Some Defects

A London View -- Professor Thomas' Academy -- Pig Iron -- Dartmouth and Yale The London Times sees in the Carnegie report a sign of the awakening of the United States to its educational shortcomings, as well as an admission of the existence of those shortcomings. "The state of American education has never been fully understood in this country. There is, on the one hand, a vague belief in its efficiency which has been encouraged by the reports of English educationalists who have been welcomed in the United States and shown many admirable schools which were not perhaps fair samples of the whole system. These visits took place before the war, in days when an optimistic census had declared that there were only some 8% of illiterates in the whole vast area. English commissions were satisfied that this country had a very dangerous competitor in scholarship, in science, in general liberal education across the Atlantic." Then came the draft report that 25% of the drafted men were illiterate. And the British breathed more freely.

But British confidence, so The Times contends, is unwarranted. The explanation of illiteracy is immigration. It will be solved. And the Americans have the will and the wealth to solve it.

The Times stresses, however, one item which does not make pleasant reading on this side of the Atlantic. That is the fact that "the average attendance, even in great American cities such as Chicago, is deplorably low compared even with English country town average attendance"; it is "almost as low in the United States as it was in Ireland." That fact, if it is a fact, the Carnegie report did not divulge.

But the British explanation is interesting. "In England free education came a great deal later than compulsory education. Parents had learnt to appreciate the education that they paid for, and compulsion was hardly necessary. When free education came the position was not effected. The reverse process took place in the States. Education was free before it became compulsory, and parents never learnt to value what they paid for." And, further, it is argued that the Government Board of Education, coordinating and centralizing laws of attendance, supplies a factor altogether lacking in the United States.

Whatever may be the advantages of one situation over the other, it seems obvious that the problems of education in England are approximately the same as those faced in the United States. H. A. L. Fisher, Pres- ident of the English Board of Education during the War, contributes to the current Yale Review an account of his incumbency which might well have been written by an American State head of schools during the same period. The manner would be different and the names would change, but the substantial facts would be much the same.

That there is a general and growing dissatisfaction with the American school system goes without saying. Witnesses need no subpoena to testify on that issue. The stand is now occupied by Casper F. Goodrich, a retired Rear Admiral, who computes his parallax from the two fixed points of Professor Sidney Thomas' School at New Haven and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. The Naval Academy is orthodox and oldfashioned; the New Haven School is advanced and experimental. At Professor Thomas' there are no books, but rather wall maps, and mathematical games; no paper pads, but slates. Competition is emphasized; the clever rewarded; the dull punished. And, more than all, there is Professor Thomas. Admiral Goodrich would reproduce the system as well as may be without the Professor. He would weed out the unfit and set them to their proper tasks. The fit he would educate to greater fitness. And throughout the process he would select and choose and apply, avoiding as he would the devil the folly of "trying to make high-speed tools out of pig iron."

To this Mr. Jim Blake, of Glens Falls, New York, writing in The Outlook, would reply that the Admiral overlooks the claims of pig iron. Pig iron doesn't relish its limitations. It would like nothing better than an infusion of tungsten. And it suffers when it is told to stay pig. Mr. Blake refers particularly to Dartmouth, which, since it has launched upon a career of excellence, has been quite tactless in its expulsions. Nearly 300 Sophomores and Juniors, as well as Freshmen, were expelled last midyear. "It was pitiful," says Mr. Blake, "to see the distress. Some were from the far West and were sent off in the midst of a severe winter." And he ends, or rather he begins, by demanding: "What is the aim of Dartmouth?"

Yale wants to know the same thing. Not about Dartmouth, but about Yale. And Professor C. W. Mendell, Professor of Latin and Chairman of the Athletic Board of Control, leads off in The Yale Daily News with a succinct and persuasive statement. The object of a college education is culture. "Culture is not the finished product, much less the meretricious trappings of an inferior article serving to deceive the observer. Culture is fertilization. . . . True education must make fertile the intellectual and moral ground so that it can bear fruit in the proper season. To be more concrete, the real education which a college can give is that which enables the alumnus to judge for himself with reasonable expectation of success."

The present senior class at Brown is so exceptionally brilliant that many of its members will be excused from taking the final examinations.

The London County Council ruled that all women teachers must be single. The legality of the rule under the Women's Disabilities Act is doubted. It will throw 4,000 teachers out of work. The reason for the rule is said to be the unemployment situation.

A happy solution of the problem of the teacher's vacation is suggested by Mrs. Alfred Lyttleton, who accompanied Lady Astor on her American trip last year. Provided sufficient money is collected, she proposes to arrange to send English school teachers to America for their summer holidays. And she hopes that the first Odyssey of pedagogues will inspire American philanthropists to send American teachers to England.

If these plans can be carried out in a large way, Mrs. Lyttleton feels that more will be done to further international good-will than can be accomplished by an exchange of erudite university professors or laboratory scientists. One thing, too, is certain: it will awake again the old discussion of "English" vs. "American" school systems, and it will again be discovered that what is good for Jonathan makes poor fare for David.

Because "many of the leading patriots of the country are held up to scorn" and certain achievements of the American Revolutionary army are "belittled," two American histories by Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard, and one by 0. H. Van Tyne, of Columbia, were ordered removed from the shelves of the San Jose (Cal.) Carnegie Library.