Education: Advice for Teachers

Another U.S. educator who hopes to strike a compromise between the critics and defenders of U.S. public schools is Professor Paul Woodring of the Western Washington College of Education. “It must be obvious to everyone,” writes Teacher Woodring in the current issue of Harper’s, “that a strong ground swell is running against us.” Too many teachers “have persisted in believing that all these attacks are motivated by malice, by a desire to reduce taxes, or by ignorance of what is actually going on in the schools . . . [But] the great public enthusiasm for these criticisms rests upon a … feeling of vague dissatisfaction on the part of large numbers of parents and other adults.”

Three Complaints. Woodring puts much of the dissatisfaction down to a feeling that professional educators have seized control of the schools and are trying to create “a new social order” along the lines of Philosopher John Dewey’s pragmatic theories. Specifically, he cites three main complaints:

¶That “education, as represented by textbooks . . . has intentionally or unintentionally shown a pretty consistent political list to the left.”

¶”That the children of this generation have failed to learn such skills as reading, oral and written expression, and computation as well as did their parents.”

¶That “the total effect of the new education is to leave the child . . . without a set of values.”

Teacher Woodring is sure that teachers as a group are no more inclined to the left than the members of any other profession. As for the three Rs, he argues, “we must bear in mind that [in the early 1900s] high-school students were a selected group who presumably averaged higher in ability and in literacy of background than the more inclusive group of today . . .” The question of values is the hardest for any teacher to answer. “It was certainly not the intention of Dewey to eliminate values from the schools,” says Woodring. But “if the children are being allowed to complete their education with no sense of values, we had better face up to the situation and try to do something about it.”

“All the People.” The first job of the teachers now is to “make it clear that we fully understand that basic policy in all our institutions is, in the final analysis, to be determined by all the people through their elected representatives.” Without abdicating their responsibilities, teachers must encourage criticism. “Some of the criticisms . . . will doubtless be unreasonable, prejudiced, unenlightened. If so, the proper way to deal with them will not be to slight them, or run away from them, or make countercharges . . . but rather to turn for guidance and assistance to the more reasonable and representative members of the community. . . If we work with the more thoughtful of our critics, [the others] will gradually lose their effectiveness. Perhaps, in the long run, better education will result from the present acrimony.”