Jimmy Durante can always get an audience to laugh when he makes his famous complaint -- “Everyone wants to get into the act.” He gets a sympathetic response.
Educators frequently face a similar situation. They, too, complain that “everyone wants to get into their act.” But, sad to say, no one laughs. Instead, more members of the audience try to crowd onto the stage. Housewives, admirals, history professors, school board members, and that ubiquitous character, the irate citizen, all raise their voices and shout their favorite theories about education. The din, and unsurprisingly enough, the confusion reach every part of the land.
One natural response to such criticism is righteous indignation. Educators are hurt. But after the first flushes of temper, after damaged egos are soothed, educators themselves sometimes inquire -- almost as plaintively as Jimmy Durante -- do all these people have a right to criticize, to suggest, to gripe, to urge changes? And the answer, at least in American educational theory, is “Yes.” Public schools are public business, everybody’s business. Education is universal and democratic, - by which we mean that the schools should be responsive to the will of the people. Host of us agree with this theory. It is part of the litany of democracy.
But, I suggest, we can let things go too far in the direction of equality. Everybody’s opinion is not equally good in determining what our schools should teach; everybody’s training, aptitudes, experience are not equally designed to make them authorities on education. Everybody does not belong on the stage with Jimmy Durante. He is a star. I paid my money, so to speak, to see him. And when I send my child to school, I am paying taxes for a star performance, not for an amateur theatrical staged by the best talent available in my neighborhood.
As you can surmise, perhaps, from this abrupt beginning, I shall have several occasions tonight to call attention to trends and ideas which seem to be dangerous, at least from the layman’s point-of-view. And the first of these to which I direct your attention is the wide-spread idea that all the citizens, “the people” in the mystical sense of Jean Jacques Rousseau, should specify the goals, the aims, of our public schools. I don’t believe this. I don’t believe much in the value of community inventories or neighborhood audits. And I don’t think the average citizen, school board members included, are qualified to specify the aims of education.
Two thousand years ago Plato wrote these words: --
“When the matter in hand relates to buildings, the builders are summoned as advisers; when the question is one of ship-building, then the ship-wrights;...and if some person offers advice who is not supposed to have any skill in the art, even if he is good looking, and rich and noble, they will not listen to him, but laugh and hoot at him, until either he is clamoured down and retires of himself; or if he persist, he is dragged away or put out by the constables.” (Protagoras)
Plato, it would seem from this quotation, consulted the experts and paid little heed to the amateurs. He urged this approach on all matters, not just education. But what do we do?
In elementary and high school education we are advised to conduct a public opinion poll to determine what the people in an area think they need. After that, there is much discussion to make sure the poll reveals a true consensus. Then, if the consensus truly represents “the people,” the “entire citizenry,” the professional educators organize the curriculum appropriately. According to this theory, the people determine what ought to be taught, and the educators how to teach it.
One illustration of this approach was brought to my attention last week at a meeting of the Illinois Citizen Education Committee. At that meeting I received one of the Committee’s new pamphlets. I have it here. It is called, “So You Want to Evaluate Your School.” Let me read you a few sentences from it.
”...It is obvious we cannot fairly evaluate our schools unless we first agree on what the schools should accomplish. No one can tell you whether you have a good school unless he knows the goals you are trying to reach. The establishment of goals or expectations for your schools is the starting point of any sound evaluation...”
How can these goals be ascertained? According to this pamphlet, they can be determined by the establishment of a citizens’ committee whose first job is to find out what the community wants. The citizens’ committee uses questionnaires, discussion and inquiry, to discover public opinion. After the community’s desires and needs are thus determined, these goals are submitted to the educators for comment and suggestions. Many joint meetings are held. Much discussion. Finally the goals are submitted to the Board of Education. If approved, these goals and needs are accepted as the educational objectives of the schools in that community.
Perhaps it is unnecessary to add that the community next door using the same procedure may develop a different set of goals, and both sets of goals are, by definition, equally good and acceptable.
Pittsburgh, for example, may develop goals which emphasize metallurgy -- the steel industry needs metallurgists. Detroit may develop goals which emphasize industrial design -- the automobile industry requires “stylists.” Los Angeles may develop goals which emphasize music, dancing, play-writing -- the movie industry and TV need “creative talents.”
