Post: "The more things change..."
Posted by L. Swilley on 8/25/08
"Because man is viewed [by our educators] as having only
an animal career and not a human destiny, interest and
adjustment have taken the place of discipline and
cultivation as the watchwords of educational policy. The
whole aim of education changes, for adjustment leads to
the cult of success, the 'ideal' of getting ahead by
beating your neighbor. The emphasis on the interests of
the student makes him a buyer instead of a patient, and
the teacher becomes a salesman rather than a doctor
prescribing the cure for ignorance and incompetence. It
is the student who is the master under the elective
system, which was invented because of the excessive
proliferation of scientific courses in the curriculum, and
has been perpetuated by the perversion of educational
policy which makes the young, i.e., the relatively
ignorant and incompetent, choose their own road to
learning, according to the fickle interest of their
immaturity. Extracurricular activities originated in
response to interests that were tangential to the main
business of educaton, but in many schools they have become
the curriculum, and the substantial studies have been
thrown out. They are not even extracurricular. Many
college curriculums offer courses from A to Z without
discrimination, and the university, instead of being a
hierarchy of studies and a community of scholars, is a
collection of specialities, together only in geographical
proximity.
"Elementary education is devoid of discipline. The basic
routines in language and mathematics have been dropped or
corrupted. Memory is not cultivated. Social studies,
current events, manual arts, and games occupy the major
time. Secondary or collegiate education fails even more,
though in every part the failure is due to the inadequate
preparation given in the elementary schools. Our bachelors
of arts cannot read, write, or speak their own language
well. They do not possess the leading ideas or understand
the basic problems which are permanently human. They have
been fed for years on textbooks and lecture courses which
hand out predigested materials, and, as a result, they are
chaotically informed and viciously indoctrinated with the
local prejudices of professors and their textbooks. As a
final consequence, education at the graduate and
professional level has been necessarily debased. Law
schools must teach reading; graduate schools struggle to
get Ph.D. candidates to write simple, clear English.
"The reasons for this deplorable situation are many...the
chaos produced by the elective system., the false notion
that the teacher should be guided by the pupil's interests
rather than the pupil disciplined by the teacher's science
and art; all of the fads and fancies of a superficial
educational psychology, such as the overemphasis on
individual differences, and the discarding of all formal
disciplines by irrelevant research on transfer of
training; the shallow pragmatism, which conceives utility
in terms of biological adjustment and success rather than
in terms of the perfection of man; and last, but not
least, the fact that our teachers themselves have been
badly educated and thoroughly misdirected by the
requirement of th existing school system and under the
leadership of our teachers colleges."
- Mortimer J. Adler. "Tradition and Progress in
Education" (1939)
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- "The more things change...", 8/25/08, by L. Swilley .
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