Quis Custodiet Custodes

Abstract

OLLOWING Laika's surprise ascension, the frenzied search for a scapegoat was inevitably directed to our educational system. Educators, in desperate self-defense, joined rabble-rousers in shifting the blame from college to high school to grade school and back to college again. Curiously, in fact, many of us, in our defensive anxiety, seem even to have accepted the view if you can't fight join 'em, and have talked of the necessity of emulating the educational system of our Russian competitors. Others have presented weird plans, oddly reminiscent of the ravings of Nazi theoreticians, for a naturally stratified society, as they have proclaimed the need for special facilities for gifted children-knowing very well that there can be no infallible test for giftedness. They also know, of course, that they themselves have in many instances emerged to brilliance from public-school associations with dullards, and that any special category of elite implies a category of non-elite-for whom the standards tend to drop. Odder yet, many educators seem determined to avoid recognizing that it is the very alacrity with which they respond to popular demand that underlies the present plight of education. That is, many of us remain strangely blind to the fact that in functioning as a mere communityservice agency and in failing to maintain the independence of judgment which is the basis of our responsibility as educators, we have gained no public respect, have merely continued the tragic confusion of responsiveness with responsibility, and have lent support to the cynical notion that he who pays the fiddler calls the tune. An examination of the record, clearly indicating that the willingness of many educators to accept a role of dependency underlies all other problems in education, makes it apparent that for shamefully long years we have blithely acquiesced in the steady watering down of course content. In our eagerness to contribute to the observable, dollars-and-cents evidences of progress by supplying the nation's producers with skilled and professional labor, have we not also permitted a remarkable skewing of campus studies to allow for the increasing vocational and technological emphasis? In fact, have we not stood aside while vocational training was stigmatized at the high-school level only to become, under glamorization, a part of the university curriculum? Have we not remained silent