It is a strong temptation these days to predict cynically that the chief effect of Sputnik on American schools will be the abolition of courses in driver training.

Our first reaction to Sputnik was anger, not unlike but vastly greater than the anger when the first Soviet atomic bomb went off. Then, it was widely (and probably correctly) asserted, we were betrayed: our secrets had been stolen by the backward Russians, who made up for their deficiencies in technology and physics by our gullibility and their skill in espionage. With Sputnik we had no such out Though the Russians had corralled German scientists—perhaps more or better than we—it was a case of the Walrus and the Carpenter. We took as many as we could get.

During the Middle Ages (says Frank Sullivan in his story on the invention of the pretzel), when any country was at war with any other country, it was the custom to besiege Nuremberg. In modern America, when anything bad happens, it is the custom to scold the schools. Sputnik was a disaster, and the scolding has risen to a scream. Yet little of the scolding is new except its volume; what was valid or silly before is exactly as valid or silly now. And each person scolds in his accustomed manner—except Sloan Wilson, who, having orbited into the circulation of Life, has become notably more strident against the schools than when he wrote for Harper’s.

America’s failure to be first in satellites is not an educational but a political failure. Increased appropriations and governmental effort could have hoisted a satellite much sooner if it had seemed desirable to the people in power. It didn’t. And if they were obtuse or badly advised or did not read the newspapers (in which for years the Alsops and others had been warning of Russian rockets), they can blame only the schools of an earlier generation. If a man is now over fifty, he went to school before John Dewey’s ideas were widely practiced; and if he went to West Point, he can hardly be said to have suffered from progressive education.

Further, when America was the first to develop an atomic bomb, it was deemed a triumph of American technology and science, with the welcome assistance of scientists who had fled totalitarianism. Neither the theoretical knowledge nor the military know-how was adduced as a triumph of American education, though the first terrestrial chain reaction was established in the disused football stadium of an American university. If our schools have failed us in Sputniks and are losing us the Cold War, then they achieved the atomic bomb and victory in World War II, and Normandy and Saipan were won in the Rose Bowl or in the classrooms of PS 6.

In short, most of what purports to be criticism of American education is merely criticism of America—which is legitimate and necessary. Let us say what we wish, but let us be aware of what we are really talking about.

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It was evident long before October 1957 that education was approaching a crisis. All observers agree that we face an immediate and increasing shortage of high school facilities and an even more serious shortage of properly qualified teachers. Within the next few years, this shortage will have moved up into college, but without helping the high schools. “This is not guesswork. The children who will be of college age in 1970 have already been born, and the only question is whether the same or a larger proportion of them will enter college in the years ahead. Currently a little over 30 per cent of the college-age group is in college, and the proportion has been rising at the rate of about 1 per cent a year. In some states it has already reached 50 per cent.”¹

The teacher shortage is of almost impossible dimensions: “It has been estimated that over the next 15 years more than three new teachers must be recruited for every two we have today, that during the next decade one-half of all college graduates would have to enter the teaching profession in order to fill our needs.”² Already the colleges are raiding the high schools for their best teachers: 14 per cent of new college teachers in the last few years came direct from high school positions. And “teacher-rustling” (the practice of luring teachers with slightly higher salaries) between communities and even states is big business and becoming bigger.³

Similarly, the present shortage of school buildings and classrooms is expected to become intolerable. Yet the President’s budget, recommended to Congress after Sputnik, proposed $300 million less than the year before, a feat accomplished partly by dropping recommendations for school construction.

Furthermore, for over a year the press has been filled with dire predictions of the difficulties that present high-school students face in attempting to gain admission to college. There are not enough colleges, we are told; entrance requirements are rising sharply; and this year many ordinarily well-qualified seniors (and a fortiori their successors) will be disappointed in their ambitions. Their difficulties are decreased, however, by the tragic fact that each year 200,000 good students end their education with high school because they cannot afford college.

