Surveyors & New Society

Education's myriad Wirts were ready for anything up to and including a Communist tocsin when the American Historical Association's Social Studies Commission finally announced its conclusions last week. Since January, when the report was scheduled to appear, campus & classroom have smoked with rumors of radicalism and suppression. Scripps-Howard Columnist Harry Elmer Barnes, onetime sociology professor, got an advance peek at the report, called it "the most revolutionary and significant document in American education since the days of Horace Mann." A first-rate, head-rolling revolution is what the Commission wants, but in Education, not Government. Down, cried the Commission, with pedagogy and its vast jerry-built structure of normal schools, teachers' colleges, Schools and Departments of Education. "The Commission proposes in the field of teacher training: (a) a drastic curtailment in the number of courses--often thin, arid and duplicating--offered in the principles and methods of education; (b) an insistence that persons engaged in training teachers in various branches of learning shall, first of all, be competent scholars in these fields; (c) the abandonment of the conception of a distinct 'science of education' and the reunion of education with the great streams of human knowledge, thought and aspiration. . . . The weaker normal schools and teachers' colleges should be closed, while the remainder should become centers, not of pedagogy as traditionally conceived, but of knowledge and thought." Besides this body blow, the Commission took a savage poke at modern pedagogy's right arm, the intelligence test. What test scores reveal, the Commission did not know. For predicting vocational success. formulating social and educational policies, such tests are "patently limited," "utterly inadequate," "meaningless." Best-known of the authors of these heresies is American Historical Association's retiring President Charles Austin Beard, 59, famed liberal historian (The Rise of American Civilization, with his wife) and onetime Columbia government professor. The Commission's research director, George Sylvester Counts, is a professor of education at Columbia's Teachers' College. Its chairman, August C. Krey, teaches history and the history of education at University of Minnesota. Other Commissioners include: Ada Louise Comstock, president of Radcliffe College; Isaiah Bowman, director of American Geographical Society, Carlton Joseph Huntley Hayes, Columbia historian. One of four who refused to sign the report was University of Chicago's famed Political Scientist Charles Edward Merriam. Like the Hoover Committee on Recent Social Trends, whose researches it found useful, the Commission began its survey in 1929. Financed by several hundred thousand Carnegie Corporation dollars and aided by scores of investigators, its announced purpose was to map the present and chart the future of social studies (history, political science, economics, sociology) in U. S. schools. That meant deciding the kind of society for which students should be prepared.

Here the Commission proved distinctly New Dealish. The present, it decided, is an age of transition. The old order of individualism is dying, a new age of collectivism coming to birth. "Almost certainly it will involve a larger measure of compulsory as well as voluntary cooperation of citizens in the conduct of the complex national economy, a corresponding enlargement of the functions of government, and an increasing state intervention in fundamental branches of enconomy. . . ." But in this "closely integrated world" the individual must be "free from excessive social pressures on his personal behavior, mode of living, cultural satisfactions and avocations, and religious, economic and political beliefs."

Potential citizens of this society must be taught social realities. Let them begin in the earliest grades with a study of their own communities, proceed upward and outward. Let them look into "the inefficiencies, the corruptions, the tensions, the conflicts, the contradictions and the injustices of the age" as well as "the material and spiritual potentialities implicit in man's mastery of natural forces?"

They will need, thinks the Commission, teachers wiser and braver than most today. "The scholarship, courage and vision of social science instruction in the schools can rise no higher than the scholarship, courage and vision of the social science teacher. . . . Until the work of teaching is made more challenging, inspiring and attractive, it will tend to draw persons of mediocre mentality; but until it does succeed in drawing a larger number of capable minds, it will tend to lack challenge, inspiration and attractiveness." Promising recruits must be attracted by dynamic training, free of drudging pedagogy. They must be guaranteed economic security. They must be offered leisure for the scholar's life. They must be free to speak their honest minds.

It is up to teachers to get these privileges for themselves and their successors. Most school administrators are more interested in new buildings than new ideas. The landholders, business and professional men on most U. S. boards of education are "peculiarly rooted in the economic individualism of the 19th Century." Special interests seek to twist young minds to their own ends. Politicians have their eyes fixed on school treasuries.

As the Third International cries to workers, so the Commission called on teachers to unite. From kindergarten to university let them join in a strong national association. Thus they may pool their thought and wisdom to steer education's course toward the new society. Thus they may secure their rights, fulfill their mission, protect themselves against "ignorant majorities, heresy-hunting minorities and all self-constituted guardians of public morals and thought."

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