UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - European Guidance Conference - February 27 1964 - Wiesbaden

Europe;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. Mason G. Daly Director European Division University of Maryland Wiesbaden February 27, 1964 European Guidance Conference There are two overwhelmingly great tragedies in American Education. The first is simple, awful, and persistent. It is that “equal opportunity for every American to be educated” remains a mockery and a delusion. It is at best a far goal toward which we continue to struggle more or less on our hands and knees. In failing to live up to our ideal we have contributed to the greatest immorality known to modern man: the immorality of illiteracy. Surely if God were handing down “do nots” through a 20th century Moses, the greatest human sin of all would be illiteracy. As a nation we have always had the high purpose, the slogans, the declarations of faith in human dignity and destiny; we have always had the power of self-correction written into our system, and we have always made appropriate noises about self-correction; and we have made enormous progress in the right directions. But when we take out that one basic slogan about education, which is the only thing which will ever merge and weld our citizenry into a steady national heartbeat, never mind the diversity of color and faith, we realize how tragic is the delay. A lot of people, especially an educator speaking to other educators, talk about the educational revolution we are now in. Indeed, whether we credit the revolution to the Russian sputnik scare or to better PTA or to better counseling, we are surely in some kind of great awakening, thank goodness, in the field of education. This awakening, thank goodness, in the field of education. This awakening appears to be so great that it makes most of what has gone on in education in the last fifty, even one hundred years (and there was plenty going on) seem ??? great paralysis. And I would content that one of the best labels you can give the present revolution in education – a good label, I think, for a long time to come – is “the Colored Revolution.” How fortunate for education and for the nation that this Colored Revolution is upon us, finally, full-force. It has not been - is not – easy for a nation which has systematically insulted the colored tenth of its population – to ever approximate its great goal of equal educational opportunity, and the tragedy has gone on long enough, and has damaged our moral leadership in the world, as well, quite long enough. The other great tragedy in American Education, upon which I will dwell at greater length, and upon which I believe all educators at all times in all places have a greater immediate influence, is the tragedy of “the American Intellectual who remains in the masses,” the tragedy of the mind which has no emergence, which remains tuned to the wave lengths of mediocrity. I wonder if it might be said right here that ??? development, historically, has been an effort to sort out the individual from the masses. It is right here I believe I should say to you in a paraphrase of Shakespeare: There are more things in Counseling and Guidance here Than are dreamed of in your philosophy! Guidance, it has been said has always been something of an educational tourniquet, seeking bravely to staunch the loss of human potentialities caused by an educational system which lets more good blood escape than a bad butcher. We have, happily, developed an education system which more and more gets the grat mass of young intellect into classrooms, classroom which contain some sort of teachers and books and equipment, as well as an American or a Confederate flag in the corner, a picture of Washington and of Lincoln or Lee on the wall. In these classrooms a bleeding away of human talent is never satisfactorily staunched. Counsellors and Guidance people may not be flattered to be referred to as tourniquets; certainly you are more than that. But you have uite a mission, as you increase and as you increase your talents and tools in handling the tourniquet successfully. You, and the impulse ehind your present work and training and future, make up a bright, new social movement in education, as you do your cousins in the business world. Or so it seems to me. The impulse to have trained counselors, scientific guidance (an impulse far from realized) is a good impulse, and it contains a partial promising remedy to my second tragedy of American Education. Yours is a young social movement in our educational world – indeed, in our binsess world. Just because of that you should not forget that there is need for much discussion and debate about your function, your place in the school system, your sometimes unearned renown, your displacement of parental functions, your brashness in the business world. That you realize the need for discussion and debate is suggest by this meeting and the concerns of this meeting. Surely you are all reasonably sure that you have a bright future and a chance for greatness; surely you are all ready to listen to one at least who thinks that bright future can be corrupted, that your chance for greatness can be crippled; that it may be better to bleed some more than to have the gangrenous results of a badly applied tourniquet. I argue, it is a corrupted brightness if you operate a Conformity Emporium. There are conformist school counselors who have