Who Shall Be Educated for Teaching?

Abstract

About 1960, pressure groups (in Colorado, for example, the state legislature) began to require state colleges to restrict their admission to a fraction of the so-called better students.Apparently this notion has also been propounded by persons overzealous to base selection of college students on grades achieved in supposedly objective intelligence and achievement tests and on rank in high school graduating classes-both of which are, at best, very partial criteria. (In the state teachers college I have been associated with for over forty years, the admission requirement was changed in 1962. Rather than give every high school graduate a chance-a policy which had been pursued for thirty odd yearsthe 1964-65 catalogue requires &dquo;rank in the upper two-thirds of graduating class with high school recommendation&dquo;-a restoration of the college entrance academic high school pattern found years back to be an unwarranted requirement.) As a beginner in education in public high schools and in a state teachers college, I, too, was eager to accept objective tests as determiners, but since 1930, I have continued to find scientific evidence which has made me increasingly wary of intelligence and achievement tests-' I now doubt the extremists who are promoting a trend in American democracy for social segregation based on such tests. Promoters of admission to teachers colleges should weigh this undemocratic tendency in Dr. Rugg is professor emeritus and chairman emeritus, Division of Education, Colorado State College, Greeley, Colorado. the light of recent marked progress in desegregation of our public schools and colleges on the criterion of &dquo;no discrimination on the basis of race, color, or nationality.&dquo; I shall sketch in this paper some evidence that selection of prospective teachers for public schools-my persistent concern since 1923 -must rest primarily on measures of social competence and sensitivity. Unquestionably, teaching is a social process so determiners of who shall teach must study the very provocative data substantiating the preeminence of these and other social factors. As far as I can ascertain, only one educational scholar, W. H. Burton, has displayed a concern for evidence establishing such factors of social competency as the attitudes, interests, and activities of applicants for admission to teaching.3The first four words of the question in my title are quoted from the exact four words of the title of a 1944 digest of scientific research revealing an obscure kind of social segregation in public education.4 4 Data summarized as far back as 1944 show the division of students in public schools into uppers, middles, and