H.L. Mencken (1880-1956),
Minority Report (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), pp. 97-98, § 127:
The public schools of the United States were damaged very
seriously when they were taken over by the State. So long
as they were privately operated the persons in charge of
them retained a certain amount of professional autonomy,
and with it went a considerable dignity. But now they are
all petty jobholders, and show the psychology that goes
with the trade. They have invented a bogus science of
pedagogy to salve their egos, but it remains hollow to any
intelligent eye. What they may teach or not teach is not
determined by themselves, or even by any exercise of sound
reason, but by the interaction of politics on the one side
and quack theorists on the other. Even savages have
reached a better solution of the educational problem. Their
boys are taught, not by puerile eunuchs, but by their
best men, and the process of education among them really
educates. This is certainly not true of ours. Many a boy of
really fine mind is ruined in school. Along with a few sound
values, many false ones are thrust into his thinking, and he
inevitably acquires something of the attitude of mind of the
petty bureaucrats told off to teach him. In college he may
recover somewhat, for the college teacher is relatively more
free than the pedagogue lower down the scale. But even in
college education has become corrupted by buncombe, and
so the boy on the border line of intelligence is apt to be
damaged rather than benefited. Under proper care he
might be pushed upward. As it is, he is shoved downward.
Certainly everyday observation shows that the average college course produces no visible augmentation in the intellectual equipment and capacity of the student. Not long ago,
in fact, an actual investigation in Pennsylvania demonstrated that students often regress so much during their
four years that the average senior is less intelligent, by all
known tests, than the average freshman. Part of this may
be due to the fact that many really intelligent boys, as soon
as they discover the vanity of the so-called education on
tap, quit college in disgust, but in large part, I suspect, it
is a product of the deadening effect of pedagogy.
Id., p. 102, § 134:
A professor, even at his best, is a pedagogue, and a
pedagogue is seldom much of a man.
Id., p. 133, § 182:
It is still an open question whether the pedagogical
methods of today are better or worse than those prevailing
in the little red schoolhouse of the past generations, and
many intelligent persons believe that they are clearly worse.
There is certainly no such doubt about the improvement of
methods, say, in medicine, farming or the common mechanical processes.