Oceans of Piffle

Professionally, Albert Lynd, 50, leads a double life. Part of the time he works as copy director for an advertising agency in Manhattan; but he is also a former teacher of history (Harvard and Stanford) who has made quite a name for himself as a blistering critic of modern education. This week, in a new book called Quackery in the Public Schools (Little, Brown; $3.50), he explains why he is so vehement. The fact is, says Lynd, that Education with a capital E is rapidly destroying education.

The new philosophy, says Lynd. is now controlled by a bunch of professional overlords who have "copper-riveted one of the neatest bureaucratic machines ever created by any professional group in any country anywhere since the priesthood of ancient Egypt. In nearly every state today, a teacher or principal cannot go to work in a public school without a certificate or license, which can be obtained only by taking courses under a Faculty of Education. When the new teacher gets his first job, he has only begun his vassalage to these superprofessionals. In a great many communities, salary schedules are so rigged that he must go back again, summer after summer, for more Educational revelation if he expects to get maximum salary raises."

Preacher in the Cellar. The worst of all this, says Lynd, is that the superprofessionals themselves are often "half-educated or uneducated." Having taken John Dewey's anti-absolutism as the only true absolute, they feel little compulsion to dig into the wisdom of the past. Thus, "one hears the value of classical studies denounced by men whose understanding is obviously uncomplicated by any personal acquaintance with the classics. Emotional conditioning is held to be more important than intellectually acquired information--by persons whose private stocks of information come almost exclusively from the occupational texts which Educationists write for each other." Indeed, says Lynd, "placing these people as judges of the spiritual experiences of our children is like placing a temperance preacher in charge of a cellar of fine wines."

To perpetuate their cult, the Educationists have drowned their schools in "oceans of piffle." They spend hours on such research projects as a "Tabular Summary of Frequency of Mention of Correlation Between Aspects of Teachers or Teaching and Certain Criteria of Teaching Success." They give courses in everything from "Administering the Use of Audio-Visual Materials" to "Dance s193C --Social Dance."

Should Every Boy Read? The result of all this piffle is that more and more teachers are swallowing the idea that subject matter is no longer important. They have distorted Dewey's "interest psychology" into an excuse for dumping almost anything intellectual, have taken the gobbledygook of Columbia's William Heard Kilpatrick as gospel. "As I look out on life," said Kilpatrick, "I find a lot of people who don't use arithmetic; and I don't think that life would be any richer for them if they used it." Echoed the principal of a Champaign (Ill.) junior high school: "We shall some day accept the thought that it is just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read as it is that each one must be able to perform on a violin, that it is no more reasonable to require that each girl shall spell well than it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie . . ."

U.S. public schoolmen have apparently agreed that the purpose of going to school is "growth"--as John Dewey put it: "The release of capacity from whatever hems it in." Educationally, the results of that doctrine have been somewhat dismal (see above), but esthetically, they have been just the opposite. In the past three years, the nation has put up nearly 14,000 schools. Consciously or not, the best of them fit into the new philosophy perfectly. Both academically and architecturally, the keynote of the new U.S. school is freedom.

In some ways, the building of a new school is nothing more than a process of elimination. The whole idea is to eliminate as many blocks and barriers as possible. Air must flow and light flood in; the building must be capable of shrinking or growing according to the tides of population, and it must be made for use at all hours of the day. To please the taxpayer, the architect must also pay attention to cost--rby cutting down on stairways, waste space, and such traditional gimcracks as Greek columns, Georgian domes and Gothic towers. But most of all, the new school must eliminate restrictions on the pupil. Says Architect Ralph Burkhard, who remembers his own days in Manhattan's prisonlike P.S. 6: "When I design a school, all I think of is making it as different from those jails as possible."

