Challenge

A woman who had just heard him lecture asked the late, great Chicago educator, Francis Wayland Parker:

"How early can I begin the education of my child?"

"When will your child be born?"

"Born?" she gasped. "Why, he is already five years old!"

"My goodness, woman," he cried, "don't stand here talking to me--hurry home--already you have lost the best five years."

The Survey Graphic, "magazine of social interpretation," thus keynoted "the challenge of democracy to education" in its October issue last week. Survey Graphic last February began an attempt to arouse sluggish U. S. democrats with a trumpeting series entitled "Calling America." Because it believes that "democracy begins in the cradle," the magazine devoted its entire October issue to an appraisal of the U. S. educational system, by 31 famed educators and journalists.

Question before the house was whether democracy's schools are a match for dictatorship's. Panic-stricken by the dictatorships' single-track efficiency in grinding out Nazis, Communists who know just what is expected of them, most of Survey Graphic's experts gloomily concluded that democracy's schools are not at the moment prepared to meet the competition. Because U. S. schools (like the U. S. people) do not pretend to know all the answers, these experts proposed that what U. S. Education needs is a big blue print.

But if they confused education with propaganda, the experts were clear, if unoriginal, on specific failings of U. S. schools:

P:Educational opportunities are unequal: Allyn Burleson's children in California get twice as much schooling as Brother David's in Nebraska, three times as much as Brother John's in Kentucky. At least 800,000 have no schools at all. >The teaching profession, says Smith College's retired President William Allan Neilson, consists largely of "timid and unimaginative persons to whom moderate comfort, a moderate competence, moderate security are the reward for a moderate amount of moderately conscientious drudgery."

P:Schooling makes youth discontented: 40% of U. S. youths, says John Chamberlain, are out of school and jobless, growing "ugly and morose."

P:Educators know not where they are going, says Eduard C. Lindeman: "Current discussions of educational goals seem to me to have reached a stage of utter confusion."

Against these liabilities, Survey Graphic's experts balanced hopeful assets:

P:Employing about 1,000,000 people (four times as many as General Motors, three times as many as the U. S. Army), spending some $2,000,000,000 instructing one of every four inhabitants, education is still the biggest U. S. business.

P:Progressive experimentation is "rolling steadily forward."

P:Education for democracy is reaching closer to the cradle; nursery schools, be, ginning on two-year-olds, today number 800.

P:Colleges and universities have raised their standards, by such experiments as the tutorial system and the junior college are better meeting the needs of individual students.

To doctor the schools' failings, Survey Graphic'?, experts proposed many remedies, from Federal financial aid to more science in education. Most practical was Columbia University's Professor Karl N. Llewellyn, who suggested that educators find mass-production formulas that even mediocre teachers can use. Sample formula (to promote healthy skepticism): Let pupils be taught from the kindergarten to preface every "fact" thus: "My geography book says that Albany is the capital of New York"; "Mr. Smithers says that stealing is naughty"; "The Bugle says Japan is a menace"; "Candidate Loud says that Senator Louder is a liar."

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