Word: lynd
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Your report [Sept. 7] on Albert Lynd's sizzling new book Quackery in the Public Schools is a cheering note of hope to those who are justifiably alarmed at the incredible stupidity and totalitarian tactics of some of the "educators" to whose care they must entrust the training of their children...
...another article (in the same section), mentions a new high school where, "through an elaborate closed TV circuit, observers can tune in on any classroom at any time." This is something right out of George Orwell's 1984 ... It's going to be a long pull, Brother Lynd...
...disgusted by your repeated attacks on American education, of which your review of Lynd's book is just another example. All your "oceans of piffle" are based on the same hackneyed theme that if only John Dewey and William Heard Kilpatrick and their ideas had never existed, then education would be far better than it is ... Your war should not be directed against educators who are earnestly attempting to improve the profession but against conditions which foster substandard teaching . . . Substandard teaching has its origin in the community, not with John Dewey...
...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...
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...