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Splendid & Shameful. The outstanding feature of James Conant's long (1933-53) reign as president of Harvard was his interest in education-notably public schools. Among besieged educators, he was well known (and trusted) long before he became U.S. High Commissioner and Ambassador to West Germany (1953-57). Among plain citizens he has won towering respect since The American High School Today (McGraw-Hill; $1) was published early this year. This fall Conant embarks on a second study: the junior high school. Nobody has already done more to convince Americans that high schools can improve-"with no radical change...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Education: The Inspector General | 9/14/1959 | See Source »

Today the charge is academic "softness." James Conant does not agree-or quite disagree. Some critics, he thinks, miss their target as badly as Pamphleteer Livesey. What everybody ought to know more about, he suggests in a forthcoming book; The Child, the Parent and the State (Harvard University; $3.50), is the history of a highly significant development -the transformation of the U.S. high school from 1905 to 1930. Those who thunder that Cicero molded young minds at the turn of the century are right. But Cicero's assassin was not John Dewey alone. It was a combination of child...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Education: The Inspector General | 9/14/1959 | See Source »

Noah's Ark. To criticize the schools in good sense, says Conant, the first rule is to grasp their astonishing diversity: "You can find almost any animal in the system. It's like Noah's ark." The pervasive U.S. cathedral is the "comprehensive" high school, which sends some of its students to college and gives the rest marketable skills. But hundreds of schools are "special." New York City has outright detention camps for delinquents-and it also has the exquisitely superior Bronx High School of Science (TIME, May 5, 1958). Some urban schools teach 90% of their...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Education: The Inspector General | 9/14/1959 | See Source »

...school, they left it to what they considered a lowbrow technician-the education professor. And to figure out how to run the schools, the "educationists" seized upon Philosopher Dewey's innocent theory that children learn best by being interested instead of disciplined. It fitted the educationists problems, muses Conant, "as a key fits a lock...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Education: The Inspector General | 9/14/1959 | See Source »

...lean-to lab outside the house. But the boy chemist's talents got him into famed Roxbury Latin School (he was the most precocious science student in 20 years) and through Harvard in three years. He married the daughter of Harvard's top chemist; in 1931 Professor Conant himself took over the department. "Bryant," said his mother once, "always had a formula for everything...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: Education: The Inspector General | 9/14/1959 | See Source »

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