Now I have a great many good friends on the Illinois Citizens Education Committee. It is an excellent organization. Its devotion to our public schools is well-known. But, ladies and gentlemen, I submit that this proposed procedure is not the way to determine the educational objectives of any school, much less of all our schools. I realize that many experts disagree with me. Some of them are without doubt present here tonight. But, as a layman whose avocation with education threatens to take more time than my vocation, I do not think that the educational program in our schools should be determined by what a community thinks it needs. I don’t think that any Gallup Poll technique is going to be very helpful in determining the goals for our educational system, and, if you will permit me, I have a personal experience to illustrate what I mean.
Not long ago I was privileged to tour the Far East and to study their educational systems. Upon my return I made a series of speeches. I urged increased study of other cultures and civilizations and of other languages. I felt that there was a serious need for such studies.
Recently a famous American educator, Dr. Earl McGrath, found himself in a similar situation. He was sent to Europe as a delegate for the United States at an international meeting. He was chagrined by his experience. He found that the European delegates spoke English and that most could even speak one or more foreign languages in addition. The American delegation suffered an extreme linguistic handicap.
When he got back he did what I did. He made speeches about the need for more study of foreign languages in American schools. We were both right; but, as T. S. Eliot put it, we were right for the wrong reasons. Tonight, I want to be right, but I’d rather be right for the right reasons.
We were both taken in by one of the most popular doctrines in American education -- the doctrine of needs. We were both for the study of foreign languages and culture because of a “felt need.” Here is how the argument runs: -
--Americans abroad can’t speak French - more foreign language studies
--Russia is ahead in space technology - more science study
--Automobile accidents are up - more driver education
--Divorce rates are up - more courses in marriage and the family
--Mental institutions are overcrowded - more mental hygiene
--A teacher shortage exists - more education courses.
Now, please don’t misunderstand me. These are all good and important subjects -- even the driver training. But the basic questions are these: - how and when do we specify what is to be taught; who participates in making such decisions; and how is such participation accomplished?
Everyone will agree that education ought to take care of a person’s needs, just as we are all for virtue and the common good. But we disagree once we try to specify what we mean by virtue or the common good, or what we mean by “needs.” Anyone who says that he is for meeting needs and that his opponent is not, is offering a specious and rhetorical argument; he is begging the question. The real issue is this: - which needs are most important and how do we discover them.
A hundred years ago nearly every young person needed to be able to recognize when a horse was going lame or when the horse needed to be shod. Today he needs to know when a V-8 engine is missing or when a tire is about to go flat. Tomorrow he will have to know about atomic and jet engines. There are, in short, needs that are “practical” -- that is, “needs” which are determined by time and place. Let me call these mundane needs.
There are other needs, however, that transcend time and place. They are trans-historical. Good physical health is a basic need no matter when you live, or where you live. Good education must provide for good health, regardless of date-in-time or location-in-space.
But, does a young person in a remote North or South Dakota town have a “felt need,” a practical need, to read Russian novelists and poets, or the French writer, Albert Camus? Does he have a need to know advanced logic and mathematics, or theology, or linguistics? Or, if he does have such needs, are his neighbors to say he is queer and ought to migrate to New York or Chicago?
The question of needs, it is clear, cuts two ways: The first way is obvious. I drive an automobile; I have a need to know about it. Need in this sense determines the curriculum: the curriculum is “life-adjusted.” The second is more difficult to see. A person studies music, builds a Hi-Fi, and does all the things that persons enthused about music do. Then he moves to a remote town. There is no symphony, no ensembles, not even a record store. If he is worth his salt, he then tries to change the small town. In this instance, an attempt is made to adjust life to the curriculum, and not the other way round. In a sense, life becomes curriculum-adjusted.
All of us have seen “My Fair Lady”, or read “Pygmalion.” At the beginning of that story, Liza Doolittle had no “felt need” to learn to speak English correctly. She was happy in the gutter and doing fine. But once she learned English, having been educated in only this one respect, she was different. The whole pattern of her “practical needs” changed. Among other things she needed now to marry a professor, where before any man would have done.
