ARGUMENTS
423
tions, the end of which, or even the beginning of the end of which, is
not yet in sight, only increases the hysteria and bewilderment about both.
It may well be that some day the sexual code will be resettled in a more
satisfactory fashion for more people than has been the case
in
the past,
but it is doubtful if educational systems and theories will ever be any–
thing but provisional, that is, elaborate and constantly shifting com–
promises. According to Samuel Kramer's
History Begins at Sumer,
one
of the phenomena of Sumer was the delinquent schoolboy, and from
the pre-Socratics, Socrates and Plato on down, education, and its mys–
teries, has been one of the basic concerns of mankind.
Thus, the humble motto for all theorists should be that uttered by
John Dewey when he spoke at the dedication of UCLA in 1930 on the
subject of "Philosophy and Education." Dewey quoted Professor John
M. Coulter, "himself a highly successful teacher," on the difficulties of
propounding theories of education:
There is no problem concerning which we can so ill afford to be
dogmatic; and no one concerning which we are so dogmatically
inclined. There is no question concerning which past experience
may be so unsafe a guide, since what we attained cannot be com–
pared with what we hope for and have a right to expect. There is
no problem concerning which theorizing may lead so far astray,
and none which has been so covered with crude theorizing. We do
not understand the structure we are seeking to modify and develop;
we do not know what we want to do for it when we shall under–
stand it, and we do not know how to accomplish when we shall
know what we want. Out of this mass of negations we are con–
structing our hypotheses.
To get directly to
The Reforming of General Education,
I find
Bell's stress on methodology and the understanding of concepts in the
learning process, which smacks of the murkier regions of sociology and
of the intellectual atmosphere of the University of Chicago-the logic–
choppers of the academic world-to be, or to be liable to be, both barren
and sterile. Further, I doubt very much that "learning," whatever that
is, is fundamentally different in the three fields-physical sciences, social
sciences and humanities-that Bell posits, or that each pursuit embodies
a special way of learning. There is some plausibility to the idea of
science as sequential, and certainly progress
in
a science tends much
more than in the humanities to be a kind of linear progression. But I
suspect that learning at its most profound and creative in all three fields
would have more similarities than differences and that in describing the
learning function at its best something like the distinction Coleridge