Lastly, since about 1950 there has been a steadily growing growl from many more or less qualified critics against the domination of American schools by progressive education and “the educationist bureaucracy,” and against the illiteracy of our children and the consequent materialism and thinness of our culture. Now to the growl is added a roar that our children are learning practically no mathematics or science. The chief growlers have been rigid conservatives like Robert M. Hutchins and Arthur Bestor, gaudy polemicists like Albert Lynd and Mortimer Smith, and panacea-pushers like Rudolf Flesch. The roarers include generals, admirals, and well-known scientists, as well as other politicians. They have all made themselves heard by one means or another, and they have had increasing effect. Progressive education, for all its power and accomplishments, has for some years been on the defensive. In 1955 the Progressive Education Association, after about thirty years of vigor and ten more of decay, gently folded up—fooling no one by its announcement that its work was done and the battle won. Now, the general feeling goes, progressive education is quite dead, and only isolated voices are heard asking to read the will to see if there is any legacy for the children.

Shortage of teachers and professors, shortage of schools and colleges and scholarships, and long-continued failure of the expensive American educational system to teach anything significant—such are the cries heard separately or simultaneously. The food is poison, and such small portions! And the Russians are serving more and better.

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The last point, though vital to our political happiness and probably to our national existence, is paradoxically the easiest to discuss, if we do not allow our justified fear of Russian successes to deprive us of reason, and if we avoid the temptation of using these successes to grind our pet pedagogical axe.

Unfortunately few of us can resist this temptation. Doubly unfortunately, the spectacular articles in Life⁴ on the Educational Cold War have made so much noise that the whine of private honing is inaudible to all but sophisticated ears. Life’s initial spread was misleading in the extreme: it purported to compare a typical Russian sixteen-year-old with a typical American contemporary. Alexei, the Russian, is finishing his tenth year and will go on to a university next year. Alexei seldom smiles. He is a zealous student, taught by strict, well-trained teachers; he is interested in nuclear physics; he is only beginning to speak a shy word to a girl. He spends three to four hours a day on homework. There is “purpose in his fun” too: he exercises his body with volley-ball and his mind with chess and concerts and piano practice. He is well read in Russian and has read the works of Shakespeare and Shaw in English.

Stephen, his American counterpart, has only just finished Stevenson’s Kidnapped; he is in eleventh grade and will not go on to college until the year after next. He jokes in class (which is “relaxed and enlivened by banter”; by pure chance Life’s photographer caught a girl in the back row reading Modern Romances—free advertising that Luce papers rarely give their competitors). Stephen is nearly failing in geometry; he goes steady; he eases through a course in typing. He is the school’s star swimmer and a leader in student affairs; he spends his spare time leading prayers as student council chaplain (“students are hushed, reverent”) and doing the Rockin’ Cha with his steady at the YMCA; and he wasted four hours a week for two months rehearsing for the YMCA centennial.

No doubt this is profitable journalism; it is defensible in that it focuses public attention on a vital problem. But it is no service to focus attention and at the same time to drop belladonna into the eyes. There are differences between Russian and American schools that Life blurs. For example: “Though Alexei gets no direct political indoctrination in school, he is constantly reminded of his duties toward the state”—the neatest formulation for Soviet Russia since Henry Wallace coined the term “directed democracy.” Russian schools, as everybody knows, are totally dominated by party politics. As Life bravely admits, “For a year after Stalin’s death Russian schools stopped giving examinations in modern history, while the party rewrote texts.”

In student body as well as ideology, Soviet schools are aristocratic schools. They educate chiefly the children of the oligarchy. Life does not specify which of the two kinds of Soviet high school Alexei attends. If he attends an academic high school, for which fees are charged that only the “new class” can afford, he may go directly to the university. If (as seems unlikely in view of the curriculum described) he attends a non-academic high school, where the poor can get scholarships, he has only one chance in seven of going on. In America both types of high school are free. Alexei’s mother (“a cost-engineer”) and his friend (who lives in “a comfortably furnished Moscow apartment”) are of the ruling class. Stephen’s father, a “painter and decorator,” is not. Alexei represents education for selected members of a ruling class. Stephen represents education for everybody. Alexei is above average in his selected setting; Stephen is below average in his unselected setting. The comparison is illogical on nearly all possible counts, and the grinding of preconceived educational axes can be the only motive for drawing it.⁵

How to compete with the Russian schools is of course a serious question, to which I wish to return. But I cannot promise as simple an answer as appears in the Life article following the rigged bout between Alexei and Stephen. Here the sound of axe-grinding snarls through Sloan Wilson’s phrasing, “John Dewey and his disciples, who invented some of the silliest language ever heard”; his animadversions on the teaching of dancing, driving, woodworking, marriage, chorus, and the “advertising arts”; and his conclusion, “It is time to close the carnival and go to work.”

