If readers will pardon the pun, Paul Goodman, the author of Com­pulsory Mis-Education (Horizon Press, $3.95), is a really good man. But, as we shall see, he mis­takes his natural friends for ene­mies, and he ends up by becoming lost between the two big camps that are contending for the con­trol of the American educational system.

Being a man who can use his eyes and ears, he knows that the country is not getting its money’s worth for the fantastic sums that are being spent on education. Great funds go to support scien­tific research, but in the past thirty years the average number of hours per week spent in class­room work by science teachers has dropped from nineteen to six. In huge educational factories, such as the University of California at Berkeley a common complaint is that a professor never really sees a student’s paper; it is usually read by a paid student reader who may or may not know what he is about. Yet a retired California English professor, George Stew­art, who is a fine novelist and his­torian, insists that the ratio of teachers to students at Berkeley is not bad; students can get coun­sel and aid if they really ask for it. We must look elsewhere for the source of what is called the aliena­tion of the student from the fac­ulty. Hugh Kenner, who teaches at another branch of the Univer­sity of California, the one at sun-drenched Santa Barbara, says the trouble with American education is that our schools and colleges are filled with boys and girls who should not be forced to hang on in hopes of getting degrees. They are there merely to mark time, and they keep real students from learning. In short, we need more dropouts, not fewer.

Paul Goodman agrees with Hugh Kenner that a "reasonable social policy would be not to have these youth in school, certainly not in high school, but to educate them otherwise and provide op­portunity for a decent future in some other way." The practical argument against such a social policy is, of course, that you have to have a degree—even an ad­vanced degree—to hold down any sort of good job. Paul Goodman doesn’t doubt that this is true, but he says it is a ridiculous state of affairs that is maintained by the stupidity of those in charge of hiring for big corporations. Nat­urally, he says, if a corporation insists that a youngster have a diploma, the correlation of school­ing and employment is self-prov­ing. Actually, the spread of auto­mation means that most jobs are of such a nature that they can be done by people with no long back­ground of schooling. The average job in General Motors’ most auto­mated plant, he says, requires only three weeks of training for peo­ple who have had no education whatever. And in the Army and Navy, complicated skills, such as radar operation, are taught on the job, sometimes to virtual illit­erates.

A Problem of Degrees

Why, then, the rage to keep Johnny in school until he is twen­ty-two, or even twenty-five? Paul

Goodman suspects that it is be­cause the unions don’t want John­ny coming on the labor market as a teenager. He is obviously right about the unions’ desire to limit the available work force, but this is not the primary reason for our national insistence on years and years of formal schooling. Mr. Goodman is closer to the mark in another context, when he talks about the "mass superstition" cul­tivated by our "school-monks," by which he means our "administra­tors, professors, academic sociolo­gists, and licensees with diplomas who have proliferated into an in­vested intellectual class worse than anything since the time of Henry the Eighth." It is the "school-monks’ who have set themselves up as "indispensable mentors for creativity, business-practice, so­cial work, mental hygiene, genuine literacy—name it, and there are credits for it leading to a degree."

Because of our insistence on educational scaffolding and trap­pings and the parchment evidences of having spent time in school, the self-made man is becoming an im­possibility in America simply be­cause he is an "out" before he can even make a start. Mr Goodman recalls the time when the ninety-four per cent of Americans who did not finish high school were our future farmers, shopkeepers, millionaires, politicians, inventors, and journalists. He speaks of "two master architects" who were born around 1900. One quit school at the eighth grade to leave home and support himself in an archi­tect’s office as an office boy. The other left school at age thirteen to support his mother by working for a stone cutter. "Would these two have become architects at all," so Mr. Goodman asks, "if they were continually interrupted by high school Chemistry, Freshman Composition, Psychology 106, at a time when they didn’t care about such things?" Then he adds, "But they have learned them since, nevertheless."

