OUR COUNTRY AND OUR CULTURE
325
us intellectuals really knows what
is
being taught in the great teach–
ers' colleges? Who knows what is the practice among the schools
of the big cities or the small ones? Who knows what the directives
are that are being issued by the superintendents? Who among us
is
even aware that these directives are based on the most elaborate
theories of society and the individual? Who knows anything about
the quality of the teaching staffs of the schools? What is the liter–
ary
curriculum of the high schools? What
is
taught in "Social
Studies"? What actually happens in a "progressive" school-I
mean apart from what everybody jokes about? What happens in
colleges? These are questions which the intellectuals have been con–
tent to leave to the education editor of the
New York Times.
With
the result that Dr. Benjamin Fine, a man with, properly enough,
his own ax to grind and his own tears to shed, is far more influ–
ential in an actual way in our culture than any intellectual who
reads this, or writes it, is ever likely to be.
Psychology is a science to which literary intellectuals feel affin–
ity. But who knows just what is happening in psychology? Dr.
Fromm and Dr. Horney and the late Dr. Sullivan, and their dis–
ciples, have great influence upon many members of the elite. What,
actually, do they say? What is what they say worth? What is hap–
pening in the development of Freud's ideas by those who are called
orthodox Freudian!r-is anything happening? Departments of psy–
chology in the universities are detaching themselves from the facul–
ties of philosophy in order to enter the faculties of pure science,
on the ground that their science is wholly experimental. What
is
the value of the considerable vested interests of this academic psy–
chology? Colleges nowadays give courses in Marriage and Sex–
presumably
not
on an experimental basis-and who knows what is
the received doctrine in these courses?
I could go on with these questions at very great length, for
I have chosen my two examples quite at random from among an
inexhaustible number. But there is no need for me to go on. My
simple point is surely plain.
As
I make it, I see that it answers the
last question, about how a reaffirmation and rediscovery of Amer–
ica can go hand in hand with the tradition of critical non-con–
formism. The editors, to identify the great American tradition of
critical non-conformism, speak of it as "going back to Thoreau
