by E. H. Gombrich
Cornell, 1984
270 pp. $34.95
by Nakae Chomin
translated by Nobuko
Tsukui
Weatherhill, 1984
137 pp. $12.50
by George Frederick
Drinka, M.D.
Simon & Schuster, 1984
431 pp. $21.95
By Lester S. King, M.D. Princeton,
1984.336 pp. $1 1.50
Edited by Rush Rhees. Oxford,
1984.236 pp. $7.95
Francis B. Johnston, circa 1899. Between the 1899 and 1979 school years,
U.S.public school enrollment grav from 15.5 million to 41.6 million.
The Wilson Quu~ter1.ylNew Year':, 1984
46
Since last spring, when the National Commission on Excellence in Education decried the "rising tide of mediocrity" in Amer- ica's schools, a succession of blue-ribbon panels has joined in the chorus of condemnation and the search for effective reforms. Americans are again re-evaluating their expensive...
The central quandary facing American teachers today is the lack of clarity regarding the purpose of the schools in which they work, the nature of the larger educational system of which those schools are but a part, and the relationship between the two. If education is more than mere schooling-and it is-then we should have been asking ourselves which educational activities truly belong outside the classroom door. Yet, increasingly dur- ing this century, and particularly in the years since World...
"A year or so before I began facing a classroom on a daily basis, I had the idea that teaching English would be a series of extended Socratic dialogues between me and mv students. . . . I would lead forth my eager, responsive . . . idealistic students from the cave of adolescent mental wistfulness into the clear light of Truth upon the verdant and lush fields of literature."
So wrote Gary Cornog in Don't Smile Until Christmas (1970). Needless to say, he was mistaken.
Teachers have...