Word: flunks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Because they did not learn enough in school, 300,000 young potential recruits each year flunk the armed forces' simple aptitude tests. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara partly blames civilian teachers who not only failed to impart knowledge, but sent students into "a mental fog of boredom, confusion and noncomprehension." He thinks that the stripped-down, highly functional, systems-analyzed teaching techniques of Defense Department schools can reach these kids, and he expects to "salvage" 100,000 of them a year...
...projectors, programmed instruction, individual audio aids, and closed-circuit television. Under McNamara, they have been pressured to prune all nonessential information from their training programs to increase efficiency-and the pruning works. When superfluous material was cut out of a communications repair course at Fort Knox, the rate of flunk-outs dropped from...
...from 40 to 200; the proportion of civilian teachers was pushed up to 51%. In the fall of 1963, it became apparent that under toughened standards flunkouts would almost triple. Academic Dean A. Bernard Drought, who came to Annapolis from Marquette, instituted what he thought would be a temporary flunk quota to keep the midshipmen afloat...
...frogman, called in Ponder and several other teachers to discuss Minter's scholastic difficulties-"not in an official capacity, but as a friend of the boy's dad." A few days later Captain Robert S. Hayes, head of the language department, ordered Ponder to conform to the flunk quota. Ponder refused: "I won't do it. I won't permit it to be done." He was thereupon flunked as an unsatisfactory teacher; his contract lapses in June...
...feel like "second-class citizens," and a number have resigned. One of those quitting in protest, English Teacher Richard C. Vitzthum, 29, accused the academy of treating its "civilian faculty as a commodity which it has bought like provisions for the mess hall." Paradoxically, despite the protection of the flunk quota, overall attrition is high: 35% of the average freshman class of 1,300 drops out by graduation. One reason is the hazing that "plebes" (freshmen) and "youngsters" (sophomores) get, which many regard as anachronistic...