Flapdoodle

Professor Henry Grattan Doyle of George Washington University thought it was time to call a halt. The latest gimmick among U.S. educators was something called "life-adjustment education" --a school of thought which seemed to believe that the teacher's job was not so much to teach history or algebra, as to prepare students to live happily ever after. "It will pass," said Professor Doyle to the Modern Language Association last week; but meanwhile, "it is continuing the same course of wild claims, blanket condemnation of 'traditional' subjects, anti-intellectualism, and contempt for 'book learning' that have characterized its predecessors for more than a quarter of a century."

To show what he meant, Doyle pointed to a glaring example of life-adjustment claims in a recent article in This Week magazine. The article was "full of the usual cliches such as 'learning as much about children as Chaucer' . . . and suspicious statistics." A "family-living" course in a Michigan high school, for instance, was credited with having cut the divorce rate among graduates, yet the life-adjustment "revolution" was only four years old. "How early do [they] marry?" Doyle wanted to know.

"The 'tear-jerker,' " continued Doyle, "is a paragraph about 'Marty,' who had difficulties in school, found Latin and algebra 'dull,' quit school . . . 'drifted from one dead-end job to another,' fell in with evil companions, and finally used a gun on a druggist during a holdup. As he awaited sentence, one of his former teachers reflected: 'I was a big help to that boy. I taught him Tennyson and compound verbs.'

"The implication of the personal responsibility of that teacher (not forgetting Tennyson and compound verbs) for Marty's inevitable end is unmistakable. Also unmistakable is the old technique that underlies such educational flapdoodle." The life-adjusters are "just as confident that a new phrase will solve problems that have plagued society for centuries ... as [their] predecessors ... of 'Education for Life,' 'Character Education,' 'Correlation and Integration,' 'Air-Age Education,' and 'Atomic-Age Education . . .'

"But we who know the value of good books ... of Latin, and algebra . . . may be forgiven if we sometimes show just a little irritation when the 'traditional' subjects are made the scapegoat, by implication at least, for the bad end of a bad boy."

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