Word: lynd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Your report [Sept. 7] on Albert Lynd's sizzling new book Quackery in the Public Schools is a cheering note of hope to those who are justifiably alarmed at the incredible stupidity and totalitarian tactics of some of the "educators" to whose care they must entrust the training of their children...
...another article (in the same section), mentions a new high school where, "through an elaborate closed TV circuit, observers can tune in on any classroom at any time." This is something right out of George Orwell's 1984 ... It's going to be a long pull, Brother Lynd...
Professionally, Albert Lynd, 50, leads a double life. Part of the time he works as copy director for an advertising agency in Manhattan; but he is also a former teacher of history (Harvard and Stanford) who has made quite a name for himself as a blistering critic of modern education. This week, in a new book called Quackery in the Public Schools (Little, Brown; $3.50), he explains why he is so vehement. The fact is, says Lynd, that Education with a capital E is rapidly destroying education...
...philosophy, says Lynd. is now controlled by a bunch of professional overlords who have "copper-riveted one of the neatest bureaucratic machines ever created by any professional group in any country anywhere since the priesthood of ancient Egypt. In nearly every state today, a teacher or principal cannot go to work in a public school without a certificate or license, which can be obtained only by taking courses under a Faculty of Education. When the new teacher gets his first job, he has only begun his vassalage to these superprofessionals. In a great many communities, salary schedules are so rigged...
Preacher in the Cellar. The worst of all this, says Lynd, is that the superprofessionals themselves are often "half-educated or uneducated." Having taken John Dewey's anti-absolutism as the only true absolute, they feel little compulsion to dig into the wisdom of the past. Thus, "one hears the value of classical studies denounced by men whose understanding is obviously uncomplicated by any personal acquaintance with the classics. Emotional conditioning is held to be more important than intellectually acquired information-by persons whose private stocks of information come almost exclusively from the occupational texts which Educationists write...