THE LONG SHADOW OF JOHN DEWEY

Thirty years of "life adjustment" by the followers of Progressive Educator John Dewey have left U.S. education over adjusted, ill-equipped to quicken intellectual life. This week, in "The Deeper Problem in Education," LIFE takes stock of the situation.

CONFIDENT of their own established values in ethics, law and culture, the old-fashioned teachers deliberately set out to pass down these values as part of a living tradition. They held that it was all one cultural heritage--everything from Boyle's Law to Cicero's First Oration against Catiline--and the more of it you learned, the wiser and more mentally alert you would be.

Dewey and his disciples revolted against this certitude, which had indeed grown more than a little ossified in its teaching methods. But history records no more egregious case of throwing out the baby with the bath water. "We agree," Dewey once said, "that we are uncertain as to where we are going and where we want to go, and why we are doing what we do." In a kind of country-club existentialism, Dewey and his boys genially contended that the traditional ends of education, like God, virtue and the idea of "culture," were all highly debatable and hence not worth debating. In their place: enter life adjustment.

The Deweyites thus transformed conditioning techniques into ends in themselves. Teachers' colleges assumed the dignity of lamaseries. Teachers were denied the chance of learning more about their subjects, in favor of compulsory education courses in how to teach them.

Within the schools, discipline gave way to increasingly dubious forms of group persuasion. "With teen-agers," one high school principal said proudly, "there is nothing more powerful than the approval or disapproval of the group. When the majority conforms, the others will go along."

It would not easily occur to the modern educationists that such blind fostering of group pressure is a travesty of free democracy. Such criticism honestly puzzles them, as do suggestions that they might concentrate more on dry "learning" subjects, like mathematics and languages, to the exclusion of teen-age problems, beauty care, fly casting.

The poor performance of their students has proved the educationists wrong. U.S. high school students are plain ignorant of things grammar school students would have known a generation ago. Years of barren discussion courses in English have made a whole generation chronically incoherent in the English language. Cut off from any but the most obvious contact with his tradition, e.g., an occasional project visit to the local courthouse, the student has lost his sense of history. Surely the history of the Crusades can give a young American a better grasp of the. problems implicit in the U.N. or NATO than dressing up as a Pakistani delegate in an imitation U.N. Assembly at school.

With Dewey's world so demonstrably in tatters, one might think the educationists would run up the white flag. Far from it. Entrenched in public school administrations, they defend with the adhesiveness of a band of brothers every article of their gobbledygook canons. In Holland, Mich, the Christian' High School, a respected institution of impeccable academic standards, has recently been denied accreditation by the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools because it refused to dilute its academic standards with shop and cooking courses. A sample of the canons by which such schools are judged: "Is the control and atmosphere of the individual's rooms and classes based upon teacher authority or group self-control and group-defined standards? To what extent are opportunities provided for children to develop moral and spiritual values through the process of direct experience in working with each other . . .?"

We cannot expect to cure such lopsided standards just by giving teachers the pay they deserve, building the schools we need, and ordering up more science courses. [But] a few important steps can be taken by state and local authorities. Most of our state teachers' colleges should be abolished as such and converted into liberal-arts colleges, with subordinate education departments. There must also be some drastic upgrading of curriculum requirements.

But most of all, we need to do some thinking about the true ends of education. The worthwhile innovations in method brought by Dewey's educationists should be kept. But their exclusive devotion to techniques and group adjustment should never again be allowed to hide the fact that American education exists first of all to educate the individual in a body of learning, with a tradition and purpose behind it.

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