The Problem Professor of Education

That there exists today as wide a cleavage as there ever was between educational theory and practice is not a mystery to anyone, even to the most hopeful. Teachers who attend our summer classes are fairly certain that the theories of us professed educators are, in large measure, unworkable. In a meeting of county superintendents in Columbus, Ohio, only a short time ago, one of the speakers declared quite bluntly that educational theory is all bunk, and has no more relation to school practice than the brand of tooth paste that teachers use. One writer, after making an extensive survey of the studies bearing on the correlation between the pre-service preparation and success in teaching said: It should be at present impossible for any conscientious individual to advise students whether or not they should continue training for teaching.(1) On the other hand, professors of education often complain that the field is out of step with sound educational theory by insisting on the traditional practice of teaching logically organized subject-matter as an end in itself. We teachers of education labor at length on the importance of providing for individual differences, while in practice we teach the same material to all the students in class regardless of their interests and abilities, use the same vocabulary, and refer them to the same sources whether they are just beginning in their study of education or are about to take their final examination for the doctorate. We have courses on guidance, but do practically nothing to guide the students according to the principles that we advocate; we subscribe to the principle of by doing, but require the students to sit in overcrowded lecture rooms and smoky seminars to listen. We advocate co-operation as the essence of democratic method only to practice laissez faire individualism with a vengeance. Thus we prepare outlines ostensibly to serve as framework of the course, but not infrequently they are mere scraps of paper. Instead of helping the students they really confuse them. A course given by three instructors using the same outline means actually three different courses. Furthermore, the outline does not often correlate with the lecture and the readings; at least, the students do not often see the relationship that might exist among them. The instructor does much as he pleases regardless of the outline; the result is that the lecture is one thing, the outline a second, and the readings a third. And if the course is taught together by two or more instructors, the parts of the outline are as far apart as heaven and earth. Then if there are conferences arranged for small groups of students, the compartmentalization is further accentuated. And yet in the first course in education compartmentalization is a target of educational criticism. We attack the teaching of text books and the use of formal methods, but we do not often see anything wrong with our practice of organizing our courses on the basis of the ground to be covered and of assigning the students to fixed seats according to the initial letter of their last names. We refer them to several books instead of one, to be sure, but the evils of book learning are not avoided by an ingenious device of multiplying the books that we require the students to read. We attack the Herbartian formal steps and the Morrison mastery formula of teaching procedure, and yet in one graduate course in education the following method was observed: The students were assigned a chapter or two from a book written by the professor in charge; the first half of the period was devoted to the reading of the chapters assigned by the professor himself before the class, and the rest of the discussion was spent in talking about anything but what the course was about. Traditional education may be all wrong, but the method just described is not even traditional, much less sensible. We assume that indoctrination or even mild imposition is the antithesis of democracy, and yet we remain complacently unaffected if not personally elated by the fact that 99

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