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Other educational reactions to Sputnik—and the press has been full of them for half a year—have been less slick, often more thoughtful, but no less vigorous. At a conference in Washington in March, Dr. James Killian, the President’s Special Assistant on Science and Technology, spoke strongly for the need “to elevate standards of performance and enlarge the intellectual content of the secondary school program,” and not only in the sciences. He emphasized the dangers to the nation inherent in “the mucker pose,” the anti-intellectual attitude. Dr. Merle Tuve, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, attacked the decline in esteem suffered by the teacher, and the frittering away of his time on petty activities and meetings that keep him from pursuing true scholarship and thus from regaining his lost esteem in the community. Admiral Hyman Rick-over, belligerent progenitor of the “Nautilus,” emitted a general roar at “the Dewey-Kilpatrick experimentalist philosophy” and demanded that our schools give factual knowledge and intellectual training and turn back to the home the job of teaching young people how to be pleasant and get along with others. He contrasted American schools unfavorably with the Dutch, which run longer per day, per week, and per year, and teach more to and demand more of the students. He ended with the now orthodox anathema against driver training and a schismatic one against school print shops.⁶

Somewhat the same line was taken, but more reasonably, by Adlai Stevenson in the New York Times Magazine for April 6. Besides hoping that schools would allow the home to teach driving and would concentrate on “some things that are more important, or at least harder to teach,” he would like to see the home set standards of “respect for work and effort” and “delight in all manner of excellence.” The “adjustment to life” that schools set out to teach should not mean, as it seems to mean, adjustment to family, community, people; adjustment to life should mean the arduously attained understanding of an interrelated, politically hazardous, and technologically complex world. That Mr. Stevenson’s tone and suggestions were far from Admiral Rickover’s ideal of Schools for Yesterday’s Europe, however, appears in the following: “The schools can’t teach children all there is to know. . . . But the schools can do a very great deal to teach children that their own ideas are good and worth having and expressing, even in the face of disagreement.”

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Within the teaching profession as well as outside it, the reaction of each person to Sputnik has been predictable from his previous utterances. Those who belabored the schools before do so now; those who were generally happy about the schools are no less happy now—except that, they say, Sputnik shows we must appropriate more money for everything. Many teachers and administrators feel that we should not be “stampeded by Sputnik” into “rash innovations.” Some of them feel, in fact, resentful of the increased pressure put on them; they do not want to become “a part of the war hysteria”—a defense of the status quo that seems as much political as educational. It may be no exaggeration to say that the profession views Sputnik just as it did World War II—everybody should do what he has been doing, but do it better; do more things for more people; pay more attention to gifted children, but be more understanding of the others; teach more mathematics and science, without neglecting the humanities. The program of the Sputnik-centered school is to be a slight emendation of Sam Gompers—-more, except for driver training.

Amid such confusion a few clear and sensible voices are heard. One of these⁷ is Paul Woodring, whose Let’s Talk Sense About Our Schools was notable, a few years ago, for intelligence and balance at a time when Lynd, Fuller, and Smith stultified a few valid objections to American education with irrational emphasis and distortion amounting to odium theologicum.

Now in A Fourth of a Nation⁸ Dr. Woodring has provided a masterly summary of the educational controversy of our times and has made two revolutionary proposals on curriculum reform and the training of teachers. His account of the “classical thesis” and the “progressive antithesis,” together with his proposed synthesis, deserves the attention of any reader more interested in being informed than in merely choosing sides and rushing into battle. Unfortunately there is space here only to commend his lucidity of thought and style and to touch on some of his concrete suggestions.

