CRISIS IN EDUCATION
has
to be supplied by the colleges themselves, whose curricula there–
fore suffer from a chronic overload, which in turn affects the quality
of the work done there.
At first glance one might perhaps think that this anomaly lies
in
the very nature of a mass society in which education is no longer
a privilege of the wealthy classes. A glance at England, where, as
everyone knows, secondary education has also been made available
in
recent years to all classes of the population, will show that this is
not the case. For there at the end of primary school, at the age of
cleven, they have instituted the dreaded examination that weeds out
all
but some ten per cent of the scholars suited for higher education.
The rigor of this selection was not accepted even
in
England with–
out protest; in America it would have been simply impossible. What
is
aimed at in England is clearly once more the establishment of an
oligarchy, this time not of wealth or of birth but of talent. But this
means, even though people in England may not be altogether clear
about it, that the country even under a socialist government will con–
tinue to be governed as it has from time out of mind-that is, neither
as a
monarchy nor as a democracy but as an oligarchy or aristocracy
-the latter in case one takes the view that the most gifted are also
the best, which is by no means a certainty. In America such an al–
most mechanical division of the children into gifted and ungifted
would be considered intolerable. It contradicts the principle of
equality, of equalitarian democracy.
Thus what makes the educational crisis in America so especially
acute is the political temper of the country which of itself struggles
to equalize or to erase as far as possible the difference between young
and
old, between the gifted and the ungifted, finally between children
and
adults, particularly between pupils and teachers. It is obvious
that such an equalization can actually be accomplished only at the
cost of the teacher's authority and at the expense of the gifted
among the students. However it is equally obvious, at least to any–
one who has ever come in contact with the American educational sys–
tem, that this difficulty, rooted in the political attitude of the country,
also
has great advantages, not simply of a human kind but educa–
tionally speaking as well; in any case these general factors cannot
explain the crisis in which we presently find ourselves nor justify the
measures through which that crisis has been precipitated.
