Word: modernizing
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Bookishness. The world of modern education, as Smith found it, is one in which drill and discipline are taboo, and teachers have become abnormally afraid of boring pupils or straining their abilities. In worrying about such matters, they have long belittled what they call "verbal intelligence" and "bookishness," forgetting that "by far the greater part of man's wisdom is stored up in books...
...insistence on keeping courses "up to date," says Smith, the school has done its modern work at the expense of basic knowledge. Smith discovered schoolchildren who knew quite a bit about the organizations of the League of Nations and the United Nations ("a meaningless parroting of their elders") but had no idea, for instance, where Geneva...
Inkspots & Removers. These unhappy trends, by Smith's analysis, have their beginnings in the teachers' colleges, where teachers are exposed to a thorough indoctrination of modern pedagogy, without which they could not hope for promotion ("Socrates himself would find it extremely difficult to be certified"). They waste valuable years taking courses in everything from the Rorschach inkspot method of diagnosing personality to the problems of student personnel administration. But what is education really for? The teachers' colleges, as far as Smith could determine...
...Higher Loyalty. To Layman Smith, the trend is clear, present, and dangerous: in their anxiety to adjust the child to his environment, modern educators have actually forgotten the child for the environment. As the American Association of School Administrators put it in its own brand of pedagoguese, education should aim not at educating "the individual in his own right to become a valuable member of society," but at preparing him "for the realization of his best self in the higher loyalty of serving the basic ideals and aims of our society...
...something faintly "unAmerican" about making collective society so all-important. To him, the most important aspect of education is "just that intellectual and moral development of the person as a person which these educators believe is now outmoded." But Smith also found another tyrant besides society: science. According to modern educational dogma, science should be the final test of all action; all things outside it-"man's ingrained habit of setting up ethical and moral ideals, his belief that his own life must mean something and that the universe should 'make sense'"-are "prejudices...