Word: conant
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Robert M. Hutchins, president of the Fund for the Republic, has attacked the proposal for consolidation of high schools made by President Emeritus Conant. Debating with Conant on a Columbia Broadcasting System radio program "The Empty Schoolhouse," Hutchins labelled the plan "impossible and certainly undesirable...
Working on a grant from the Carnegie Foundation, and with the assistance of the Educational Testing Service (part of the College Board organization), Dr. Conant visited 55 comprehensive small town high schools in 18 states. His report takes the form of ad hoc suggestions for improving these schools and others which presumably resemble them. The suggestions range from increased time for teaching English composition to requiring that talented students study science and foreign languages...
...intensity of passions on both sides of this schism has been such that those who wish to have a real impact on public education must avoid the controversy completely, couching their suggestions in practical rather than ideological terms. Such is the form of the Conant Report...
...Conant report is, then, a political document, designed to sway school boards and school principals. It is written in terms which the least sophisticated can really grasp, equipped with check lists and inventories which a ten-year-old could easily administer. The appeal throughout is to that great political slogan: individual freedom and variation. Although the major emphasis of the report is on providing higher academic standards for the intelligent minority, this appeal is surrounded with recommendations which appeal to every special interest group from vocationalism to the mentally retarted...
Considering Dr. Conant's intellectual record, as chemist, as Harvard President, as advisor to the Manhattan Project, and finally as diplomat, it is perhaps surprising that his recommendations should be more practical than those of a professional man of affairs such as Admiral Rickover. Unfortunately, the builder of the atomic submarine seems to have thought more about the demands which reality places upon America than about the equipment with which we must meet this crisis. He sees very clearly that we are at the brink of disaster, that the Sputnik was not merely a fluke, and that unless a revolution...