Education: What Grandma Knew

Progressive educators are beginning to discover some of the things that Grandma knew:

Cursing. “I hope you fall out of the window, you blankety-blank stinky old bitch.” This bad wish was expressed by a three-year-old in the wartime nursery school set up by Connecticut’s St. Joseph College, in downtown Hartford. The vexed urchin’s pretty teacher was not at all shocked: but being a nursery-school teacher, she carefully wrote down every word. In the newly streamlined November Progressive Education, she suggests how to handle such tough-talking cherubs:

“Ten to one [the] youngster . . . doesn’t know what he is saying . . . [but] knows it creates a stir. . . . If the adult is shocked and sharply forbids . . . the child will use the phrase over and over . . . the teacher [should] let the obnoxious expression go the first few times. . . . Often . . . it will wear itself out. . . . If you correct a child and he answers, ‘My father says that’ . . . you must . . . [avoid] discrediting his home. . . . It must be pointed out. . . that, although those words may be used at home, [they] cannot be . . . at school.”

Cheating. Nearly half (46.5%) of 241 pupils in Oregon’s Corvallis Junior High School recently grabbed what looked like a fine chance to cheat.* That was in line with other studies of student honesty (TIME, June 19, 1939). But this study, by Lyle Johnson of the Eastern Oregon College of Education, went ahead to look for causes. Some findings, published in the high-school teachers’ monthly, Clearing House:

> Sex, parental nationality and occupation, residence area (urban or rural) and divorce of parents all seemed to have little to do with cheating.

> In higher grades there was less cheating than in lower.

> The more brothers & sisters a pupil had, the greater the tendency to cheat.

> The higher the I.Q., the lower the percentage of cheating.

> Pupils whose mothers worked outside the home tended to cheat less than others.

> Pupils rewarded at home for good grades cheated more than others.

> “One of the more discouraging conclusions . . . is that membership in the so-called character-building organizations (such as Scouts, Y.M.C.A.) seems to have little influence in curbing the tendency to cheat. . . . Members of such organizations cheat slightly more than nonmembers.”

Teasing often begins at home. The ways of fathers with children were studied recently by Cornell’s L. Pearl Gardner. In the Journal of Genetic Psychology she reports on interviews with 300 fathers aged between 20 and 79, of whom 48% admitted that they teased children under six. They cited 151 ways of teasing.

> 31% of the teasing was by poking, punching, pulling curls, tweaking pigtails, tickling, rubbing whiskers.

> 27% (including snatching) involved papa’s joy in being big.

> 15% consisted of paternal lies (tall stories); another 15% played on the child’s fear (of bears, burglars, being dropped, being deserted, etc.).

> 13% involved ridicule (reference to defects, plumpness, freckles, snub nose, etc.).

Researcher Gardner warned that such teasing not only makes children unhappy; it also lays a basis for “inferiority, social timidity and temper tantrums.”

* Tests for cheating generally consist in giving a true-or-false examination, grading the papers,giving them back with no markings on them, asking the students to grade them, comparing results.