From Bell to Bell

After 34 years on college faculties, Dean Harry J. Carman of Columbia had to admit his distress. Last week at a Manhattan meeting of educators, he spelled it out: too few college professors and instructors know how to teach. He conceded that, as a class, college faculty members know a lot about a lot of things; but too many of them are "departmental-minded" people, who are "without ability to inspire."

It is not because of overcrowded classrooms or overloaded schedules that teachers are falling down on the job, said Dean Carman. The big reason is that teachers themselves are not being taught to teach. Said he: "We have persisted in the assumption . . . that good teachers are born, hence cannot be made . . . The truth of the matter is that teachers can be made, but at present are not being made, or are being made badly."

For the most part the graduate schools are to blame, Carman believes. They have apparently decided that all a teacher needs to get along on a college faculty is "knowledge of the subject and ability to do research . . . The university graduate who is awarded his Ph.D. is recommended for college teaching on his promise as a scholar" --not on his promise as a teacher.

"What have been the consequences? Our college staffs are weighted with well-meaning but often dull and routine people . . . When one visits the classrooms of these so-called teachers, he is impressed with the aimlessness of performance. The only apparent purpose the observer can discover is to fill the interval, from bell to bell, with another segment of the subject matter of the course which the student can and should acquire for himself."

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