to every citizen than it has ever been in the history of mankind, and its importance grows with every year." But the alarming truth, says Bestor, is that educators today are all too ready to accept the unproved proposition that some 60% of American high-school students are incapable of absorbing such training. In report after report, they suggest that the majority of Americans are doomed to intellectual mediocrity, "destined from birth to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to a select few." As a result of this notion, high-school curricula are filled with "Life Adjustment Education Programs," in which " 'the problem of acquiring the social skills of dancing, playing party games, doing parlor stunts, etc.' is given just as much emphasis as 'the problem of acquiring the ability to study and help solve economic, social and political problems.' " In his home state of Illinois, said Bestor angrily, a recent report suggests "that the schools can serve the nation in its present hour of peril by asking its students to 'make studies of how the last war affected the dating pattern of our culture.' " This type of unbridled experiment ought not to be allowed in U.S. schools, said Bestor. As educators, "we are under the most solemn obligation to proceed with care . . . The caution and circumspection characteristic of medical research is the only proper model, for we are dealing with something as precious as human life itself. Vague hypotheses, truncated experiments, rash conclusions and loose generalizations are utterly out of place . . .

"It is my considered judgment that every one of these basic requirements of scientific, ethical experimentation upon human beings has been violated in the launching of the current programs of curricular change in the public schools of the nation ... To build our defenses of freedom firm and deep, we need to eradi cate, before it is too late, the anti-intellectual tendencies that have crept into our public educational system."

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