The point is simple though elusive. There are needs which are basic to humanity, irrespective of time, place or culture -- needs like the need for mastering language, understanding one’s religion, enjoying music, performing in an art. In some communities, these may not be regarded as “practical” needs. They may not be the needs revealed by a public opinion poll in Pittsburgh, Detroit or Los Angeles, but, if these needs, basic to all human beings, are satisfied, then the whole pattern of a student’s desires will be different. True education will have created needs where none existed before.
Or, to put this discussion another way, is it a heresy to suggest that students in Kankakee might want to see Italian movies or even visit Italy because they have enjoyed the benefits of a good curriculum and teacher of Italian? Or is the community “inventory of needs” to preclude the study of Italian because not enough people in Kankakee are interested in travelling to Italy?
Instead of this doctrine of community needs, may I suggest that the test of good education is whether it will make people want to do, and enjoy, and make, and contemplate, the things most worthy of them. If education does not create a need for the best in life, if it does not open new vistas for the mind and the soul, new ambitions, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid, caste society where Shakespeare is reserved for the sons of the well-to-do and educated, and hillbilly music for hillbilly’s. The Stone Age for the Stone Man: May he stay there forever!
Well, you say to me, if the citizenry, the people, the public, should not determine the aims of education, who should? To which I reply: “You should. You, the people present in this room tonight. You, the educational leaders of Illinois.”
You should do this job because in a very real sense, you are best qualified to do it. Here is why.
You are best qualified because only you educators know, or should know, both the timeless, basic, intellectual needs of every man, and, his transient, passing needs as an individual in a particular town, village or community.
I have made the point that Gallup polls and community inventories are dangerous ways to determine the aims of education. But I haven’t stressed the fact that community needs are genuinely important, too, and must be fulfilled by our schools. Now I wish to do so. I wish to emphasize that local needs must be met by our instructional programs.
The real problem, however, the problem which the educator is best qualified to answer is this:
How can these local, transient needs of a particular time and community be covered in our program of studies along with the essential, timeless, trans-historical needs of all human beings at all times in all places?
This is a large philosophical question. It requires experts like yourselves to answer it accurately. Your whole training and experience should be directed to this task. Laymen can be of very little help. But may I, as an interested layman, give you one man’s idea of the correct approach to the problem.
Despite the risks, let me begin by saying that in educating a young person we are concerned with him,
First, as a man (or a woman) -- as a human being
Second, as a citizen -- a social human being
And only third and least important, as a specialist, in his vocation -- as an economic being.
Some authorities disagree with this order of priorities. Dr. James B. Conant, for example, and many others, are advocating a special program of education for the “academically talented” student who go on to specialize in medicine, law, engineering, and research science. According to this theory, the preservation of our freedom and the maintenance of our industrialized society requires such specialists. The need for the specialists dictates the need for a “tough curriculum.”
I disagree. My system of priorities postulates that a good man is more important than a good citizen, and, that both these qualities are more important than a man’s profession or specialty. Only in a totalitarian society can you have a bad man who is also a good citizen. A bad man cannot be a good citizen in a democracy. Even if he is the most “academically talented” man in the country, he is a liability and a misfit. He is a Klaus Fuchs or Bruno Pontecavarro. We don’t need them and we don’t want them. Furthermore, a society of bad citizens would be hell to live in, even if the hourly productivity of each were the highest in the world, even if they were all “academically talented.” Good men and good citizens are the backbone and the future of any society. They are the kind of human beings who can make intelligent choices about their vocations, their specialities. They will really learn their jobs and can be trusted to do them well, both in the technical and ethical sense.
The needs that pertain to a man as a human being, which transcend time and place, the needs which will help to make him a good man and a good citizen, should be known to the true educator. It is his job, his primary job, to discover these needs, to explain them with clarity, and to defend them with eloquence. He must bring before us the needs that are hidden, or at best seen darkly, and make them clear and luminous. If he must discover these needs through the modern techniques of the public opinion poll, then let him poll the scientists, the philosophers, the artists, the saints, the poets, the great men and women of history living and dead. Let him avoid the man on the street -- even the school board members. They are not the people to tell educators about the timeless needs of education.
