Word: dewitt
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...sources, the Digest is now a notably slicker product than the one founded in 1922, on 4,000 borrowed dollars, by a Minnesota minister's son with an infallible instinct for middlebrow tastes. More than anything else, though, the Reader's Digest is a monument to DeWitt Wallace's reading habits-multiplied 22 million times...
...year it acquired a record club that sold some $20 million worth of platters. From all sources, the Digest grossed a total of $155 million last year. Its profits are not published since the Digest is about as privately held as a company can be; it is controlled by DeWitt Wallace and his wife Lila...
...gauging the tastes of their vast audience, DeWitt and Lila Wallace pay little heed to the Digest's critics. Nor do Digest editors. "If Wally likes it," an editor said some years ago, when the magazine had a mere 12 million subscribers, "12 million other people will like it. It's like that." In Chappaqua, 30 miles from New York, the Digest staff works in a big building that looks like the high school of a particularly prosperous suburb, listens to canned music drifting through the halls, and departs the premises-on orders from Wallace...
...DeWitt finds that the quality of Soviet training in technological fields is at least as good, sometimes better than in the U.S. and Western Europe. One reason is early exposure: physics is introduced in the fourth grade, and one-third of the Soviet secondary curriculum is devoted to science and mathematics. Moreover, says DeWitt. the very specialties that the state gives top priority are those freest from Marxist hobbles. The result is first-rate training...
...DeWitt is fully aware that turning out technicians is a narrow? educational goal. If the aim is "to develop applied professional skills, enabling the individual to perform specialized, functional tasks, then Soviet higher education is unquestionably a success," he says. But if, as the West believes, the aim is ''to develop a creative intellect critical of society and its values, then Soviet higher education is an obvious failure...