DID THEY SUCCEED IN COLLEGE?

byDean Chamberlin '26, Enid Chamberlin,Neal E. Draught, Wm. E. Scott. Harper,1942, 280 pp. $2.50.

THERE IS NO SUBJECT save religion in which there is as much stubborn resistance to change as there is in education. New methods, progressive ideas in medicine, agriculture, industry, are eagerly sought and avidly adopted, but the progressive teaching methods advocated by Comenius in 1642 are still unknown today to a majority of our college teachers. So when the Progressive Education Ass'n in 1930, asked some 300 colleges to admit, through an eight year experiment, the graduates of thirty schools which had scrapped, to a greater or less degree, the old C.E.E.B. curriculum, it was a surprise when permission was readily given.

Some 2,000 graduates of the thirty schools were visited, checked, interrogated, questionnaired, and compared with an equal number of graduates of traditional schools, chosen individually to match the I.Q.'s, the home background, the scholastic aptitude, etc., of the "guinea pigs" sent up by the P.E.A.

This study, made by the authors of our volume, is a beacon light in the darkness of our educational fog. The book should be prescribed reading for every college instructor and administrator as well as for each secondary school curriculum maker. The facts are there. They art told in clear, lucid English, free from hyperbole or understatement. They deserve a review of 2000 words, not 300.

The Progressive guinea pigs not only held their own academically: they beat their "matchees" in marks, in honors, in intellectual curiosity, in scientific approach, in interest in contemporary affairs, in educational maturity and in motivation, and the more their preparation deviated from the old Latin-French Math. Ancient History program, the more highly these qualities were manifested. Pages 83, 97, 139, 145, 147, 183 should be read with especial care.

The doctrine of formal discipline received two mortal wounds from the Stanford Experiment of 1920-24 and the Kentucky-Indiana Cincinnati study made by J. A. Yates a few years later, but it has remained for the Chamberlins to give it a final coup de grace, and they have done a grand job.