498
PARTISAN REVIEW
common sense by virtue of which we and our five individual senstJ
are fitted into a single world common to us all and by the aid
of
which we move about in it. The disappearance of common sense
in
the present day is the surest sign of the present-day crisis. In every
crisis a piece of the world, something common to us all, is destroyed.
The failure of common sense, like a divining rod, points to the place
where such a cave-in has occurred.
In any case the answer to the question of why Johnny can't
read (as the title of a well-known best seller has it) or to the more
general question of why the scholastic standards of the average
Amer–
ican school lag so very far behind the average standards in actually
all the countries of Europe is not, unfortunately, simply that
this
country is young and has not yet caught up with the standards
of
the old world but, on the contrary, that this country in this particular
field is the most "advanced" and most modern in the world. And
this is true in a double sense: nowhere have the educational prob–
lems of a mass society become so acute and nowhere else have the
most modem theories in the realm of pedagogy been so uncritically
and slavishly accepted. Thus the crisis in American education
an–
nounces, on the one hand, the bankruptcy of progressive education
and, on the other, presents a problem of immense difficulty because
it has arisen under the conditions and in response to the demands of
a mass society.
In this connection we must bear in mind another more general
factor which did not, to be sure, cause the crisis but which has
ag–
gravated it to a remarkable degree. You know of course that the
concept of equality plays and always has played a unique role
in
American life. Much more is involved in this than equality before
the law, more too than the leveling of class distinctions, more even
than what is expressed in the phrase "equality of opportunity,"
though that has a greater significance
in
this connection because
in
the American view a right to education is one of the inalienable civic
rights. This last has been decisive for the structure of the school
system in that "higher schools" in the European sense exist only
as
exceptions. Since compulsory school attendance extends to the age of
sixteen every child must enter high school, and the high school there–
fore is basically a kind of continuation of primary school.
As
a result
of this lack of a "higher school" the preparation for the college course
