Too Many Books?

After a long, hard look at U.S. high schools, from opposite ends of a telescope, two educators last week agreed on the basic trouble with U.S. secondary education: too much book learning.

In the January Harper's, George Henry, principal of a 350-student high school in Dover, Del., contends that a third of all high-school students can't read or write well enough to learn much of anything from textbooks. What's more, he adds gloomily, they never will be able to. Says he:

"The state accepted long-ago the principle that all pupils, bright and dull, were entitled to the same education. But the right to learn does not seem to carry with it the ability. . . .

"Most parents regard passing ... as a child's democratic right. . . . Unless a teacher wishes to be picked to pieces . . . she cannot fail a third of her pupils, and so she passes nearly everybody. . . ." Meanwhile, sighs Principal Henry, "precious little education, even for the others, is now going on."

George Henry is convinced that the one-third are not necessarily either stupid or underprivileged; they are just "nonverbal." Many of them have good minds and superior talents ("the kind of intelligence it takes to build a boat from blueprints"). Some cities now put such students in vocational schools--but there, Henry objects, they take four years to learn what they could learn (with pay) in industry in a few months. His recommendations: more movies and radios in the schools, much more pioneering in the uses of arts-drama, music and painting, "to sharpen the awareness of pupils to their everyday surroundings."

Sargent v. Twelve-Year-Olds. Harvard's articulate Dean of Architecture Joseph Hudnut would like to cut down on rote textbook learning, not only for the "nonverbal" third, but for all high-school students. Says he in the January Magazine of Art:

"The spirit of the workshop . . . should inform every part of school. There should be a workshop for letters where poems and stories are made; workshops for dancing and for music; workshops for the art of living together in houses, that ridiculous name domestic science being forever anathema. . . . Not science but the goal of science is important. . . . Cookery, for example, is a better discipline in our schools than chemistry. The ingredients of a cake are science, art and good sense, all of which can be blended there into a very pretty simulacrum of the good life. . . ."

The art that Dean Hudnut feels a need for in U.S. schools is "that kind of making and doing which illuminates life, gives it interest and importance, and which, through education, makes life a common experience . . .

"I would have high-school students wholly ignorant of art history until after they had learned to paint and write and build. ... I find few things more depressing than the correct appraisements [of works of art] by juvenile critics accompanied usually with condescensions toward Sargent and Saint-Gaudens. Little as I admire Sargent I am ready to defend him . . . against all comers under twelve years of age."

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