The fate of the “upper third” of American students is of particular concern to Dr. Woodring. Though his book was published before Sputnik, he provides an effective answer to Life and Admiral Rickover. Dr. Woodring ridicules comparison of European and American schools. Of course the European student is ahead of the American student of like age—the European student represents a selected third, or tenth; the American student represents everybody. Dr. Woodring agrees with the American ideal of educating all students through high school, but he is emphatic in his recommendation that they be grouped by ability and the ablest be pushed ahead farther and faster. The social arguments often adduced against such selection he discounts, since accelerated students in large schools will always have the company of their peers. The selection should be made, however, by the schools; “at present the choice [of an academic rather than a vocational program] is made much more often on the basis of parental expectation or of family income than upon learning capacity.” As to the apprehension that such grouping is undemocratic, “Such a fear,” he says, “borders on hypochondria. . . . If we ever have an elite, it is not likely to be an intellectual one.”

Dr. Woodring’s proposed reorganization of the curriculum is based on a two-speed system: at the age of seven, or seven and a half, the faster students would proceed from an ungraded primary school, roughly the equivalent of our kindergarten and the first two grades, into the four grades of an elementary school. At eleven or twelve they would go into a three-year high school and thence to a four-year college. They would be ready for graduate or professional schools at nineteen.

Slower students, who would be grouped with the faster ones of their age and social maturity in home rooms and extracurricular activities, would proceed generally two years behind, ending their two or three years of high school at sixteen or seventeen. They would then go to work or to junior college or trade school. Dr. Woodring envisages this system as flexible enough to take care of the student who is, for example, good in mathematics and weak in literature. Such a student would take part of his work in one sequence and part in another. The program obviously is suitable only to large schools with competent guidance, but these—consolidated schools or school systems—are becoming more and more the rule in America.

As an equally important corollary, Dr. Woodring would reorganize teacher-training, requiring all teachers to go through his reconstituted liberal arts colleges and then a two-year course leading to a teaching degree. Until such reorganization has come about, however, he is willing to settle for the five-year program (college plus one year of graduate work and apprentice teaching) now being experimentally tried in a number of colleges, with subsidies from the Fund for the Advancement of Education.

Dr. Woodring’s plan, even if wholly sound, is sure to encounter the objection that it would involve enormous change and expense. A somewhat similar plan, however, to which this objection is less valid, has been offered by James Bryant Conant, former president of Harvard, who has been conducting a survey of American high schools for the Carnegie Corporation.

Dr. Conant’s proposal, sketchily pictured in Life, has the merit of being a composite of actual practices. He suggests three main sequences, for the bright, the average, and the slow student. The bright student is not accelerated, but by the time he has finished high school his work is wholly on the college level in mathematics, science, and language; his destination is obviously college. The average student follows a solid but less advanced academic course with considerable vocational training, leading perhaps to business or highly skilled labor (“building contractor” is Life’s example). The slow student pursues simplified general studies and basic shop courses and is headed for semi-skilled or skilled labor. All three groups come together for home room, extracurricular activities, typing, mechanical drawing, music, and twelfth-grade social studies. The plan is most appropriate for large, comprehensive high schools, many of which already exist and more of which are being consolidated from small and inadequate schools—a policy Dr. Conant recommends. No provision seems to be made for driver training, even for the boy who is graduating to “Joe’s Garage.” Presumably his fellow garage attendants will teach him the requisite ruthlessness toward man and machine.

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However attractive such proposals as Dr. Woodring’s and Dr. Conant’s may be, it will be hard to adopt them widely in the near future. Education is one of America’s largest industries, with a tremendous investment in a plant whose function cannot be quickly changed; we cannot close down the industry for re-tooling; it suffers from a chronic labor shortage; its labor is highly skilled and relatively inflexible in skill; and training new workers is slow and costly. The most serious shortage is in the college—the final assembly line from which roll the Sputnik-builders—for here labor is most departmentalized and takes longest to train. You can build a college in a year, amass a library for it in five, and get a good faculty in ten—but only assuming that you have more money than your competitors. At that, you will not have alleviated the college shortage, since you will have raided other colleges for your professors.

In view of this shortage, the President’s Committee on Education Beyond the High School last year urgently recommended the doubling of all college faculty pay and the eventual trebling of total expenditure for colleges and universities. The money was apparently to come from industry and business, private donors, and Federal aid for buildings, scholarships, and research. Presumably this is a necessary recommendation, but most observers are pessimistic about its chances, since even the recommending committee was squeezed for funds by Congress. Federal aid, moreover, inevitably runs into difficulties of principle and politics over the questions of integration and subsidy to religious institutions.

