Wake Up the Educators

November 25, 1957

EDUCATORS URGE WAKENED NATION. So ran a prominent newspaper headline not many days ago. Yet the facts indicate that it is not so much the public that needs to be awakened as the educators themselves.

This is brilliantly clear from the 226-page report just published by the U.S. Office of Education comparing education in the Soviet Union and in the United States. This study, as summarized by President Eisenhower, shows that “when a Russian graduates from high school he has had five years of physics, four years of chemistry, one year of astronomy, five years of biology, ten years of mathematics and trigonometry, and five years of a foreign language.” In the United States, fewer than one-third of high-school graduates have taken a year in chemistry; only one-fourth have studied physics; only one-seventh have taken advanced mathematics. And we are far behind even in teaching foreign languages. Russian students learn more of all these academic subjects in ten years than ours do in twelve.

BEHIND EUROPE TOO

It is true that the Russian studies are primarily selected to make Russia powerful in war; that Russian schools are instruments of Communist indoctrination. Yet American education in mathematics and the sciences is backward not only as compared with Soviet Russia but with our principal European allies. A dispatch from Germany to The New York Times of Nov. 10 found that “The scientific preparation of West German high-school students for admission to universities and engineering colleges surpasses anything that is offered in the United States public-school system as a whole”; while “high schools in France, Britain, Italy, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the Scandinavian countries also give their high-school students a superior education in the sciences.”

What the Office of Education’s latest study also fails to emphasize is that the present American situation in scientific and mathematical education is an appalling deterioration even from half a century ago. In a biennial survey by the Office of Education itself, in 1951, a table was published comparing “percentages of pupils enrolled in certain subjects in the last four years of public secondary day school [high schools].” Here are some of the comparisons it showed:

MEETING ‘LIFE-NEEDS’?

“Enrollments in both mathematics and foreign languages in the last four years of high school,” the study stated, “were smaller percentages of the total pupil bodies in 1949 than in 1934. . . . Percentage enrollments in algebra, geometry, physics, and Latin have shown progressive decreases in all investigations since 1915.”

Yet the Office of Education approved this trend. “For the most part,” said its summary, “the changes are in the direction of more functional education. They represent efforts to meet life-needs of increasingly diverse bodies of pupils.” Commenting on this, in his book The Restoration of Learning (1955), Arthur Bestor wrote: “It is a curiously ostrich-like way of meeting ‘life-needs’ to de-emphasize foreign languages during a period of world war and postwar global tension, and to de-emphasize mathematics and physics at precisely the time when the nation’s security has come to depend on Einstein’s equation E=mc².”

Just as some of our military administrators are now blaming our backwardness in missiles chiefly on “inadequate funds,” so most of our educators are blaming their own failures on inadequate funds and calling for huge Federal subsidies. It is our educational system itself, however, and the flabby educational philosophy dominant for the last quarter of a century, that is first of all in need of reappraisal and reform. It is the dominant educationists who have been the real anti-intellectuals, fearful of everything that is difficult and disciplined, including the very knowledge most essential to survival in the modern world.