decided that the conforming child is the preferable child, and ultimately the preferred adult. That conformist promotes the tragedy of the American Intellectual remaining in the masses. That conformist is concerned with “well-roundedness” more than with intellect. That conformist is concerned with the charting and labeling and graphing and identifying of problems and problem children - a process that is often banal and usually unscientific. It is especially unscientific because we are so remote from anything like a safe understanding of that greatest of unknowng spaces, that uncharted, devious space, almost as unexplored and unknown as Venus – the human cranium. The conformist forgets there are some wonderful possibilities of human development between monolithic conformity and disheveled Bohemianism. The variations cannot all be charted and labeled and isolated. They do not all develop in the same year or in the same environment. There are conformists among counselors who move in on a bunch of growing youngsters, tossing tests and check lists at them as avidly as the school nurse sticks needles in them. I’ve seen some of those tests. If they do not trouble my youngsters one day, they trouble me now, if for no other reason than that they go so far to expose to you counselors too much about my always chaotic, but not therefore unhappy, home – a home full of tensions and troubled moments but also, I hope, full of stimulation, conflicting ideas, and moments of intellectual challenge. If my home has no right to privacy from some of these testers and charters, my children in growing up have some right to the privacy of the soul, some right to be non-nomal if not outright abnormal. I say to counselors that the search for the non-conformist is a valid search, providing its purpose is not to glorify conformity, but rather to identify and encourage diversity in intellectual development. And let that searcher and his searching devices be humble and tentative every step of the way, and maybe just a bit prayerful, as he probes the mysteris of space in that three pound brain. It is a corrupted brightness when you counselors succumb to Career-it is. The essence of the trained and cultivated mind is that it transcends the world of the useful and pragmatic. Americans have been, still are, obsessed with a successful career, and something called “good citizenship,” and schools, and counselors, have reflected that obsession. The combination of parents and career obsessed counselors creates too many neurotic causalities among high school youngsters and even grade school kids, among the youngsters who need less guidance about a career than they need guidance about the essence of education. When the counselor is both test-obsessed and career-obsessed the wreckage can be appalling. A test, and there are many such on the market or in the locked cabinets of counselors, can discover in my daughter a so-called “high musical interest.” It is not, as far as I know, able to tell whether she will be a good composer or a good chorus girl. I would bet on the later. But there are counselors so test obsessed they forget the breadth of musical interest, and difference between interest and talent, and especially they forget the humble nature of their counseling tools. One of the great virtues of a good counselor must surely be, in addition to recognizing the limitation of his tools, his ability to overcome “career-itis” in himself, and especially overcome it in the pimply faced youngster who has thoroughly confused education with a career. That good counselor has a mean fight on his hands. He has the tormented youngster driven to an early career-decision by career-minded parents. I don’t blame the counselor for reaching for the nearest test, I don’t blame him for profiling that kid into something. How wild it must be to have a 13-year-old decided upon architecture or archaeology or anthropology before he can define or even spell the term. How patient you all have to be with the West Pointer’s kid who you know, even without a test, is temperamentally and mentally far removed from success in that school on the Hudson. How nearly you perform a miracle when you counsel career-decision delay for the bright but baffled youngster who may not find direction until the end of a good liberal arts baccalaureate. How much you contribute to wiping out the tragedy in American education by this sensible, patient, delaying tactic. How much you do, in fact, save that too-eager parent, both in money and in heartache in overcoming an early dose of career-itis. How incredible, really, that educational institutions, including Harvard, have joined up with Madison Avenue in the barraging parents and pupils with charts on earning power, charts blandly predicting the individual’s financial pot after sixty years with this or that specialty career – a pot based on a specialty and a career that might very well be automated right out of existence in ten years, let alone sixty. These charts of career status and financial reward can be interesting and even serve as a needed stimulus to some bright but becalmed baton-twirler, but they are not the essence of education or of counseling. It is a corrupted brightness in the counseling world if you get charmed into over-professionalizing your status or so this educator contends. First, you know very well that hanging out a counselor’s shingle does not make you a psychologist or eve a