From Poetry to Bitter Fruit

The inside story of the corruption of public school education has never been more poignantly told than in Joan Dunn’s Retreat from Learning: Why Teachers Can’t Teach—A Case History (New York: David McKay, $3.00). Miss Dunn, a young woman with ideals, decided to make teaching her career—partly because she had worked with children and liked them, and partly because she wished to bring to others her own natural delight in literature. After going through the various maneuverings necessary to get a post in the New York City school system, she showed up one Friday shortly after Labor Day at the high school to which she had been assigned.

A leap from the poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw, the subject of her college thesis, to an institution like that described here is about as great as any mortal could be expected to make. But she had the qualities of character and personality to make it, and for four years she observed modern public education from the firing line. Her book is an account of what she saw between that morning of hope and expectancy and the day she resigned, out of fatigue and disillusionment, to enter the happier world of journalism.

RW

About the Author

Richard M. Weaver

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The inside story of the corruption of public school education has never been more poignantly told than in Joan Dunn’s Retreat from Learning: Why Teachers Can’t Teach—A Case History (New York: David McKay, $3.00). Miss Dunn, a young woman with ideals, decided to make teaching her career—partly because she had worked with children and liked them, and partly because she wished to bring to others her own natural delight in literature. After going through the various maneuverings necessary to get a post in the New York City school system, she showed up one Friday shortly after Labor Day at the high school to which she had been assigned.

A leap from the poetry of John Donne and Richard Crashaw, the subject of her college thesis, to an institution like that described here is about as great as any mortal could be expected to make. But she had the qualities of character and personality to make it, and for four years she observed modern public education from the firing line. Her book is an account of what she saw between that morning of hope and expectancy and the day she resigned, out of fatigue and disillusionment, to enter the happier world of journalism.