Perhaps to most people’s surprise, scholarships—private, industrial, or Federal—will not go very far to solve the problem of the reasonably able but impoverished student. Most scholarships, even fat ones, help only the middle class.⁹ Very few enable a student wholly without resources to go to college; there are many such students; and such scholarships are available only to nearly flawless performers. They must be tops not in one but in all academic areas; they must also be “well-adjusted” and “leaders.” It is very rare that a student needing heavy financial aid will have the gregarious suavity, the optimistic zeal in often trifling activities, and the unfocused and hence evenly manifested brilliance now required of a big-money examination-killer. Charles Steinmetz would have had too meager a record in extracurricular affairs. Robert Frost would have been too untrustworthy as an off-beat humorist to win a big national scholarship.¹⁰

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Scholarship aid does not meet and is not likely to meet the need. Yet higher education is demonstrably related to increased earning capacity. An investment of about $9,000 in a college education (the cost in 1949 of fees and maintenance, less the amount for maintenance for four years in any case, and plus the amount that could be earned in four years without a college education) would result in an expected lifetime income about $100,000 greater than for the non-college person.¹¹ Nine thousand dollars invested in government bonds would yield only $15,000 in a lifetime; the yield and the capital together, $24,000, are only a quarter of the mean yield of a like outlay on college. So profitable and safe an investment should be a reasonable basis for a loan.

Funds available for loans to college students, it is often and correctly stated, are not used to anywhere near capacity. Yet it is overlooked that such loans are usually for a hundred dollars or so—at most an amount in the hundreds. These are useful only for unforeseen emergencies encountered by students normally able to pay their way. The others need to borrow in the thousands and can repay only over a period of years after graduation. In Education as an Industry, an astute and closely reasoned book, Ernest van den Haag argues that a revolving fund set up by colleges to aid such students would in the long run cost the colleges nothing and would bring enormous social and economic advantages to the nation. Certainly his plan, though so daring as to terrify many economists and most educators, would put a larger number of reasonably capable students through college than could the most grandiose—and still grossly inadequate—current plans for scholarship aid.

The question of numbers is not peripheral but central. For more students must go to college to become the teachers to staff colleges and schools—not to mention the scientists and engineers and executives to run society, launch moons, and otherwise compete with the Russians.

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To meet the situation, both school and college will have to institute numerous piecemeal reforms, and extensions of current practices, rather than a single sweeping revolution. To increase opportunities in higher education, we may be forced to keep colleges open the year round (Oberlin College has proposed two quarters of teaching, one of study, and one of vacation, enabling the same number of teachers to carry twice as many students); to increase college size and enrollment; to set up more junior colleges and local colleges; to make existing junior colleges more demanding intellectually; to make some use of television and (the forgotten medium) radio; to use increased competition for admission to a favored few colleges as a means of elevating standards in all; to make better use of the oldest “visual aid”—books—as an alternative to the lecture system, which was the medieval substitute for books; and somehow to find money to pay professors well and so keep able men from drifting into business and industry.¹²

With the aid of both major and minor reforms, the American colleges may be able to turn out a sufficiently large number of well-trained young people. Yet it would be a pity if we did not use the emergency also as an opportunity to examine and improve the colleges. The hand of vocational-ism, as has been observed by critics as far apart as William H. Whyte, Jr., and Robert M. Hutchins, is far too heavy on the curriculum. The best engineering schools are now, perhaps too late, becoming concerned with the literacy and cultural sophistication of their students. And professors of the humanities are desperately striving to keep their few islands of culture in the liberal-arts colleges from being washed away by the rising tide of “business majors” and other quasi-vocational courses, most of which are of very dubious value even in training for any known vocation.

Perhaps as important as curricular reform, however, is the attitude of administrators and admissions officers toward eccentric and original students and applicants. Colleges today are entirely too successful in molding boys into organization men. College presidents orate publicly on the need for brains and original thought; but their colleges officially foster all kinds of activities, innocent but inconsequential campus affairs as well as the insanity of big-time “amateur” athletics and the barbarous snobbery of fraternities, that have nothing to do with this need except perhaps to make it worse.

Waste is another matter. Some waste is inevitable. All leisure classes throughout history are prodigally wasteful of time and energy; culture is a by-product of waste. And our college students are our leisure class. They will waste their time and energy having fun, and some of the fun will be cultural; but they are capable of their own waste without the help of the administration.

