EDITH KURZWEIL
Postscript
Webster's dictionary defines education as "the act of educating, teaching,
or training; the art of developing and cultivating the various physical, intel–
lectual, aesthetic, and moral faculties; instruction and discipline; tuition,
nurture and erudition." Each of our participants spoke about one or more
aspects of these aims, how and why we fall short of achieving them, and
what could be done about them. They did get outside our current con–
troversies as I had hoped and addressed others. A number of people
invoked John Dewey. However, Dewey never clearly spelled out how his
precept of education for democracy conflicts with his expectation of
maintaining standards. Yet that was a large part of what we were discussing.
Our questions had to do with the importance and role of traditions, the
relation of high schools to universi ties, and the impact of societal values
and institutions on what teachers and students end up taking for granted.
In this respect, the contributions by the educators from abroad were
enlightening. More than we, they related their educational goals and
accomplishments to their entire cultures and did not focus on what goes
on in the classroom.
When in the 1960s, in
Up the Down Staircase,
Bel Kaufman described
the pandemonium and delinquency faced by teachers in inner-city high
schools, we all were shocked. But we did not focus on these students' dis–
dain for their teachers, nor on how close their behavior was to
criminality-already before some of them were carrying knives and guns.
Thus we did not fully realize that these conditions were deterring many
truly bright young people from entering the profession. Chester Finn
addressed this point when, among other things, he said that teachers now
are being taught how to teach rather than what to teach, and to care for
children rather than instruct them; that teaching the three "r's" and "mere
facts" like geography, history, and science, has by now been dropped in
favor of preparing students for life-long learning-whatever that may be.
(I wonder whether this is what George Orwell had in mind when he said
that a certain kind of nonsense can only be learned in school.) Rita Kramer
stated that ever younger generations of teachers, brought up on such a thin
diet, a sort of pabulum, later on become the professors
in
schools of edu–
cation. Yes, some teachers may object to teaching science when they
themselves have never had a course, and may realize that they cannot provide
