Dilution in American Education

AMERICA (the national Jesuit magazine)
November 3, 1951

Dilution in American Education
by Charles F. Donovan, S.J.

Charles F. Donovan, S.J., head of the Department of Education in the graduate school of Boston College, has contributed occasional articles to AMERICA on educational topics since 1945. In the present article he discusses the damage done to American education by those who have been at pains to make it painless, and shows that in education, as in other fields, to forsake the Christian ideal is to settle for the second-best.

Charles Donovan, in late 1990s




An Englishman who taught in an American college for ten years commented recently that our students are eager but naive and ill-informed. The American high school, he thinks, is becoming a pre-college playground. We could, of course , write off his criticism as the sort of ungracious jibe that Englishmen and Europeans are expected to make about American culture and institutions. But so many Americans are making the same sort of complaint that it can hardly be called a matter of foreign bias.

Those who are complacent about the educational situation in this country point out that never in history have so many people received so much schooling a in tile United States today. And those who are not complacent counter: "Schooling, yes. But how much of it is education?"

One of the principle that are doing as much as anything else to undermine American schools is the fixed notion that education has to be fun. We won't have our children subjected to anything hard or bothersome. We have practically adopted as a national educational motto: "If it isn't easy, it isn't educational."

This effeminacy of our educational philosophy can be traced to several causes -- to II materialistic civilization's deification of comfort and painlessness, to a prevalent Rousseauistic romanticism regarding childhood, to a well-intentioned parental desire to have things easier for the younger generation, and so on. Among the more formal influences encouraging educators in their soft pedagogy is the educational theory of John Dewey.

Dewey, influenced by his early Hegelianism, declared war on all dualisms. Wherever he found two opposed spheres of thought or action, such as mind and body, spirit and matter, labor and leisure, interest and effort, liberal and vocational education, he worked out a "synthesis" joining the two. Most of his syntheses resemble a Soviet mutual-assistance pact with a satellite country: one party is wiped out. This is a facile way of composing opposites, to eliminate one of them, at least verbally, One of the dichotomies Dewey attacked was that between work and play. Unhappy about this opposition, he argued that given the proper setting (note the environmentalism), work would become play. Naturally he applied this notion to schooling and concluded that in a healthy educational environment, where children are engaged in matters of vital interest to them personally, the spirit of play will prevail. No doubt Dewey did not mean this to he taken a sentimentally as it has been by so many of his followers, but certainly his doctrine is a main prop, though not the only prop, supporting the "play way" in American education.

The consequences of this fun complex in education are many and obvious. Take the matter of homework. Apart from its function of lengthening the school day and making the pupil's school life a part of his larger non-school life, homework serves as the best link between home and school. It gives parents a realistic notion of what their children's school activities are month by month, as well as the opportunity of fulfilling their very important parental duty of overseeing and cooperating in their children's education. But the schools, so anxious nowadays to identify themselves with "life," so eager to make the school a faithful reflection and continuation of the child's and the community's experiences and problems, are cutting off this most real extension into the home of the child's present vocation -- that of student. Homework is considered an old-fashioned institution, a carry-over from the days when schooling was unpleasant. an interference with the child's and the family's recreation.

Various rationalizations are used to make the abandonment of homework sound like an educational step forward. We are told that supervised study in school is more valuable than disorganized and reluctant study at home. But why can't we have study in both environments? If the child needs supervision to teach him to work independently, doesn't he also need an opportunity to practise these study skills on his own, away from school? A more straightforward attitude was taken recently by a politician running for election to the school committee of one of our large cities. There is little likelihood that he ever heard of supervised study, but he proclaimed the abolition of homework as the main plank of his platform. Why? Because in America this has vote-appeal. What is hard must be abolished; homework is hard; therefore ... It may be that the spirit of the politician is stronger than the spirit of John Dewey in our school administrators.

Whenever you hear school people talking about the problem of drop-outs, about the holding-power of the school, about making school "meaningful" to pupils, you an generally take it as the prelude to some further softening of our education. Drill, repetition, recitation, memory-work are dismissed as drudgery. Calumnies about past, and dreamy-eyed gushings about present, education are common. Take the following. which occurs in an article on the teaching teaching of modern languages: "In the past all learning was made difficult for the student. A joyous attitude towards leaning must be created." Another typical bit of wishful thinking appears in an article on the teaching of poetry.