P: For the Washington Irving elementary school in Waverly, Iowa, Architects Lawrence Perkins and Philip Will went on the theory that children are happiest in their own little community. They equipped each classroom with its own washroom, scaled its windows and ceilings to child-size. Other kinds of rooms, however, are of different heights, and each height has its reasons. The low-ceiling corridors leave room for extra clerestory windows in the classrooms, but the high-peaked playroom is designed in part for adults who want to hold dances or meetings at night.

P: Architect Donald Barthelme designed the West Columbia elementary school, south of Houston, to allow freedom of expansion. The school is really a series of spokes which can be added to the hub at will. To save money, he eliminated corridors: pupils go from room to room through courtyards. At the hub of the school is the common room--"Just a big hall/' says Barthelme, "where kids spill in and kids spill out."

P: In Seattle's Foster Junior-Senior High School, says Ralph Burkhard, "there are enough new things to hang a guy . . . But we based everything on how children would want to be treated." Daylight flows through photoelectrically controlled skylights, and this "provides new uses for window walls. Since they are not used for lighting, we have used them as display areas, with shelves for classroom exhibits." The school is heated through pipes under the floors, and plastic classroom ceilings are yellow to offset the grey Northwest skies. Furthermore, says Burkhard, "Foster is completely designed for earthquake resistance. You could empty the school in 15 seconds, and anyhow, there is nothing but plastics to fall on the kids' heads."

P: "A school," says Architect Richard Neutra, "is essentially a container out of which organic life can bloom." At the Kester Avenue elementary school in Van Nuys, Calif., life can bloom both indoors and out. Rooms can be made big or small with movable partitions; the furniture can be moved about for any sort of activity. "I do not consider a school only as a machine for learning," says Neutra. "It should be beautiful."

P:The Chandler Street Junior High School in Worcester, Mass, is really a semi-campus--a series of units connected by glazed corridors. Special sections, however, can be cut off entirely and heated separately. Thus the school's library could easily become a branch public library, if the city should want to make it one.

P: The Coconut Grove, Fla. George Washington Carver School for Negroes, says Alfred Parker, was also designed for "community needs." At night, the home-economics department can become a women's sewing center, and the workshops can be used by men. The school also contains a built-in model house, where the girls can run vacuum cleaners, make beds and learn how to cook. "Homemaking," says Parker, "is especially important, because most of the girls must find work as servants."

P: The purpose of the new University of $ Minnesota laboratory high school (St. -Paul) is not only to teach students but also to teach their teachers. Through an elaborate closed TV circuit, observers can tune in on any classroom at any time. Classrooms are about 25% larger, to provide space for modern "activities."

P: Though classrooms line a traditional central corridor at Maine's Bar Harbor school, Architect Alonzo Harriman has been able "to bring trees and sky into the center of the building by clerestory windows." He also places small panes of brightly colored glass in the kindergarten window wall "to enable the younger children to see the outdoors in different colors." To cut costs, Harriman advocates the use of "more prefabricated units such as wall and ceiling panels, heating and ventilating units for classrooms that are completely self-contained. One of the chief causes of wasteful school building," says he, "occurs when a committee seeks a monument, replete with costly ornaments, rather than a truly modern building giving the children a better school to learn in."

P: Architects Stevens and Wilkinson designed Atlanta's E. Rivers elementary school so that each classroom would open directly outside. They used cherry red brick both inside & out, painted window trims bright yellow, built paved spaces outside of primary rooms for outdoor teaching. Said the Atlanta Constitution when the school opened: "Not a gargoyle in sight . . . The end of the peanut-butter sandwich era ..."

P: Of all the new schools, one of the most revolutionary is the new elementary school in Scarsdale, N.Y. In planning it, say Architects Perkins and Will, "we concentrated on the innards of the child." The classrooms are in clusters, like petals about a flower, but each cluster is removed from the main part of the building. To get the shape of the classrooms, Perkins and Will experimented with full-scale diagrams on a gym floor. The circle and square, they decided, were too imprisoning; the pentagon was drab, the octagon confusing. The architects' final decision: the hexagon.

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