Evening star., 1938-03-04
A Parents Revolt
progressive" Education Appears to Be More
Backward Than Forward Looking.

the range of which the English Ian
guage is Greek Now, this seems to me
to be extremely important. For the
whole process Of thought is tied to
language; we think in words, and the
precision of logical processes is in
timately connected with precision of
expression. Sloppy expression means
sloppy thinking. and sloppy thinking
on the part Of people who are encour-
aged to think themselves educated
bodies i'll for the future Of our de-
mocracy.
DR.. johnson O'Connor at the
Stevens Institute of Technology in
Hoboken has made a special study of
vocabulary in common use. He picked
$50 common words-words which oc-
cur once in 100000 IN such widely
distributed printed matter as news
papers. He tested thousands OF cases.
And he found that the average high
school graduate knew only 81 Of them,
and the average college graduate only
1913. Seventy per cent of all classes
tested could give no definition, or an
idhoC oiiS, "a
''furtively," dispense" "docile," con
trite" Ninety-four per cent could not
define or describe the meaning of the
word "subversive."
Senators and Hamilton Fish, please
note!
Another Poor Idea.
I also observe from sad experience
that young people who earn their liv-
ings reading proof cannot read Let
sentence be dropped out of an article.
The sentence before it makes sense;
the sentence following it makes sense.
But without the omitted sentence the
whole argument makes no sense at all.
If you have young secretary who will
notice that simple fact, you are very
lucky.
Memory training is noticeably bad.
The most ingenious systems have to
be worked out in simple offices be-
cause human beings cannot be counted
on to have stored anything whatever
in their heads. When I was young.
was told in school that the important
thing was not to know thing, but
to know where you could find it. For
tunately my father, who was largely
responsible for such education as ! got,
believed no such thing, and forced me
to memorize masses of poetry and lit
erature Later 1 found that / didn't
always have the Encyclopedia Britain
MICA with me in Belgrade or Warsaw,
and that ability to see something on a
printed page. take note of it. and re-
member 1t, was one OF the few useful
things l had ever acquired.
Revolt Foreseen.
We ought to set our faces against
this tendency to mix up such things
as educational training with politics
and economics 1t has reached the
pass that If a person believes in
classical education he is condemned as
being a Fascist According to that
definition, the fathers of American
democracy we're all FascistS. One can
not read the Federalist. without realiZ-
ing how indebted Hamilton Madison
and Jay were to Aristotle and the
classical philosophers. And one often
wishes that our present legislators and
brain trusters had had the same train
ing in methodjcal thinking and were
half as familiar with the accumu-
lated wisdom of the past.
Yes, I foresee a parents revolt.
And a lot of teachers will join it,
Some day the parents are going to
rise up and demand that the teachers
in our schools spend less of their time
getting Teachers College credits in
the technique of teaching subject
and learn more about the subject
they teach. Our teachers know how
to teach history, according to the
most approved methods. but they are
without passionate interest in his
tory. They know how to teach Latin.
but they are not imbued with either
the spirit of the language or the
spirit Of the world it expressed. Many
Of them would get much more that
they could transmit to their pupils.