"Shoot If You Must…"

This sort of plain speaking is iconoclasm with a vengeance. But Paul Goodman isn’t really advo­cating a return to the old world that did not require a degree be­fore a boy could get a job as a draftsman in an architect’s office. In the old world children got solid drilling in such things as phonetics in the early grades, they read literature that provided them with some background of history ("Paul Revere’s Ride," "Barbara Frietchie," and so forth), and they were permitted to work at a young age without having the policemen of the child labor and minimum wage laws descend upon them. Paul Goodman, as a believer in the doctrines of John Dewey, denounces the "Rickovers and Max Raffertys" who would restore both discipline and intellectual nourish­ment to the first years of school­ing. This doesn’t make much sense, for Max Rafferty is one of our most effective enemies of the very "life adjustment" fetish that Paul Goodman himself deplores for its accent on "conformity." It also ignores the probability that there was a definite correlation between the type of education that one got in the grammar grades in pre­Deweyan times and the great ef­florescence of self-made men that, among other things, produced Paul Goodman’s two favorite ar­chitects.

Learning by Doing—But Doing What?

The great paradox is that the nineteenth century, which really believed in "learning by doing," got along without John Dewey (or John Dewey’s far more benighted successors), while the twentieth century, which has gone in heav­ily for "progressive" education, is producing students who can’t "do" a coherent outline in a fresh­man college course. The old world was better: concentration on ba­sics for a few years, then the "learning by doing" that went with actual experience in the world of affairs.

Mr. Goodman wants to simu­late that old world of affairs by big spending in the "public sec­tor," which would provide "educa­tional occasions" for youths who could be put to work "on town improvement, community service, or rural rehabilitation." Somehow one doubts that "public sector" experiences would help very much. Mr. Goodman himself mentions the fact that "the professor-ridden Peace Corps needs $15,000 to get a single youngster in the field for a year, whereas the dedicated Qua­kers achieve almost the same end for $3,500." And "again, when $13 millions are allotted for a lo­cal Mobilization for Youth pro­gram, it is soon found that nearly $12 million have gone for sociol­ogists doing ‘research,’ diplomat­ed social workers, the N.Y. school system, and administrators, but only one million to field workers and the youths themselves."

Paul Goodman seems to be caught in a major contradiction here. He hates what the exaltation of the "official" has done to our world. Yet his cure is to hand over more money to the state, which is always "official," to provide op­portunities for experience and spontaneity to youths in some ill-defined outside-of-school school­ing. The contradiction mars what is otherwise a most stimulating book.

A Theological Interpre­tation Of American His­tory by C. Gregg Singer, Phila­delphia: Presbyterian and Re­formed Publishing Co., $4.95, 305 PP.

Reviewed by Robert M. Thornton

Some who read this book may not find Dr. Singer’s theology entirely acceptable, but it would be hard to disagree with his statement that "it is impossible to understand completely the history of a nation apart from the philosophies and the theologies which lie at the heart of its intellectual life." These constitute the basic prem­ises on which people act.

Dr. Singer contends that the history of this country since its early days reflects the drastic changes in its prevailing world-view from Puritanism through Deism, Transcendentalism, and Unitarianism, to Social Darwin­ism and the Social Gospel. Man, not God, comes to occupy the cen­ter of the universe, so it follows that man, now the master of his fate, can create a utopia here and now. The Kingdom of Heaven, brought to earth, becomes the goal of politics, and there is a growing acceptance of the belief that "gov­ernment is responsible to people rather than to God and that law is little more than the embodi­ment or expression of the will of the majority." Hence man, forgetting he is a creature of God, lets himself become a minion of the state. Statesmanship neglects principles and becomes the art of compromise or the art of the pos­sible.

Dr. Singer’s book is an urgent warning to check our premises lest the political and economic order that has made this country free and prosperous crumble to the ground because its theological and philosophical foundations have been eaten away.

***

The Process of Inflation

As described by Secretary of Treasury, Robert B. ANderson, April, 1959

Now suppose I wanted to write checks of $100 million starting tomorrow morning, but the Treasury was out of money. If I called up a bank and said, "Will you loan me $100 million at 3½ per cent for six months if 1 send you over a note to that effect?" the banker would probably say, "Yes, I will."

Where would he get the $100 million with which to credit the amount of the United States Treasury? Would he take it from the account of someone else? No, certainly not. He would merely create that much money, subject to reserve requirements, by crediting our account in that sum and accepting the government’s note as an asset. When I had finished writing checks for $100 million, the operation would have added that sum to the money supply.

Now certainly that approaches the same degree of monetization (creating money) as if 1 had called down to the Bureau of Engraving and Printing and said, "Please print me up $100 million worth of greenbacks which I can pay out tomorrow."