Word: lynd
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...restrictions when we laughingly violate them in a way which can only make them more strict? To be sure, it was a good lark: but Americans, even Harvardians, are going to have to learn that they cannot be Men of Distinction and Lone Rangers at the same time. Staughton Lynd...
Thin Drippings. Except for some "thin drippings" on cultural subjects, says Lynd the summer curriculum consists mostly of the so-called "professional" courses, which spin out "the simplest teaching procedures into astonishing lists of redundant offerings." Teachers College of Columbia, for instance, gives no fewer than ten course; in Audio-Visual Education, with an eleventh in "Administering the Use of Audio-Visual Materials." Says Lynd: "There seems to be a transcendent mystique of administering anything in the schoo world more complex than a pencil...
Such inventiveness, Lynd ruefully concedes, requires ingenuity on the part of the super-pedagogues, but there is plenty of ingenuity there. "Thus, your daughter in her high-school sewing class, may be getting the benefit of any 'enriched' teaching her instructor may have learned from this offering at Columbia...
Bargain Basements. To Lynd, it seems obvious that today's schoolchildren lack culture, and that it is due to the lack of culture in their teachers who are trained by the professional schools to treasure "enriched teaching" and "social orientation" more than the subjects they teach. Says Lynd: "The faculties who operate these intellectual bargain basements are the men who are quietly running the educational program in your school. It is more than a possibility that they are also running intelligent and literate young people right out of public education...
What can a parent do about all this? Lynd, himself a graduate of California's public schools, has only one pessimistic suggestion: "Mortgage your house and put your youngster in one of the good private schools, where the best teaching today is being done by high-quality liberal arts graduates for whom the professors of education are only an inspiration for humor in the Masters' Common Room...