And Madly Teach: A Layman Looks at Public School Education Hardcover – 1949

Excellent, highly recommended, "And Madly Teach" was among the first great salvos fired against the Education Establishment.

Only 105 pages long, this book provides a thorough analysis of the sins of American education. Smith identified all the problems 60 years ago; his examination is shrewd, intelligent, and (for me) entirely accurate. Predictably, the cult in charge of our public schools ignored this book.

Smith was a co-founder of the Council for Basic Education, and was the executive director of this organization from 1961 to 1974. His obituary in the New York Times (1981) summed up Smith's life by noting that he wanted public schools to place more emphasis on "the mastery of basic skills," which is like saying that Babe Ruth played baseball.

The following quotes from "And Madly Teach" will give you a better sense of Smith's thinking, and of his book (which can be cheaply obtained on Amazon):

"That our public schools are at the present time in a bad way is the notorious fact deplored by everyone, not least by the public-school educator himself. During the war the armed services uncovered an appalling degree of illiteracy among recent school graduates...From every side come complaints that the typical public-school graduate can't spell or write a decent English sentence, that he is ignorant of the elementary facts of his country's history, and completely muddled about the rest of the world."

"Real life is full of compulsions; it is dominated by competition, and the adult is constantly having to submit to examinations with his fellows; but these are conditions the thorough-going modernist will not permit in his classroom. The result is that in the end all his elaborate effort to reproduce real life experiences amounts to play and make-believe..."

This next quote reveals how early the public schools were infected with the scam now called Critical Thinking: "[T]he little boy from a modern school... countered his mother's complaint about his getting only 30 in arithmetic and spelling by proudly pointing out that he got 100 on Postwar Planning."

Smith characterizes the new schools this way: "I think it is an atmosphere of plaintive bewilderment, for I believe that young people, no matter how irksome they may find it at the time, depend on direction and leadership and are at a loss when it is withheld from them...Discipline is not an adult conspiracy against children; it is a responsibility adults owe to children."

An elite educator, according to this book, is a very limited person--"anti-intellectual and anticultural, practical and narrowly scientific...His own schooling emphasized social, not individual, considerations and inculcated in him a respect for majority opinion and the ideas and ideals of the collective. He can only be suspicious of true education, intellectualism, culture, and individualism...He is enslaved by a philosophy that produces moral myopia and prevents him from seeing that education might be a means of achieving freedom."

Here's "more evidence of how far we have traveled along the road to totalitarianism....[O]ur schools are helping as much as any institution among us to produce automatons ripe for exploitation by clever and unscrupulous men -- politicians, movie magnates, labor leaders, newspaper publishers -- who recognize and take advantage of the new herd instinct for uniformity."

"We will not resolve our school problems until individual parents indulge in some expensive critical examination, not only of the schools but of themselves; until they come to a realization of what true education is and how absolutely vital is the need of their children for this education in a world that seems devoid of values and direction."

"And Madly Teach" was published in 1949, the same year as Orwell's "1984." Smith makes a similarly pessimistic prediction: "All spontaneous individual and social action will wither away; the group and the state will reign supreme."

I believe that two things have sheltered our educators in their subversive mischief. One, we want to assume our experts are acting in good faith. (Unfortunately, we cannot make that assumption.) Second, we want to be polite. Otherwise, we would more often use such terms as flimflam, quackery, claptrap, balderdash, baloney, drivel, bunk, hooey, malarkey, hokum, twaddle, not to mention flapdoodle.