Bokelskere.no

Is not the great defect of our education today (...)
that although we often succeed in teaching our pupils
"subjects," we fail lamentably on the whole
in teaching them how to think:
they learn everything, except the art of learning.

/ / /

For we let our young men and women go out unarmed,
in a day when armor was never so necessary.
By teaching them all to read, we have left them at the mercy
of the printed word.
By the invention of the film and the radio, we have
made certain that no aversion to reading shall secure them
from the incessant battery of words, words, words.

They do not know what the words mean;
they do not know how to ward them off or blunt their edge
or fling them back;

they are a prey to words in their emotions
instead of being the masters of them in their intellects.

We who were scandalized in 1940 when men were sent to fight
armored tanks with rifles, are not scandalized
when young men and women are sent into the world to fight
massed propaganda with a smattering of "subjects";

and when whole classes and whole nations become hypnotized
by the arts of the spell binder,
we have the impudence to be astonished.

(...) we postpone the school-leaving age,
and plan to build bigger and better schools; the teachers
slave conscientiously in and out of school hours;
and yet, as I believe, all this devoted effort is largely
frustrated,
because we have lost the tools of learning,
and in their absence we can only make a botched and piecemeal
job of it.

fulltekst