THE field of education at the present time is practically the last realm in which the seeker after absolute values should expect to find satisfaction. While a very few may feel perfectly content in a position of dogmatic certainty, the situation among the skeptical and the open-minded majority will be more characteristically pictured by a committee of serious college teachers who, when recently faced with some new problems in the curriculum and challenged to formulate a definitive educational policy, with one accord maintained a discreet silence. Distracted theologians could hardly do more-or less. Even if one presumes to believe that human life offers anywhere else solid foundation for an absolute creed, certainly in our conflicting educational theories and practices we can claim no such certainty. Why do we believe as we do? Is it some unassailable body of fact and logic that decides us, or mere tradition or environment, or some superficial piece of petrified reasoning? In language teaching, for instance, the oldest assumption was that, in both school and college, the grammar-translation method functioned as a miraculous and all-satisfying process of mental discipline; this complacent certainty has melted before the doubts cast by experiment on the supposed discipline1 and before the suspicion engendered by experience with a dull and mechanical routine. A second cheerful assumption is that of the culture resulting from the appreciation of literature, a confidence chilled by the fear of dilettantism and by doubts about practical values. A third group have been sure that we are all to be saved by learning to speak the foreign languages-and then someone asked, With whom will Americans talk French and German? Others suggested the query whether several years of study are not a high price to pay for the ability to fight with a Parisian taxi driver over the fare, unless conversational lessons have some other intellectual meaning. Finally scholarship was stressed-in college classes and in the graduate school-meaning linguistics and the scientific study of literature. The obvious danger here is arid pedantry arising from acquiring or producing remote and dehumanized information. There are, to be sure, just a few who feel that they have a clear and positive educational program from which no righteous or intelligent person may dissent. These may be found both-in two mutually destructive extremes-among conservatives living in some traditional rut, and among
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Jun 1, 1977
Lawrence Johnson 
