"The Worst Education of All"

How good are U.S. teachers' colleges?

This week, in a special issue devoted exclusively to U.S. education, LIFE gives one man's answer to that question. If it is an answer bound to disturb the teachers' colleges, it is one even more likely to disturb the parents of U.S. schoolchildren.

The article was written because a young parent who uses the pseudonym John William Sperry/- happened to get into casual conversation with an English teacher in a Midwestern town.

Mainly for something to talk about, Sperry spoke of what he had been reading. He mentioned Harper's Magazine ("I don't think I know that one," said the teacher), the Atlantic Monthly ("I don't think I know that one," she repeated), and several books. As far as Sperry could see, the English teacher didn't do any reading at all. With three children of his own just about ready to enter school, he began to wonder what sort of education teachers get. In the next two years, he visited dozens of teachers' colleges all over the U.S. to see for himself.

"You Can't Expect . . ." Sperry soon learned that the U.S. has about 150 teachers' colleges, some called liberal arts colleges, some normal schools. But one fact stood out about all teacher education: "A great many of the teachers' colleges bring an inferior faculty and an inferior student body together in an inferior physical plant. And what is even more astonishing to me is that most of the people in the field take this for granted. 'Of course you can't expect a teachers' college to offer the cultural opportunities that a private liberal arts college can give,' one president of a teachers' college told me . . ."

What sort of "opportunities" do the teachers' colleges give? Sperry gathered examples. At one summer "workshop," he watched 200 teachers spend hours going over a list of 100 obvious phrases and rating the ideas as "quite important," "of average importance," or "not important." For instance, reports Sperry, "the group . . . rated 'To help children with their academic problems' as 'quite important.' When we came to the eighth phrase ('To avoid sarcasm or "talking down" in your relations with children') . . . there was an uneasy silence.

" 'Come on now!' the dean said. 'What does "talking down" mean?' " After several guesses ("Does it mean arguing with the student?" "Telling a pupil his mistakes?"), the group got the answer, dutifully rated the phrase "quite important."

"Be Attractive." This summer workshop--including its special morale-building song ("We are working in the workshop/ Working all day thru/ Learning all about Democracy/ Education and Science too . . .")--was not unique in its preoccupations. At another conference, "I saw some 400 poor, tired, middle-aged teachers solemnly conduct a discussion of 'desirable characteristics for a teacher.' They listed, one after the other, all the human virtues and agreed that teachers should have them . . . They [concluded] by taking a formal resolution that 'teachers should be personally attractive . . .' "

That night, after a full day of such accomplishment, there was a big conference dinner. "At the end of the dinner," reports Sperry, "[the teachers] started repeating slogans to each other. It took me a few moments to catch on to what they were doing, but I finally understood: they were reciting slogans in unison. The toastmaster stood up and said, 'This conference here at Bryant Hill has been a rich experience. Yes sir, Bryant Hill, Conference, Rich Experience. Let's all say that together now.' In chorus the audience replied: 'Bryant Hill, Conference, Rich Experience.' "

"You Wouldn't Know . . ." To Sperry, the "rich experiences" of the regular winter term were just as appalling. In one literature class of a New England institution, he found the teacher "a tired woman of about 50, with heavy black eyebrows and a nasal voice . . . For an hour she leafed through a collection of verse and commented on the titles in a dry monotone. She reached the conclusion that John Masefield loved the sea, and said she liked Robert Frost because there was 'none of that falderal about him--you wouldn't know his stuff was poetry if you didn't see it printed with capital letters.' "

Why do professional educators tolerate this sort of thing? To some extent, says Sperry, they have no alternative. Since public-school teachers are wretchedly underpaid, the profession seldom gets the cream of high-school graduates ("The English don't have a democracy," cried one student teacher in the course of a history class. "They have a king.") The colleges themselves seldom have the money that other institutions have, and their professors--"the men who teach the teachers--rank close to the bottom of the prestige ladder in the academic world." The great universities and the liberal arts colleges consistently ignore their plight: "[They] have little right to criticize teachers' colleges for not doing well a job they themselves have hardly done at all."

To Sperry, it is high time that both the public and the liberal arts colleges begin "to contribute more toward the great American goal of public education and help the teachers' colleges more instead of scorning them . . . Somebody better start doing something," says he. "As things stand now, the teachers being trained to instruct your children and mine are getting the worst college education of all."

/- Sperry decided not to sign his real name because he is engaged in "other education projects."

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