group relations’ and ‘national beliefs’ are all over the curriculum, often enough in just the manner Hunt and Metcalf seem to approve (which can be nastily but not inaccurately called the You’re-a-better-man-than-I-am-Gunga-Din approach). One should not label as ‘authoritarian’ people whose first loyalties are to immediate family, spreading thereafter to friends, neighbors, tribe, etc.; the poor chaps are just human. Even if we could do it, we do not wish to create a community of saints.”
If school boards and university administrators will pay a little attention to Mr. Mayer and Mr. Koerner, something may yet be done to restore right reason among us. Teaching, in Mr. Mayer’s phrase, “is the reorganizing of raw experience in such a way that the human mind will discover the usable patterns of thought called disciplines rather than the hodge-podge of irrelevancies called common sense.” For a generation, American schools scarcely have been commonsensical; still less have they provided discipline—lacking which, the mind cannot be free.
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