Perpetually Adolescent

This may be, as Henry Wallace insists, the Century of the Common Man--but is that just as dandy as Henry implies? How good is the Common Man? Last week, in the New York Times Magazine, Episcopal Canon Bernard Iddings Bell, who has been around colleges most of his life, indicted the Common Man--and his so-called education--in words meant to disturb the complacent. Wrote he:

"Democratic education must not only be democratic, it must be education. It does not follow that because the Common Man has been lifted into control, that he is automatically made competent to exert control. When the Common Man was thus suddenly liberated, what he needed . . . was such education as would enable him to understand what hitherto only the controlling few had been encouraged to try to understand, the nobler and wiser aims of the race, those visions which dictate the ethical foundations of a sound society.

"[But] ours is the century of the uneducated Common Man, of the perpetually adolescent Common Man, of the Common Man unskilled in the art of living. For this he is not to blame. [Our arts] are controlled by profit-hungry manipulators of a populace which has not by education been assisted to arrive at judgment about beauty. Those who have to do with educational policy-making . . . must rescue the Common Man. Otherwise ... the Century of the Common Man will end in a worse enslavement . . . enslavement to a standardized vulgarity sold as the good life by a group of rascals bent on their own enrichment. . . .

"Children need to be taught how to read, write, and speak the English language, if not with elegance, at least with clarity. . . .

"Children must be taught to respect the rights of others. Americans have the reputation of being the most inconsiderate folk on earth. Discourtesy is at once an evidence and a cause of immaturity.

"Last, we have a right to insist that [our schools] inspire a reverence for the Unseen. Americans will never be mature if all they recognize as real are the things of this and now, as long as they deal forever with what and never why."

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