Word: goode
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Summertime. The first critic to stop being constructive after 1905 was a longtime guardian angel-the college professor who once took a proprietary interest in high school standards. When professors took a good look at the proletarianized high 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...
...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...
...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...
...Conant was highly encouraged: "All of the schools could have been made as good as the best or even better. I am more and more convinced that it would be much more difficult to make a radical change in our schools than to improve those we now have...