pseudo-psychologist, despite the psyches placed in your hands by pupils and parents, despite the respect and awe you may be able to generate in your colleagues, despite the increased validity of testing tools becoming available to you, despite the growing status of your field (which like other new fields gains confidence and often smugness in being paid more than the old reading-writing-‘rithmetic plodders who have been counselors and inspirations long before the need for you was discovered and more or less defined). The moment a career field gets so established that it holds national conventions, develops its own degrees up to and including the post doctorate, it is in danger of over-professionalizing and tarnishing thereby its bright new coat of armor. The counsellor’s shelf of ready references and reminders of conscience should certainly include Gross’s “The Brain Watchers,” which may not impress some of you as much as it has me, but it should be around to prick the conscience of every counselor who is getting too professional and self-conscious about his calling; around any counselor whose professionalizing is becoming so compelling and life-consuming that he has little time, interest or impulse to develop his own breadth of intellect. If the old cliché “the one who can’t, teaches” applies to the ordinary pedagogue, the counselor who must lead and advise others in all kinds of human endeavor must have modesty, intuition, and the widest possible knowledge. He must fight against the narrowing, immediate requirements of his important job and save a little time at least for the heart of the matter, his own intellect and its nurture. The brightness of your new social movement can be corrupted by the last agency in the world which should be guilty of waylaying you in your good work: the college and university. We have turned you into a super catalog-reader, a translator of our tiresome prose and our frantically changing regulations – regulations about so-called admissions requirements which are not so much intellectual selection as a too-desperate run for cover as we see the hoards of new Americans streaming toward our clogged fountains of learning. We expect miracles of you. We confuse and frighten our public with declarations about rising standards and costs (selection is unfortunately possible by both academic and economic devices), for the sake of dignity, we label our worried condition a search for the scholarly elite. And we turn the search back to you. In addition to expecting you to administer not only College Entrance Board and a host of other not so validated devices, we call on you to fill in questionnaires and critiques about our prospects which would turn Freud into a charlatan, and certainly turns each of you into a too-important, too-omnipotent being in the minds and futures of too many pupils and parents. We have made you into the poor devil who is, in spite of himself, a kind of “personality board” to supplement the “college boards,” and often the two “boards” together add little or nothing to the academic record already recorded about each of our prospects that old standby, the high scool record. If we keep this up in some quarters, we had better not settle for anything less than an experienced Ph.D. in psychology in each of your slots, and it would be useful if that psychologist had several years in theology and, for read safety, an M.D. as well. I figure the Orwellian ultimate in this so-called quest for the scholarly elite will be so far advanced by the time my children vie for college entrance, that I will have to answer for every bad gene I have transmitted. I will have to painfully recall my entire genetic heritage to explain my child’s failure to score 700 on the college boards. The screening of younsters for college need not be as severe today as the popular press, our college catalog, some counselors, and the future portend. Surely you will keep your counseling career brightest by calming needless fears, by reminding ambitious and promising youngsters that there are more than an elite few campuses that give status and security and intellectual stimulation. Surely you can and do lift many hundreds of youngsters in these American high schools in Europe out of the mass of mediocrity into which they will slip, by insisting to them and their prents that there is room in the frightened admissions files of good schools everywhere, that there is always a time and a place for the right intellect to find the right way so long as it finds challenge right now in broad learning – let the specialization and the career wait. I suggested that there is something almost Orwellian about college selection. Isn’t it getting just a bit too Orwellian, in 1964 not 1984, by the way, to find systems set up for matching the personality of a scholar with the personality of a school, thus guaranteeing success and stable behavior for both? I suppose I don’t really have any objection to exploring this intriguing possibility. Perhaps tests will show that ivy towers, like students, have tender, responsive psyches. Syracuse, with a grants from the college boards, is full steam ahead, according to Gross, and has already personality-texted 100 campuses with a questionnaire called the College Characteristic Index. Among the 300 question inventories filled out by students rating the personality of their schools, are such traits as “Sexuality-Prudence,” a kind of eroticism rating, I guess. The