Or, does someone maintain that we have lived 3,000 years since Buddha, 2,500 years since Moses and the Prophets, 1,900 years since Our Lord Jesus Christ; that we have read and assimilated the learning of Aristotle, and Aquinas, of Galileo and Newton, only to find ourselves asking the man on the street what he considers the goals, the aims of education? May God help our educational system if that is so.
In summation of my thought, let me repeat --
In the order of importance, the first factor to be taken into account in determining the aims of an educational program is not the immediate and local community, but the great human community extending through time and space. The real objective of education is to induct high school students into the community of saints and scholars, philosophers and poets, scientists and statemen, to make them enjoy and appreciate the works of Shakespeare, Goethe, Mark Twain, Lincoln, Jefferson, T. S. Eliot, Auden, Einstein and Mahatma Ghandi. I deny that 80% of our high school students are incapable of appreciating, understanding or desiring to know about the work and thought of these great men. This idea has been suggested only recently -- the idea that only 20% of our high school students can absorb this kind of knowledge. We all know of many schools which are already providing such work for 50%, 60% or even 70% of their students. More can do so if we are determined to make the effort to give such instruction.
The expertness of the educator consists in his knowledge of this great world-wide community. The people of Kankakee will be more than willing to tell the educator about Kankakee. It is their legitimate business to do so. Between them, the educator and the layman, they must determine what things are important, and in what order certain goals are to be reached. But, in the determination of goals and in the strategy and tactics of reaching them, the educator must hold fast to the transhistorical, to the essential goals that are derived from the human community as a whole.
The superintendents and the principals should be educational leaders, not followers of local prejudices and customs.
Our belief in science, democracy, and, our belief in individual human dignity and freedom, are three sets of complicated subjects that have had a relatively permanent place in the history of Western education. The specific subjects derived from these headings and others, belong in the secondary school curriculum whether the community raises corn or skyscrapers, is urban or rural, whether the students are “academically gifted” or not. Under conditions of modern mobility, a boy in Brooklyn should know his way in the woods and understand farm policy, just as a boy from the country should nil be, and no longer is, a hayseed once he gets to the city.
We parents and citizens do not want to adjust our children to a local culture -- we want to emancipate them and help them rise above it, to soar to the highest heights of human achievement - whether in New York or Paris, whether in 1958 or the 5th Century, B.C.
I have taken so much time in discussing this most important subject of the aims of education that I have little opportunity remaining to tell you of some other matters which have come to my attention with greater clarity in recent weeks and months. But several are so important, I must mention them before closing.
First among them is the problem of financing our public schools. Most of you probably know that I fought a losing fight on the School Problems Commission in an effort to gain endorsement for a foundation program of $260 per child in average daily attendance. Only five members voted “Yes” to my proposal. The opposition thought $245 was the maximum they could recommend. They maintained that my figure of $260 could not be paid out of current tax revenues.
Well, perhaps they are right. Maybe existing taxes will not produce the money needed for Illinois schools. But, I maintain, it is not the job of the School Problems Commission to determine where the money is coming from, or whether it is available for education. We are not the Finance Committee of the State Senate. Our job is to tell the legislature and the Governor what are the true, reasonable needs of our schools. This we have not done. We held meetings all over our State to find out, ostensibly, what the educators and the people believe to be necessary. But when the time came to act on the evidence, we failed. Instead of recommending what every member of the Commission knows is a minimum needed program of state support, we made a horseback guess as to how much money might be available (without any additional taxes), and then we put out our “tin cup” and asked for our share.
I think this is most regrettable. The legislature and the Governor have a right to know the true needs of Illinois’ schools. They don’t have to accept our estimate or evaluation of those needs. They don’t have to appropriate more money solely because the School Problems Commission recommends it. In fact, we all know, they have not done so in the past. But this time, ladies and gentlemen, we are not even telling the Governor and the legislature what the true needs are. We are misleading them with the idea that the basic problems of Illinois’ schools can be met with a foundation program of $245. I tell you, and you know it’s true, $245 per child will not do the job.
Educators, and all citizens interested in the welfare of education, have an important responsibility as a result of this action. You must explain, you must exhort, you must arouse the people, to the realization that we are not going to have a quality program of education in Illinois unless we get more money from the state government. I urge you to start now in making that fact known everywhere and to everyone.
