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Children who can’t stand intimacy or frankness. Children who masquerade behind
personalities hastily fabricated from watching television and from other distorted gauges
of human nature. Behind the masks lurk crippled souls. Aware of this, they avoid the
close scrutiny intimate relationships demand because it will expose their shallowness of
which they have some awareness.
Materialistic children who assign a price to everything and who avoid spending too
much time with people who promise no immediate payback—a group which often
includes their own parents. Children who follow the lead of schoolteachers, grading and
ranking everything: "the best," "the biggest," "the finest," "the worst." Everything
simplified into simple-minded categories by the implied judgment of a cash price,
deemed an infallible guide to value.
Dependent children who grow up to be whining, treacherous, terrified, dependent adults,
passive and timid in the face of new challenges. And yet this crippling condition is often
hidden under a patina of bravado, anger, aggressiveness.
A Critical Appraisal
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, as the new school institution slowly took root after the
Civil War in big cities and the defeated South, some of the best minds in the land, people fit by
their social rank to comment publicly, spoke out as they watched its first phalanx of graduates
take their place in the traditional American world. All these speakers had been trained themselves
in the older, a-systematic, noninstitutional schools. At the beginning of another new century, it is
eerie to hear what these great-grandfathers of ours had to say about the mass schooling
phenomenon as they approached their own fateful new century.
In 1867, world-famous American physician and academic Vincent Youmans lectured the London
College of Preceptors about the school institution just coming into being:
School produces mental perversion and absolute stupidity. It produces bodily
disease. It produces these things by measures which operate to the prejudice of
the growing brain. It is not to be doubted that dullness, indocility, and
viciousness are frequently aggravated by the lessons of school.
Thirteen years later, Francis Parkman (of Oregon Trail fame) delivered a similar judgment. The
year was 1880, at the very moment Wundt was founding his laboratory of scientific psychology in
Germany:
Many had hoped that by giving a partial teaching to great numbers of persons,
a thirst for knowledge might be awakened. Thus far, the results have not
equaled expectations. Schools have not borne any fruit on which we have
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