Rebel

Before a packed audience at Manhattan's Horace Mann School, two old men slowly mounted the platform. They had come to deliver eulogies. One was slow-spoken 88-year-old Pragmatist John Dewey. The other was white-haired William H. Kilpatrick, 76, Columbia's fiery ex-professor of education. Both, in their time, had been rebels. They had come to honor a third. Boyd H. Bode (rhymes with soda) had walked in their steps in progressive education, but he was no meek disciple. "Whatever of mine goes through Bode," said John Dewey, "comes out different."

The son of a stern Calvinist preacher, Boyd Bode was brought up to be "a good 16th Century Calvinist." At school in Illinois, he dutifully mastered his catechism, the doctrines of predestination and a high tariff. At home one day, young Bode remarked that something might be said for Evolution. His father rushed out of the house, hitched up his horses, and drove all day, praying for his son's soul. "For me," said Bode, "it was a period of unmitigated suffering. . . ."

Horse Sense. His father wanted him to become a professor of theology, but Bode turned to philosophy. At the University of Illinois, he got a job teaching logic ("horse sense made asinine," Bode now calls it). A few years later, he was appointed professor of education at Ohio State University. Wherever he went, his agonizing doubts shadowed him. Though not by temperament a rebel ("I tried to be a good boy"), he could find no authority for moral standards in traditional creeds or dogmas. In desperation, he turned to the works of William James and Dewey, first to criticize, then to be converted.

Even those of his students who disagreed with him ("We had to leave our souls stacked outside his door," said one) learned to respect and even love him. His absentmindedness was the talk of the campus. He was forever taking his little children out for walks, only to forget all about them and leave them abandoned in some shop or library. Once, after a day of bewildering discomfort, he found he had been wearing his one-piece suit of long underwear upside down.

A disturbing but kindly teacher, Agnostic Bode attracted such big classes that only the chapel would hold them. There, his long figure draped over the lectern, he would lecture with inflammatory enthusiasm. Sometimes, on fire himself, he would edge off the platform onto the top of an adjoining grand piano, to get more persuasively close to his hearers.

As a progressive educator, he has little use for the willful children turned out in progressive education's name. He tells the story of one student who arrived at school bearing a note to the teacher: "Please don't strike Willy. We never strike him at home, except in self-defense."

Hash. Now retired at 74, Boyd Bode is convinced that the U.S. is "still making a hash" of education. He believes, like all good educators, that education should arm a person with a philosophy of life. Today it fails, he says, because it is undecided. Where does its moral standard come from? The traditionalists bid students look to the supernatural, and to dogmas of the past, for authority; the pursuers of the scientific method "invite us to create our standards as we go along." For Bode, the choice has been made: "Why not say that moral ideals spring from the soil of every day?" To the present uneasy, schizophrenic anarchy in teaching he would prefer a victory of either side.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.