QUACKERY IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS

by Albert Lynd ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 1953

A spirited and heated but at all times substantiated attack against ""quackery"" - which is essentially progressivism - in our schools today. The charge is levelled against the public schools but many private schools cannot escape the sphere of guilt there. Lynd, as a former professor and as a concerned and active parent now, has assembled some fairly indisputable evidence on the lowering of learning and literacy in schools where the ""real needs"" curriculum has displaced the fundamentals and an ""activity"" program of room care and household pets prevails over arithmetic (""distasteful medicine"") and foreign languages which ""offer meagre possibilities"" (Kilpatrick). The attack here broadens to research and degrees acquired on subjects of complete unimportance (plumbing facilities, the basketball free throw); to the teachers' demand for immunity from effective lay scrutiny; to the scramble for degrees and semester hours and the shameless course-manufacturing at teachers' colleges; to the theory of neo-pedagogy which had its inception in Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Dewey, but its championship here in the fuzzy philosophy (""a collection of emotive words"") of Kilpatrick; and finally to the conclusion that we must raise our standards of teaching and the teachers' level of remuneration to restore the dignity of the profession and the dignity of sound scholarship.... A stimulating, combative, cogent critique of the debasement of teaching and learning achievement in this country.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 1953

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown (A.M.P.)

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1953

Categories: NONFICTION