CRISIS IN EDUCATION
501
of which they cannot flee to any other world because the world of
adults is barred to them. The reaction of the children to this pressure
tends to be either conformism or juvenile delinquency, and is fre–
quently a mixture of both.
The
second
basic assumption, which has come into question in
the present crisis, has to do with teaching. Under the influence of
modem psychology and the tenets of Pragmatism, pedagogy has de–
veloped into a science of teaching in general in such a way as to
be wholly emancipated from the actual material to be taught. A
teacher, so it was thought, is a man who can simply teach anything;
his training is in teaching-not in the mastery of any particular sub–
ject. This attitude, as we shall presently see, is naturally very closely
connected with a basic assumption about learning. Moreover it has
resulted in recent decades in a most serious neglect of the training
of teachers in their own subject, especially in the so-called secondary
schools. Since the teacher does not need to know his own subject, it
not infrequently happens that he is just one hour ahead of his class
in knowledge. This in tum means not only that the students are
actually left to their own resources but that the most legitimate source
of the teacher's authority as the person who, tum it whatever way one
will, still knows more and can do more than oneself is no longer
effective. Thus the non-authoritarian teacher, who would like to ab–
stain from all methods of compulsion because he is able to rely on
his own authority, can no longer exist.
But this pernicious role that pedagogy and the teachers' colleges
are playing in the present crisis was only possible because of a modem
theory about learning. This was, quite simply, the logical application
of the
third
basic assumption in our context, an assumption which
the modem world has held for centuries and which found its syste–
matic conceptual expression in Pragmatism. This basic assumption,
as you all know, is that you can only know and understand what you
have done yourself, and its application to education is as primitive
as it is obvious: to substitute, insofar as possible, doing for learning.
The reason that no importance was attached to the teacher's master–
ing his own subject was the wish to compel him to the exercise of the
continuous activity of learning so that he would not, as they said,
pass on "dead knowledge" but, instead, would constantly demon–
strate how it is produced. The conscious intention was not to teach
