Businessmen v. Schoolmen

Most of the 1,000,000 U. S. schoolteachers, principals and superintendents are conservative. So are the textbooks they use. So are the businessmen who run the boards of education that run the schools. Yet today the U. S. has a decidedly liberal Government, voted in by the products of its conservative schools, and classroom and campus resound with students' criticisms of the social order. Flummoxed by this paradox, businessmen are getting increasingly hot under the collar about "visionary" professors. The institution they attack most often is the fountainhead of "progressive" education, Columbia University's Teachers College, which they call "The Big Red University."

Last fall T.C.'s garrulous, conservative Dean William Fletcher Russell, who believes that not more than 2% of his faculty leans to the left, decided to show businessmen their mistake. Professor Paul R. Mort, director of the college's Advanced School of Education, invited business executives to a conference with the professors. Three critics of business--Professors George Sylvester Counts, F. Ernest Johnson and Edward Hartman Reisner--thereupon started the fur flying. Four businessmen hit back--Mark M. Jones, president of Akron Belting Co.; George Harrison Houston, president of Baldwin Locomotive Works; Henning Webb Prentis Jr., president of Armstrong Cork Co.; Dr. Harold Stonier, executive manager of American Bankers Association.

The businessmen and schoolmen agreed that: 1) U. S. education in recent years has paid too much attention to methods of teaching and not enough to social problems; 2) business has been backward in adjusting itself to new technological conditions. But when they began to discuss what should be done about it, the debate grew bitter. Businessman Houston warned the educators they were flirting with dangerous, collectivistic ideas. More bluntly, Businessman Jones charged them with letting businessmen down, demanded that they do something to remove the impression prevalent among businessmen that educators were "persistently questioning the continued usefulness to society of the enterprise system."

Still hopeful of bringing businessmen and schoolmen closer together, Professor Mort appointed a committee to clarify the issues. The committee needed ten topics and 24 subdivisions to catalogue the disagreements. Last week the four businessmen and three educators sat down before an audience of professors and students in Columbia's Milbank Chapel to thresh the matter out. Flanking Dean Russell, they sprawled in their chairs, wriggled and squirmed, stared at the ceiling, never got beyond Subdivision 3 of Topic I. Crux of the argument was not education but the "private enterprise system" v. "planned economy." At the end of a full day's talk the businessmen and schoolmen were farther apart than ever. Messrs. Houston & Co. accused the educators of threatening U. S. Liberties. Confessed Professor John L. Childs (chairman of the committee that "clarified" the issues) : "I for one, in my work, daily am letting business down, for it seems to me that what business wants the schools to do is against the best interests of the people."

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