Treason in American Education: A Case History

New York/Monterey CA: Pleiades Publications. Near Fine in Good+ dj. c.1949. First Edition. Hardcover. (price-clipped) [jacket worn, with several tears, soiling on back cover]. Pity the poor author -- he set out to simply write a biography of his beloved professor Ellwood Patterson Cubberly, first dean of the School of Education at Stanford, "for over fifty years devoted to American public education to the exclusion of all else save his devoted wife." In the process of research, however, he smelled something rotten, and upon further investigation discovered nothing less than what he termed "a mortal defect in the body-politic of North America." So instead he decided to write a history of Stanford University itself, to expose "the 'social errors' and wilful irresponsibilities of (chiefly) school and 'higher education' pedagogues -- i.e., professors and executive officers. It is aimed at the rescue of U.S.A. schools and colleges from amoral and short- visioned science, the cynical materialism of anti-religion and the cult of academic license [and] therefore at the clear-cut return of Yankee pedagogy to reason, religious aims and instruction, responsibility to constituted authorities and positive service to educational trusts and to the nation's welfare." Although it's claimed that the "Treason" of the book's title " does not refer to political subversiveness at all," it's not hard to see where this mind-set was heading, particularly in the McCarthy/HUAC era. .