charting is done from True – False statements including: Bermuda shorts, pin-up pictures, etc., are common on this campus. Some of the more popular students have a knack for making witty sublte remarks with a slight sexy tinge. To get her ready for one of these more socially oriented institution, it may be already too late to get your daughter started on some serious all-night carousing. That there is not always a measurable link between the intellect of a student as shown on his high school record and some personality evaluation, which is too often hounded out of you when you are too busy to use coherent English, should not be so dismaying. A college that fights for some such equation, a counselor who makes a fetish of this approach, a system which does not allow for the genius, the unpredictable, even the total misfit who shows signs of a good mind, is flying in the face of human advance, is forcing college entrance and advanced learning into patterns that may be more predictable and comfortable, but patterns that are not really from the loom of life. Scholars and schools are not meant to be so compatible that there is no spark of friction. With happy conformity there are not real individual scholars and there are no really distinctive schools. I hope you will help to save us from our Orwellian tendencies until we get beyond this present period of worried adjustment to too-rapid growth. The bright promise of your developing profession will also continue, I think, in direct proportion to your adjustment to our drastically altering culture. I’m not sure you can keep up. I’m not sure anyone can keep up with our cultural change. But we all had better try, and you are particularly challenged to keep up if you are to guide the new generation in solving its problems and mapping its future. It is hard to contemplate the structure of our society in just 10 years from now, even if that structure is not rent by any bombs or international blows. In a decade your present perspectives will be archaic, some even dangerous. Your language, your environment, your classrooms, your testing procedures will be, in many cases, beyond recognition. Do you think that ten years go even a dictionary would have helped in dealing with a recent New York TIMES advertisement calling for applications from person with experience in: transistorized circuitry, inertial guidance, gyrodynamics, shielding design, ferret reconnaissance, human (?) science, mciro-miniaturization, and data telemetry. I almost tremble with anticipation in thining about the ads of ten years from now, don’t you? I do tremble with anticipation, and with some insecurity, no doubt, in thinking ahead to the electronic equipment just about to be used on a large and fruitful scale in teaching all sorts of things: in looking ahead to the certainty that the day is fast approaching with a simple Americn home will have a communications room wher the child and adult will have his own television monitor; where research will be done in that simple American home through the facilities of the Library of Congress without a book leaving that library, because the day is near when a library of 20,000 volumes will be a mere six foot shelf. A Princeton professor recently found out from his young son that the culture was changing faster than the professor when he told the son about the great Einstein who had lived in Princeton. He explained something about Einstein’s theory of relativity without dismaying the son. He thought his son would be interested to know that Einstein suffered when he had to deal in simple arithmetic, and told how the great man always fumbled when making change on the trolley car. The son’s face clouded with bewilderment and like a shot he asked, “What’s a trolley car?” An admission’s man at Cal Tech recently said that freshmen of ten year’s ago would fail miserably in competition with today’s freshmen. Let’s home and expect that that admissions director or his successor will say the same thing ten years from now. Let’s anticipate with both pleasure and trepidation the certainty that one of the greatest challenges to our society, right up there with the challenges of the population explosion and nuclear warheads in wrong places, will be the challenge of leisure time. For the first time in human history a large segment of mankind will have time to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, and we know that much of that segment will be incapable of being anything but bored. The terror of tedium faces that segment because it will not be ready to make genuine use of leisure, will be thoroughly unready for contemplation, for noble thinking, for the development of wisdom and virtue, all of which must surely be the intended destiny of mankind. We see, then, a great need and growing hope of getting rid of these two tragedies in American education. The present “colored revolution” will move us closer, faster than ever before, to the realization of our great and good slogan, “equal opportunity to be educated.” There are comforting signs that we are getting ready for a future without that tragedy, and also ready for a future that better serves the individual while it serves the mass in education. Through good counselors, and by many means, we can devise a system that finds the individual American intellect and lifts it toward the poetry and purpose that is in its separate soul. Surely your determination to see the individual intelle