The 1962 Summer Institutes of The Commission on English: Their Achievement and Promise

Of the many enterprises undertaken during the last few years to upgrade the teaching of English, the 1962 Summer Institute Program sponsored by the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board has been the most dramatic and, in many ways, the most promising. Already it is clear that the effects of this program are being felt in many high-school classes, and that the formula devised by the Commission on English is being copied widely and successfully. The potential usefulness of such Institutes for the advanced training of high-school English teachers, therefore, has already been demonstrated. What makes these Institutes of especial significance to MLA members, however, is that the program required twenty of the most influential Departments of English in the country to involve themselves directly in this advanced training of high-school teachers. These were not institutes conducted by professors of Education with the casual blessing of Departments of English; these were institutes administered and largely taught by professors of English. The difference is a very great one indeed. Whether we like it or not, the CEEB Institutes have, in effect, forced those of us in Departments of English to acknowledge a substantial responsibility for improving the quality of English teaching in the high schools. Because of them—and of such subsequent activities as the Allerton Conference and the Curriculum Centers—a new appraisal of our proper professional functions has been quietly taking place on one campus after another. Even now it is no exaggeration to say, I believe, that a Department of English may no longer claim to be of the top rank unless it includes among its programs one or more designed to aid the high-school English teacher, both the tenderfoot and the old-timer.