Volume 3, Number 1 · August 20, 1964
Education and "Stupidity"
By Edgar Z. Friedenberg
The Tyranny of Schooling: An Inquiry into the Problem of "Stupidity"
by Lewis A. Dexter
Basic Books, 182 pp., $4.50
Lewis Dexter's book is the first of what, I anticipate, will be a series of books by many authors criticizing American educational policy fundamentally from a conservative position. I do not count Koerner or Rickover as predecessors of Dexter, because these critics and others like them accept universal compulsory school attendance in principle, though they decry the condition of the public schools. Dexter is more penetrating and radical; also, within the limits imposed by his special point of view, more perceptive. He ruminates quietly and clearly about education, and his coolness and restraint tend to conceal that his attack, though gentle, is explicitly directed against the most fundamental assumptions on which public education rests.
Review, 1998 words
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