Doctor on Doctorates

P: Analysis of Janitor Service in Elementary Schools.

P: The Vocabulary of Samuel Sewall from 1673 to 1699. P: Life After Death. P: Laughing and Crying of Pre-School Children. P:How Christmas Came to the Sunday Schools.

These titles of Ph.D. theses are typical of the lists which proud mothers thumbed last June as their sons stuck their necks out for the bright hoods of the Doctorate of Philosophy. Last week in Manhattan, Edgar Wallace Knight, Ph.D.,* Kenan professor of education at the University of North Carolina, guest professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, generally recognized as one of the South's leading teachers of teachers, delivered a diatribe against "fetish worship" of Ph.D. degrees. The old story he told his audience (most of whom were graduate students on the road to a doctorate): that Ph.D. degrees are "mass-produced" to the number of 3,000 per year, that the fault is with colleges for requiring that all professors be Doctors of Philosophy. Result, said Dr. Knight, is that rearrangements of known facts pass for contributions to learning. "Knowledge," said the Doctor, "is produced not by taking pains but by having them."

* Dr. Knight's thesis: Influence of Reconstruction on Education in the South.

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