Children should learn a great many poems -- or segments of poems -- just for the sheer joy of knowing them and being able to recall them at will. But this learning of poems by heart should be a painless process, an incidental part of the joy in hearing and reading poems. Memorlzation of poems should never be required.

There you have in a phrase the policy that is debilitating American education: it must be a painless process. The author does not ask how many pupils will be moved to memorize poems for the sheer joy of knowing them. or whether the sheer joy can be fully felt until after a poem is made one's own possession through memory. He does not consider larger issues such as the purchase of something personally rewarding by the expenditure of personal effort, or the value and need of self-control itself. For him, a single, simple principle settles all issues: schooling must be painless. One wonders what chance there is of stopping the deterioration of American education so long as this principle guides those who control our schools.

Sometimes the principle of painlessness is linked with a naive utilitarianism to justify the reduction of the quantity or quality of learning. There are many instances of this, but let us take one important one -- vocabulary. Modern education frowns upon old-fashioned vocabulary and spelling lists because they include many words children rarely use. Older textbooks are likewise censured for containing words beyond the comprehension of pupils. One could admit some validity in both these complaints without accepting the pragmatic remedy that has been applied. Vocabulary lists based upon use have been drawn up: They contain words that children of a given grade level actually need to know for their everyday purposes and get to know through their interests, hobbies, reading and so on. If ever a device was calculated to limit a people's vocabulary this is it. School people, Instead of being leaders, uplifters of the cultural level, are meekly following the ways and tastes of the average youngster. Instead of telling teenage boys and girls what words it would be good for them to know, our educators go hat in hand to the young people and let their "needs" and usage determine vocabulary content. Not by such methods did the Elizabethan age produce a Shakespeare and a Jonson.

When you let frequency of use by a cross-section of all youth determine your vocabulary, then -- to take only one example, but a pertinent one -- words like "monasticism" and "grace" will tend to disappear. They just won't make the approved list. If Catholic writers accept the sacred lists established by secular educators who have taken dictation from the "average" child, then the Catholicity of our own education will necessarily be watered down. The danger, however, is general, it is by no means Catholics alone who need fear the end results of this method of cultural dilutlon in education.

An unhappy law of diminishing returns seems to be operating in American education. The people at the top, who make educational policy, write educational textbooks and train our teachers, are not, generally speaking, well educated themselves. They have been trained in their schools of education as technicians, not as cultured men and women, not as philosophers, not as literate adults. The dreary uniformity of thought and expression of our so-called educational literature bears witness to this dismal truth. Such people are only too ready to follow easy rules like the rule of painlessness and the rule of use. They are succeeded by recruits of whom less has been demanded and to whom less has been given educationally. These successors in their turn apply the laws of use and painlessness to lower further the standards of our education and culture. Thus they draw into their ranks a newer generation more poorly trained than they.

This is a gloomy picture. If the situation is to improve, someone, somehow, must inject a little iron into American education. Catholic education can perform a valuable service here. Catholic realism, standing midway between senseless Spartanism and Calvinistic pessimism, on the one hand, and spineless sentimentalism on the other, recognizes the need and value of hard work and self-discipline. Accepting the fact of man's fallen and redeemed nature, the Catholic educator understands and takes into account the truth that "knowledge maketh a bloody entrance." That is a fact. Closing one's eyes to it won't alter the fact; it will merely result in no knowledge making an entrance. There is likewise a Christian understanding of self-discipline -- just William James' stoical program of doing something hard to prepare oneself for unexpected hardship -- but a recognition that all of us are called to share the Cross of Christ. The Catholic educator sees the danger of giving pupils the impression that there need be no unpleasantness, no hardship, no difficulty, no pain in life.

With this philosophy, Cathol1c schools should hold on to their sound educational values and perhaps even inspire some public-school educators to imitate their procedures. It would be a shame if Catholic schools were to abandon their sensible realism and allow themselves to be drawn into a foolish copying of the secular education.