Word: bestor
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...public schools, says Historian Arthur E. Bestor of the University of Illinois, are now in the hands of "a narrow group of specialists in pedagogy [who are] utterly devoid of the qualifications necessary for the task they have undertaken." In a new book, Educational Wastelands (University of Illinois; $3.50), Bestor, a liberal arts scholar, summons his colleagues to take over the schools once again...
...Babble. These people, says Bestor, not only shun knowledge; they often seem to despise it. "There is an antique play on words that still seems to tickle the fancy of professional educationists. 'We do not teach history,' they say. 'We teach children.' " Instead of subject matter, they babble about the "real-life" needs of children. They talk on and on about the "problems of high school youth" (e.g., "the problem of improving one's personal appearance . . . the problem of developing and maintaining wholesome boy-girl relationships"), and they put these in the place...
...Says Bestor: "It is a curiously ostrich-like way of meeting life needs to de-emphasize foreign languages during a period of world war and postwar global tension, and to de-emphasize mathematics at precisely the time when the nation's security has come to depend on Einstein's equation...
...pointed criticisms, during the question period, of the new policy. He was also critical when Stout abolished the faculty's Academic Council. Later, he committed what to Stout seemed the most serious offense of all: he began distributing about the campus reprints of an article by Historian Arthur Bestor Jr. (TIME, Jan. 5) of the University of Illinois. The article was called "Aimlessness in Education," and it echoed Biologist Richardson's opinions completely. It denounced the brand of education that many modern pedagogues are preaching, called for a restoration of intellectual content to the U.S. curriculum...
Intellectual training is more essential to every citizen than it has ever been in the history of mankind, and its importance grows with every year." But the alarming truth, says Bestor, is that educators today are all too ready to accept the unproved proposition that some 60% of American high-school students are incapable of absorbing such training. In report after report, they suggest that the majority of Americans are doomed to intellectual mediocrity, "destined from birth to be hewers of wood and drawers of water to a select few." As a result of this notion, high-school curricula...