Word: mencken
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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That bogey of liberty--"business efficiency"--is again stalking the land. Mr. Mencken accuses it of a well-assorted category of crimes. Its dastardly attack on the saloon has multiplied sentimental toasts and bibulous jokes. The Kansan prohibition of public smoking has become a subject of vaudeville humor. But the last and least expected of all its crimes is bound to provoke the usually docile American to revolt, instantaneous and complete...
...intense desire of the two American virtuosi in virulence, Messrs, Mencken and Nathan, to till against every windmill on the plain has led them to attack one of the most respected of modern pedagogical theories. The review of D. W. Fisher's new book, "Teaching the Young to Think", too neatly annihilates the fallacy of teaching how to think, without teaching what to think...
...more important than any encyclopedia of knowledge. The ability to grasp and reason with experiential fact is supposed to be developed by the testing and teaching of a college course. Naturally the emphasis has been shifted from the body of facts to the method of using them, but Messrs. Mencken and Nathan are merely shadow boxing with an ethereal opponent if they conceive that education has been evaporated to a highly concentrated essence, devoid of all relation to the world of problems surrounding modern...
Instead of so airy and fragile an educative purpose, about as comprehensible as pure theology, it is plain that the aim of education is not to implant in young intellects any given set of dogmas--even the very interesting dogmas of the dogma-hating Mr. Mencken. Education does not ignore the issues that confront the modern world, but, avoiding the ex cathedra dictation of belief, tries to lead the student to reason for himself, to cull and consider to become a thinking atom in a difficult universe of conflicting purposes...
...best seller is Papini's "Life of Christ". A gentle raising of the critical eyebrow marks Harvard's reserved surprise at this announcement. In the CRIMSON Bookshelf for November the Community Bookshop states that Harvard's "great interest these days is in the works of the modern sophisticates, Mencken, Nathan, Van Vochten, Machen, Dreisen, and others, that stimulate the critical faculties...