https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/education/2021/03/making-notes-as-the-rot-began/
After his work on culture and racism, Jacques Barzun spent his sabbatical leave in 1943-45 on a study tour to “take the temperature” of education across the nation. “Under every meridian on this continent I have been privileged to attend meetings of the curriculum committee which was, it seemed, sitting continuously from coast to coast.”
Back in his office, his head full of information about the finance, culture and politics of education, he wrote Teacher in America (1945) in burst of energy. This was a tour de force of the challenges and difficulties in the education system, such as the notion that learning has to be “fun”, misguided fads promoted in teacher training schools and the soul-destroying drudgery of the PhD “octopus”.
The preface of the 1981 edition is a mournful reflection on several decades of regression in the public education system, much of it driven by the graduates of the courses in Education which he deplored in the first edition.
Thirty-five years have passed, true; but the normal drift of things will not account for the great chasm. The once proud and efficient public-school system of the United States, especially its unique free high school for all—has turned into a wasteland where violence and vice share the time with ignorance and idleness, besides serving as battleground for vested interests, social, political, and economic.
This “heartbreakingly sad” development flowed from misguided moves to expand the scope of the schools with a wave of additional responsibilities and progressive innovations to promote personal development, citizenship and sociability.