To attack the American undergraduate for this waste is futile. Other notably successful educational systems have paralleled the waste, and not to recognize the parallel is mere literal-mindedness. Nineteenth-century Oxford and Cambridge performed miracles of elegant indolence. For every Arnold or Clerk-Maxwell or Housman there were a hundred passmen who rode to hounds or otherwise went to the dogs. Modern Russia also has its leisure class, but its waste is organized—in meetings, agitation, ritual speeches and applause, ideological tightrope-walking, heresy-sniffing, and state-directed murder. This kind of leisure activity the Russian student, with humorless intensity, learns by doing. Our students prefer athletics, college radio stations and newspapers, beer, music, and bull-sessions.

Contrary to public belief, there is as yet no real college shortage. There is enormously increased competition for admission to some thirty or fifty well-known colleges and universities, but there are many times that number of intellectually respectable colleges still in need of capable students. Within a few years all good colleges may be full of good students, and it will then be necessary to improve the colleges that are not good. This is really what the shouting is about. But in the meantime the problem is being artificially aggravated by the insistence of many well-to-do non-students (or of their parents) on college, the willingness of many admissions officers to take them, and the irrelevance of some of the criteria for admission. Admissions officers have become—like the rest of us—highly sophisticated in amateur psychiatry. They (and we) are quick to spot and reject the deviant, to reward the well-adjusted, to confuse a knowing eye for the main chance with emotional maturity. Young people are sheep-like enough without being coached and trimmed from lambhood into well-rounded mutton-heads. We need to take chances on ill-kempt, angular goats, hoping that some of them may launch literal or figurative Sputniks.¹³

There is no real college shortage yet. But there ought to be. Paradoxically, one measure of our success in primary and secondary education will be the extent and gravity of the college shortage. If the annual crop of 200,000 able but impoverished students were suddenly given the money for college, the crisis would be upon us now. If the ablest third of our high-school population were trained up to its capacity, it would need and demand more good colleges than we have now. To try to send more than half our high-school population to college, however, to extend the American expectation of universal education from twelve to sixteen years, is in my opinion impossible within the foreseeable future and undesirable at any time. We must simply do the best we can—by more rational selection of college students, by all kinds of scholarships and loans, by raising faculty pay, by improving methods of college teaching, by reemphasizing the liberal arts and sciences and de-emphasizing vocational courses—to limit our colleges to the appropriate kind of student (who will still be there in overwhelming number) and to staff them with enough capable teachers. With luck and judgment, we may come within hailing distance of success. But the crisis is too big to be met with only one idea or gadget.

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Likewise in the high school we are doomed if we look for a panacea. The past failure of American education is that it achieved universality at the cost of thinness. But before we listen to the roars of the axe-grinders, and before we angrily curse the still-active ghost of John Dewey (merely our best educational philosopher and one of the greatest minds of our time), we might soberly contemplate a single piece of evidence. “Everybody knows”—and conservatives wail in anguish—that “nobody studies Latin any more.” But today Latin is studied by more American youngsters of high-school age than in 1890; and the percentage of Latinists in the high-school-age population has risen from 4.3 to 4.9.¹⁴ The reason: universal high-school education, unprecedented and impossible, no doubt, but achieved and American.

The scientific, technological, military, and political crisis demands trained minds. I think it is possible to secure them without sacrificing the advantage of universal education—but not with a single blueprint for every school and a single solution for all teaching problems. Some sort of Conant-Woodring plan, involving two, three, or more paths through school, is in the long run unavoidable. Nevertheless these programs will bring more problems with them.

For instance, we have never solved the difficulty of providing a decent “terminal education” in the high school for the student unable or unwilling to go on. Dr. Hutchins would teach him the Great Books. I’d like to see him do it; college teachers in general and Dr. Hutchins in particular have no conception of how to teach a really low IQ; they have never had to try. Yet the Conant-Woodring plans, it seems to me, contemplate far too calmly a vocationally oriented, culturally stunted curriculum. And neither Dr. Conant nor Dr. Woodring has considered the cruel pressures that would be put on average or below-average children by middle-class parents ambitious for them to undertake an accelerated program. In schools abroad, the evils of early discrimination among children’s abilities, the crucial examinations at the age of eleven, the intolerable strain on moderately able adolescents, have led England, France, and even Russia to question results achieved at such cost. There is no point in importing diseases: we have enough of our own without infecting every tot with a fevered ambition for a career to which high marks are the only path.

