By and large. Dean Sharp has complied with these counsels: most of the statements are decently written, and some—like Professor William Ernest Hocking’s “The Eighth Grade” —are valuable and entertaining. Almost all of them suffer from an extreme brevity that makes escape from platitude difficult, however, and which gives them a repetitious tone; the editor might have done better to have published twenty instead of a hundred and twenty statements. The contributors are remarkably various: Ezra Taft Benson, Omar Bradley, Stuart Chase, Norman Cousins, Clifton Fadiman, Claude M. Fuess, Paul Hoffman, Margaret Mead, Yehudi Menuhin, Dore Schary, Ralph W. Sockman, Pitirim Sorokin, Adlai Stevenson, Mark Van Doren, etc., etc.
A good many people decline to teach who would make very good teachers; and one of the persons most responsible for this state of affairs is a contributor to this volume, Mr. William Heard Kilpatrick. This sample from his “Teaching as a Desirable Profession” is itself sufficient illustration of what is wrong with the educationist hierarchy, the “patronage network of Teachers College, Columbia,” which works diligently to drive out of teaching any teacher who declines to conform to its canons:
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