The Layman Looks at School and College

Abstract

AT THE outset it may be useful to define term layman. He is a member of public, has a profound respect for in general-as distinguished from general education, which confuses him-and looks at both school and college through glasses of limited vision. With Mrs. Pritchard of The Wayward Bus, he believes that education is and is inclined to complacence over British discovery in I944 that it is good for all. The fact that it took Britain two world wars to arrive at this conclusionwars in which she bore full heat of day-only confirms him in his own faith. He is a little puzzled by Sir Richard Livingstone's observation that everyone in England wants an and no one in England cares what kind. The layman likes all kinds. More specifically, he looks on college both as a logical social goal and as a modern prerequisite on road to success. He assumes that two essentials consist in obtaining admission for his son and in covering all costs by payment of tuition: delivery on contract is responsibility of college. More recently he has begun to believe that tuition charge is a public obligation. He looks on public schools, quite rightly, as traditional heart of democratic society. He is bewildered by gap which has opened up between his confident expectations and stories he hears of daily performance in schools. The cost of closing gap, and then of full-scale advance, he leaves to public treasury with only an uneasy glance at tax program which it will entail. He is particularly disheartened by talk of the crisis in teaching and of growing difficulty in recruiting new blood for profession. That we must have good teachers, and that they must be paid adequate salaries, he realizes, but he wants them to be really good and to earn their money. In sum, he has little understanding of fact that our high schools have grown thirty times faster than population in recent decades, and has even less understanding of variety and complexity of problems now shouldered by our harassed superintendents and principals. On independent schools he looks with considerable misgiving, regard-