Word: conant
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...Conant was nearing a Nobel Prize for his research on chlorophyll. He never got it. In 1933 Harvard plucked him out of the lab and elected him president (at 40) to succeed aging Abbott Lawrence Lowell (Cambridge was full of old professors, and its reputation had sagged). By World War II, Conant had hired so many outstanding new professors and administrators that he was able to spend up to 75% of his time away from Harvard, organizing atomic scientists for the supersecret Manhattan Project...
...through those years, Conant grew more interested in public schools. In the penny-pinching 19305, he saved Harvard's ailing Graduate School of Education (now one of the best) from extinction. In 1936 he ordered a new Harvard degree: Master of Arts in Teaching, uniting education courses with liberal arts. In 1949 he suggested launching the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools (now the National Citizens Council for Better Schools) to throw intelligent criticism instead of brickbats at the schools. When it began, only 17 citizens groups existed in the country. Today's roster: 18,000 local...
...Gifted. What first fascinated Conant about the public school was its Jeffersonian character-the mixing of children from all social levels. At casteconscious Harvard, President Conant's great theme was the American tradition of respecting any man good at his trade. "Each honest calling, each walk of life,'' he said in a baccalaureate sermon, "has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments...
...this reasoning, all men working at full throttle are "gifted." In a status-conscious nation, the idea is sometimes hard to get across. Conant's transmitter: the "comprehensive" high school, a social melting pot throwing rich and poor, dull and bright together. In ideal form, thinks Conant, it should give every kind of student as good an education as he might get in a school designed just...
Amid the nation's scramble for brainpower, some men believe in imposing a uniformly "tough" curriculum on all students. Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover wants to set up European-style schools limited to the brightest scholars. To Conant, both ideas are anathema on realistic as well as philosophical grounds. A single standard would breed frustration, delinquency and lower standards. The elite school implies splitting up universal education on the European pattern...