Volume 2, Number 6 · April 30, 1964
A Scandal in Education
By Diana Trilling
High School English Textbooks: A Critical Examination
by James J. Lynch, by Bertrand Evans
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 526 pp., $4.95
In the Preface to their study of the textbooks currently in use in the teaching of English in the United States, James J. Lynch (now deceased) and Bertrand Evans are speaking, in their quiet way, for the importance of a proper literary training for American youth. They quote a statement of President Kennedy's: 'If, in the effective use of language, style is the man, style is the nation too; men, countries, and even entire civilizations have been tested and judged by their literary tone.' Since totalitarianism established for us the part played by ideas and even by modes of sensibility in the modern struggle for power, no gifted politician of democracy can again easily ignore the artist and intellectual in his public programs, or at least in his strategies. But what, for intellectuals, distinguished Kennedy as a President was his ability to make a pronouncement of this kind without its sounding like either a ploy or an embarrassment but like a genuine promise. Thus for the first time in memory one began to imagine for America a culture in which literary style might indeed be taken for what it is, a measure of the individual or national commitment to the civilizing forces in life.
Review, 2351 words
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