The Folly of Ignorance

Also, would New Zealand criminals and New Zealand school children react in similar ways to psychiatrists? I cannot see why this sentence was used.

The other one, a mixture of misunderstood technical words and a woolly cliche, is accidentally true, and the facts are not disregarded by those concerned.

D.A.P. reminds me not of the kitten that chases its tail, but the one that bites it too hard, repeatedly. I don't know whether he means the article to be serious or humorous. On the humorous side, the only thing that could be laughed at is the author's ignorance; but that ignorance is indeed appalling.

Anti-Ausubel? Anti-American? Anti-Psychiatry? Anti-Psychology? Anti-everything?

What exactly is D.A.P.'s target? Is he criticising Dr. Ausubel, or "psychiatric methods"? He is obviously not criticising psychiatric methods, since he never uses the words correctly. But if he is criticising Dr. Ausubel, then he does not know the function or meaning of "criticism", either. In this connection, I quote what I think he thinks to be his key sentence:

"Coming from the nation with the highest juvenile delinquency rate in the world, Dr. Ausubel should have the sense to shut up about American phychiatric methods and we should take a good look at them before we get them foisted off on to us."

N.B.: Dr. Ausubel has, in fact, said very little, by way of Press publication in New Zealand, about American psychiatric methods. What he has mainly stated, are "talking points" for educational psychology.

I see no sense in picking on every (incorrect) sentence in this way. D.A.P.'s first sentence helps me to make my point doubly clear. The first part of it is merely untruthful nastiness ("so-called Educator"). But the second part of it—that Dr. Ausubel's visit has stirred up a great deal of controversy on psychological (D.A.P. uses the correct word here) methods of education in schools—is probably right. I for one think, and I hope that Dr. Ausubel does too, that this is mainly a good thing. The controversy is mainly on the form of D.A.P.'s "arguments" against scientific fact. In other words the ones with little useful to say (including an alarming percentage of New Zealand parents) are simply stirring up the water to see how muddy it can get, so as to obscure the issue; whilst the others (Dr. Ausubel and the few who are able to do it), are stirring it up for analysis. But at least in this way there is just the possibility that something constructive may result, whereby the ignorant may some day realise their folly, at what could almost be classed as "biting the hand that feeds them" type of behaviour.

Dr. Ausubel is not a psychiatrist, nor a "so-called Educator", and therefore D.A.P. need not get so alarmed—amongst other things, he is a parent and an educational psychologist. Perhaps D.A.P. might have to sort out these terms from a dictionary? (He might find that he might profit from an interested psychiatrist, but that teaching methods certainly profit from the work of interested psychologists. D.A.P. calls modern psychology "a perverted Frankensteinean monster." I did not suspect that any one had ever seen so much in it as to warrant this type of definition. Besides, to my way of thinking a perverted Frankensteinean monster is probably a better thing than an ordinary one.

David Riesman says of Progressive Education in the U.S.A. (in The Lonely Crowd"), "Its aim and to a very considerable degree, its achievement, was to develop the individuality of the child; and its method was to focus the teacher's attention on more facets of the child than his intellectual abilities." These are my underlinings in one sentence that tells us more about teaching and psychology than D.A.P.'s whole article. The underlined words are to my mind only incidentally against what D.A.P. has to say—I know that they have been carefully thought about.

D.A.P. is so utterly unqualified to write on these subjects that it would have been better for all if he had had his temper tantrum all by himself, in his own locked bedroom.

—Roland Vogt.