For Better Citizens

Nobody can learn to be a good citizen by studying a textbook. But textbooks have something to do with it. And the quality of U. S. school textbooks depends to a considerable degree on an earnest group of 3,000--members of the National Council for the Social Studies. They are the people who write most of the history for school children, devise courses of study in history, civics, economics, geography, sociology. They take their jobs and themselves seriously. Distressed but not daunted by evidence that, in spite of their textbooks (and the field investigations which they prescribe for students), the world is still full of knaves and fools, this week they published a book* that attempted to get the schools off to a fresh start in citizen-making.

No. 1 Social Student is spectacled, enthusiastic Professor Harold 0. Rugg, of Columbia University's Teachers College. Twenty years ago Professor Rugg (Dartmouth '08) decided that history and geography, as taught in the schools, were dust-dry, had little to do with the price of eggs. An engineer, he began to study what a citizen needed to know. Eventually he designed a series of textbooks intended to give useful answers to useful questions. He undid the old packages (i.e., history, geography), dumped all his information in one basket--social studies.

Because no publisher would take a chance on his revolutionary books, Professor Rugg sold or pawned everything he owned, raised $4,000, printed and distributed them himself. They sold like soft drinks in a desert. Today his books are published by Ginn & Co., have sold more than 2,000,000 copies.

Professor Rugg's critics accused him of disrespect to history and learning. His chief critic, practical Professor Howard E. Wilson, then at University of Chicago, investigated schools to see how the Rugg "fusion" plan worked, pronounced it a failure. But Professor Wilson found that he could pin no roses on the old-fashioned textbooks, either. Three years ago he investigated old-fashioned upState New York schools for the New York Regents, learned that many of the State's future citizens thought that habeas corpus was a disease, liabilities were assets and poverty was best defined as "the boyhood of great men."

By last week Professor Rugg and Professor Wilson (now on the faculty of Harvard's Graduate School of Education and editor of a series of social studies texts published by American Book Co.) had patched up their feud. Both contributed to the National Council's new book.

The Future of the Social Studies had 17 authors, each of whom proposed a course of study for training citizens. Although no two plans were the same, the authors agreed on many points, e.g.: that the best way to understand the U. S. is to study its regions (such as the Tennessee Valley), that pupils should study causes of World War I, how the British Empire was built, how dictatorships rose, how to make democracy work in the U. S., how to analyze propaganda.

Most arresting proposal in the book (by Hunter College's Frances Morehouse) was that U. S. youngsters should get a new set of heroes. To conventional U. S. heroes, such as Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Miss Morehouse proposed to add: Buffalo Bill, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Wright Brothers, Elias Howe, Booker T. Washington, G. W. Carver, Cyrus W. Field, Jane Addams, Dan Beard, Richard Byrd, Charles Lindbergh.

*THE FUTURE OF THE SOCIAL STUDIES--National Council for the Social Studies, Cambridge, Mass. ($1.50).

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