“In the United States today a nation composed chiefly of people who have not grown up, who think and act for the most part with the immaturity and emotional impulsiveness of adolescents, it is our education system, defective in its understanding of Man, which is largely responsible for our dangerous juvenility.”
“Peter Pan is a charming figure in fantasy; but a real community made up of little boys and girls who never cease to think and behave as children has nightmare possibilities.”
“Nothing much can be expected in the way of growing up from most of the alleged adults who now comprise the majority of the electorate of America. Unless maturity arrives by the age of thirty or so (and those in control are well over that) it can come, if at all, only by miraculous interventions of the gods.”
“Our task is to mature the rising generation. This must be done by character-molding institutions.”
“Democratic education must be not only democratic but also education.”
“The standards of admission and of achievement at such institutions have for some time been so low, their regimens have been so stereotyped, their desire for growth in quantity rather than quality has been so great, their appetite for fees to supplement an ever-lessening income from endowment so voracious that it was a dreadful thing to expose a million or so veterans to their tender mercies.”
“The effect on the universities and colleges might be equally sad. Their financial hides saved, at least for the time being, these institutions of somewhat diluted learning would probably go in more and more for uncritical expansion. They would have to engage more professors, instructors, assistants, technicians than the competently trained supply.”
“We were fairly sure that the returning veterans were too much the product of our school system to know a decent education discipline if they met up with it.”
“No good and much almost certain harm would come to America by encouraging in complacency new throngs whose attention had been directed under official sanction chiefly to concentration on superficialities.”
“What we dreaded seems to a large extent to be happening. Most of the collegiate GIs neither desire nor gain access to illumination or general understanding, while increasingly the cry goes up from the intelligent GI that instead of wisdom he is being sold an inferior piece of goods.”
“Back of these proposals is an assumption that it is a good thing for everyone to attend the American college “as is,” just as it has come to be taken as beyond argument that it is highly desirable for the national welfare that every child shall go through the American high school “as is.” There are those of us who insist that these assumptions are unjustified, who maintain that what is needed is a rethinking of our whole notion of democratic education.”
“By their fruits shall ye know them.” It is an observation of the fruits that scares many of us; we see what has happened and is happening to the American mind, the American character, under the leadership of those who now set the educational pattern. A theory which works so badly must be wrong.”
“First Steps in Reformation:
- The teaching profession must resist all political control, all attempts to transform the schools, colleges, and universities into agencies for the spreading of government-devised propaganda.”
- Recognize that there is an inexcusable waste of student time involved in or system of schooling as now organized. Formal education takes entirely too long. Most observers are sure that the major waste is in the elementary and high schools.”
- We need to combat the notion that the only attitude toward God which is legitimate in a tax-supported school is the attitude that ignores God as though He does not exist or, if He does exist, does not matter.”
It is hard to see why atheists, few in number as they are, should be allowed to force atheistic-by-negation education on the children of the great majority of us who do pay at least theoretical attention to the Deity. As the American school system is now conducted, more and more conducted, there is no such thing as religious liberty in American education. There is liberty only to the unreligious.”
“If the public schools must ‘leave religion out,’ then the only decent thing is to permit religious groups to run their own schools, which of course we now do, and to give them tax money to run them with, which we do not.
Those who think that to give public funds to a religious body for schools in which religion matters is somehow tied up with reuniting Church and State, would seem to be just plain ignorant and illogical people, and this whether they sit on cracker barrels or on the Supreme Court of the United States.
- The schools should refuse to assume burdens properly parental; they have quite enough to do without that.
- Thought needs to be given to what may be done in respect to teaching morals and manners.
“There is also the irksome difficulty, widely known, of a teacher’s having to deal with undisciplined children:
“The truth is that I could not stick it any longer. I could not face the thought of being insulted for another year, day after day, by a pack of impudent and unlicked cubs of fourteen or so, the males’ crude enough and the females worse, whose homes did not discipline them, discipline of whom was on principle ignored by the very “progressive” and in my opinion wholly unrealistic school authorities, and whom I was forbidden by law in any way myself to punish. Life is too short and self-respect too strong for me to go on.” – a schoolmistress of ten years with a Master’s Degree.
“The same thing is true in New York City. A woman must have the hide of a rhinoceros to teach in the public schools in our metropolis. It is a rare day that I am not insulted by some of the little beasts, cursed at, shoved, and jostled, called a vile name or two.” – Bronx school teacher.
“Teachers often feel an irritation at being ordered about by theorists from schools of education who are put into posts of authority over them and who, though they have had small teaching experience themselves, continually want to change procedures to fit in with new ideas thought up in a study somewhere.”
“Would the taking of these steps serve to rescue American thinking and action from incompetence, insure maturity among us, enable us to avoid alternations of ignorant conceit and of a panic fear, make out of education in America what it reasonable ought to be? Obviously not.
The purpose is to know that in respect to our education and our minds we are sick folk, that we have been too long fooled by doctrinaire pedagogues who ignore man as he is and children as they are. Education in these United States is in crisis. It is being judged by the relentless impact of reality. It is being judged and found wanting. Once we realize this, [and rectify it] we shall soon have both wisdom and bravery.” – Bernard Iddings Bell: An Indictment of American Education, 1949; Annals Vol. 16, p. 578
