Sadler's Elite

Last week a bald, ruddy-cheeked, jolly Briton of 69 arrived in Manhattan from England. His coming was the occasion for great activity among the pedagogs of Columbia's Teachers College, for since the turn of the Century no name has been more famed in pedagogy than that of Michael Ernest Sadler. He had come to deliver this year's Sachs Memorial Lectures at Teachers College.

Author of the "Sadler Reports" (1895-1903) when, as director of Special Inquiries and Reports in the Education Department of England and Wales, he disseminated sheafs of data on educational goings-on in Germany, England, France, Belgium, the U. S., he became in later years President of the Calcutta University Commission (1917-19). For this work a Gracious Sovereign was pleased to knight him. Sir Michael Sadler is now Master of University College. Oxford, where he likes to show students his collection of French and English paintings.

Amused and stimulated were Columbia's pedagogs last week when their visitor, in his three lectures, took gentle but firm issue with the Columbian idea of mass education and the pet theory of their colleague, Professor Thomas Henry Briggs, head of the department of Secondary Education. Professor Briggs vehemently believes that all schools should be state-supplied, "democratic," that today's private schools are unsatisfactory. Sir Michael prefaced his remarks by soothing any Columbian feathers that might become ruffled later. Said he: ''Teachers College is by far the greatest center for the study of educational method and philosophy in both hemispheres . . . [its yearbooks] the best telescope through which the student can now sweep into his vision the educational changes of the world."

Then he began refuting the Briggsian precepts. Recommending an Aristotelian hierarchy of learning, said he:

"The new movement in education, which at present wears the appearance of being democratic, has gained volume and . . . irresistible force. But all government calls for an elite; business calls for an elite; sound administration rests upon an elite; culture itself, though, like art incessantly reinforced by unexpected genius, has a core which must be guarded by an elite. . . .

"What most concerns humanity in the long run is the illumination of genius not the mediocrity of the crowd. A thousand poetasters might well have been left to carry on their shoulders heavy burdens up the Italian hillsides rather than lose one Dante. Better that all the students in the mid-Victorian Mechanics' Institutes should never have heard of science than lose a Darwin. If the modern movement in secondary education means the decapitation of the eminent in the interests of the average, it will stand condemned at the bar of future history.

''Education must produce an elite. The elite must emerge from the whole range of human society."

After his Columbia lectures Sir Michael headed for Washington to look at the Congressional Library, then to lecture at Swarthmore (Pa.;, then to the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), thence back to Manhattan and home, a fortnight's flying visit.

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