The second point I must mention also involves finance, but it concerns our responsibility, rather than the state’s. It is this:-
In some places we are spending too much money on school buildings, and in doing so, we are laying ourselves open to the charge that we are profligate with the taxpayer’s dollar. $8,000,000 for a general high school serving 2,500 pupils is too much! Four gymnasiums in one high school building is at least two gymnasiums too many! Yet there are such schools, and perhaps more to follow, -- monuments to the pride of some community or some individual. I respect the motives of most persons involved in such expenditures. They want to create a symbol of their devotion to education.
I am willing to admit, also, that a wealthy community can, spend its money this way if it wants to. That’s democratic freedom of choice and I’m all for such freedom. But -- how much better would be the introduction of foreign languages instruction or good basic science courses in the elementary schools! Such courses of instruction cost money, too, and they produce much more important and lasting results.
Let us not waste money on buildings or in any other way. In short, ladies and gentlemen, let us make every effort to put our own financial affairs in good order before we ask the state to help us.
Finally, let me mention, very briefly, the situation involving integration in our schools. Our state laws are very clear on this point. All of you know those laws, probably by heart. 95%, so to speak, follow these laws, adhere to them and support them completely. But a small percentage of our schools are not living up to the letter or the spirit of those laws, and we are all suffering from this dereliction on the part of the very few. We have seen in the newspapers that the Governor lodges the responsibility for this matter with the State Superintendent of Public Instruction, and we have seen the State Superintendent assigning the blame to local officials. And we have witnessed the consequences: -- very little, if anything, is done to correct this abuse.
May I urge you, one and all, to rededicate yourselves to the Judaeo-Christian principles of charity and justice with regard to this important question of contemporary American life. I hope we shall get action; I look forward to effective action. But, in the meanwhile, let us all make sure we each are doing what we can to assure justice and equality in educational opportunity to all persons of all races, and of all creeds.
And, now in closing, may I return to the train of thought with which I began this talk. My idea then, as it has always been, is this: -
Education is the greatest means for providing new ideas, for arousing new needs, for opening up new opportunities. This is the most important function of education, and should be extended to all people, especially to all, or nearly all, students in our high schools, not just to the top 20%.
I say this with conviction because I know from actual experience that our schools -- even our vocational schools -- are not factories producing specialized workers for a hungry industrial machine. They are not institutions which seek to give a man a trade and then imprison him within it. That was the attitude in the old days, when knowledge of the liberal arts was restricted to the man who was liberated, to the free man, to the top 20% if you will -- and the “servile arts” were the destiny of all others, the lower classes, or manual laborers.
The coal miner, who saw only the darkness of his pits, found his children following him into the same profession. The textile worker at his loom, or the merchant man at sea, passed on to his children the trade he knew, because it was all he knew.
And in most of the world today, we see this age-old pattern still in operation. In India the caste system imprisons millions within their occupational and cultural group; in Russia, no one may change his job or status without government approval; in China, men are shackled to their jobs with little hope of liberation.
Two great forces have worked for two thousand years to change this ancient pattern; - religion and education, -- especially liberal education, so named because it liberated man, opened his mind to a full view of society, and gave him hope and light to guide his children into a full participation in the life of mankind.
Today, as in the past, it should be our ambition to extend this education universally. It is not our purpose to prepare students only for induction into the existing communities of Pittsburgh, Chicago, Champaign, Detroit or Little Rock. On the contrary, it is our purpose, the purpose of true education, to enfranchise man into the great, human community of free men and free spirits, of all times and all places. Let us not deny admission to this great community because of preconceived notions about intellectual capacity based on I.Q. tests and the other paraphernalia of behavior scientists. Let us prove that our famous American know-how can accomplish what the Russians are proving themselves afraid to try, namely, the production of more and more boys and girls, fully educated, fully alive to all the glories of culture and civilization, fully aware of their responsibilities, each to each, and all to all, in our American democracy.
In this task of surpassing importance and great challenge, you educators of Illinois must be the leaders. May God bless all your efforts. May He crown them and you with laurel wreaths of victory.