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Good schools demand good teachers. More college graduates—in both absolute and relative numbers—are going into teaching than ever before. But what are these among so many? The numbers do not come near matching the need. We might get more teachers if teachers enjoyed enhanced prestige and encountered less overwork. But in these matters the best schools are as guilty as the worst. True, a good teacher must be a guide and friend; he is too often encouraged to be nursemaid and probation officer and family counselor; and he is rarely encouraged to be (within the limits of his subject, the age of his pupils, and his own intellect) a philosopher and scholar. Endless meetings with parents and educators, bales of paper work and reports and surveys, each purporting to streamline the educational system and achieving only more plastic tail-fins and chromium grillwork, busy-work to feed the administrative ego, and chaperonage of student activities better abolished or allowed to run themselves—these hardly promote any philosophy but cynicism, or any scholarship but Parkinson’s Law.

Scholarship, however, will carry little prestige in America unless it is well paid. And recruiting partly trained housewives for stop-gap “teachers’ aides” to do the paper- and busy-work has been proved unnecessary in school systems where salaries are raised enough to attract teachers.¹⁵ The average American teacher (salary $4,055) must work on other jobs evenings, week ends, or vacations, or all three, to make ends meet. The Federal government, including the President, has stood on the safe side of the line talking. Any other industry as large and vital as education would have enjoyed a major strike long ago. But despite the efforts of the American Federation of Teachers the industry remains unorganized; and even the AFT does not favor strikes, since the children suffer (a most un-labor-like sentimentalism: the consumer suffers in every strike). Thus teachers have been striking in the only way open to them—by leaving the profession if they get the chance. A widely advocated lure, merit pay, or extra salary for special competence, is anathema to teachers’ organizations, since it can be used administratively to cow independence, originality, or intelligence. But good administration will not use it so, and bad administration can be fired. The shortage is of teachers, not administrators.

The very real dangers in merit pay would be minimized if all salaries were raised. Such a desideratum can be achieved only by the Federal government—in spite of manifold objections, partly valid but mostly political. As a starter, I would recommend that all income from teaching be tax exempt. The legislation would be reasonably simple, the cost perhaps $1 billion a year, and the result a massive economic pump-priming by goods-hungry teachers’ families. The argument that teachers would thereby become second-class citizens seems to me disingenuous: they have been so for so long that, like the aged and the blind, they might well enjoy some of the benefits. But this is only a starter. I cannot see how our teacher shortage can be met without doubling teachers’ salaries. That will certainly cost more than a billion.

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The time has come to state a few simple educational laws: 1) Education costs money. Though expense does not guarantee success, more and better education always costs more. 2) American education has not so much progressed as yawed wildly from one extreme to another. Let us tack, if necessary, but not yaw. Many of our schools, in David Riesman’s phrase, are still “correcting for deficiencies of an earlier day.” The conservative critics may charitably be said to be over-compensating for an over-correction. But the real axe-grinders are venting their religious or philosophical rage at Dewey’s destruction of their pet absolutes. Hence they try to behead the schools under the pretext of giving them a haircut. 3) All schools make mistakes. The bitterness of almost every debate on education attests nearly universal ignorance of this truth. 4) American education has grown by crazy accretion. We always add and never purposefully discard. The schools are already trying to do too much. Therefore let us never add anything without inspecting and discarding at least two other things.

Should we then acquiesce in the loud campaign to drop alleged trivia, beginning with driver training? Not without more sober examination than any axe-grinder condescends to make. To strip the curriculum of “frills” is plausible economy. If they really are frills, it is wisdom. But it is both costly and stupid if in so doing we destroy opportunities for aesthetic experience, for originality, for the amassing of apparently useless information, for experiment and vitality through recreation, for independence of judgment. These are necessary to all children, especially the ablest, if we are to have trained, resourceful minds and sturdy personalities to meet the scientific and political crisis. Those who shout, “Down with Dewey and driver training,” besides demonstrating incompetence through inability to make distinctions, are unwittingly making a colossal task impossible.

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¹ Clarence Faust, “Rising Enrollments and Effective Use of Faculty Resources,” Bulletin of the Association of American Colleges, Vol. XLIII, No. 2, 1957. Dr. Faust is President of the Fund for the Advancement of Education.

² Charles C. Cole, Jr., “What Must Be Done in Science Education,” College Board Review, Winter 1958 (figures taken from Teachers for Tomorrow, Fund for the Advancement of Education, 1955). Dr. Cole is associate dean of Columbia College.

³ Marie L. Caylor, “Teacher-Raiding Spreads, State to State,” The American Teacher, April 1958.

⁴ Life, March 24 and 31, April 7 and 14, 1958.

⁵ Ernest van den Haag sums up the differences between Russian and American school population thus: “1) Education is far less widespread in the Soviet Union than in the United States; 2) the selection of students to be educated is based to a far greater extent on irrelevant discriminations in the Soviet Union (in terms of financial ability, political belief and economic class origin) than is the case in the United States, where a high school education does not require the payment of fees, and where a college education can be obtained for much lower fees—relative to income—than in the Soviet Union (despite discrimination the chance of a Negro sharecropper's son in the U.S. to acquire secondary and higher education is far greater than that of the son of the average Soviet worker or farmer); 3) while the United States has moved in the direction of more education and less irrelevant discrimination in access to education, the Soviet Union has moved in the opposite direction.”—Ernest van den Haag, Education as an Industry, Augustus Kelley, New York 1956.

⁶ Being acquainted with a high-school print shop, I happen to know that there are few spots in a high school more attractive to alert intellects, more productive of disinterested craftsmanship and learning, or more stimulating toward careers as diverse as literature, journalism, law, engineering, and mathematics. But Admiral Rickover is a scientist, and scientists are not required to make sense outside their special fields.

⁷ Another is Professor H. S. Commager, whose essay “Victims of Success” (Saturday Review, May 3, 1958) judiciously balances the astonishing achievements and unsolved problems of American education.

⁸ McGraw-Hill, 255 pp., $4.50.

⁹ Actual figures are both embarrassing and depressing. “The income of the parents of male applicants [for scholarships in 1954-5 through the College Scholarship Service] averaged about $6,800 per year, while the parents of female applicants averaged $7,500.” These incomes, of course, are far above the median for the nation. “Lack of any family offer [i.e., inability of the applicant's family to pay anything at all toward his college education] is more of a deterrent to receiving a college offer than evidence of willingness to pay all or a sizable portion of the expenses. The fact that large offers are hard, if not impossible, for most colleges to make lies behind a statement made by many scholarship officers: ‘We didn't offer him anything; his need was just too great.’“—Rexford G. Moon, Jr., “Financial Aid—from Application to Award,” College Board Review, Winter 1957.

¹⁰ The scholarship committees would be right, too. Neither man could be considered successful in later life, since Steinmetz never became socially well adjusted and Frost failed to finish not one but two colleges.

¹¹ Figures are taken from Paul C. Glick and Herman P. Miller, “Educational Level and Potential Income,” College Board Review, Winter 1957. The authors are statisticians of the United States Bureau of the Census. It should be noted, however, that these are mean figures. Other writers have shown that the much higher income expectation from longer education is lumped at the top of the academic scale. Students who do poor college work do not generally reach the normal expectation of increased income.

¹² “The plain fact is,” says the President's Committee on Education Beyond the High School, “that the college teachers of the United States, through their inadequate salaries, are subsidizing the education of students . . . by an amount which is more than double the grand total of alumni gifts and endowment income of all colleges and universities combined. This is tantamount to the largest scholarship program in world history.” A fortiori, of course, elementary and high-school teachers are making a similarly munificent and involuntary gift to the nation's taxpayers.

¹³ The effect of the objective, multiple-choice, or little-block-filling type of examination is as chilling to contemplate as the search for the inoffensive personality. But this is too big a subject to go into here.

¹⁴ New York Times, March 2, 1958. But lest any discouraged classicist be tempted to cheer at this unexpected ray of hope, I must add that the subhead reads, “Tempera Mutantur.” QED for both sides.

¹⁵ Marie L. Caylor, op. cit.