Word: high
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Some studies show that public schoolers outdo private-school graduates in top colleges. But only a fraction of public schools turn out students of such high caliber. Some of the brightest graduates (nearly half the top 30%, or 200,000 yearly) do not go to college at all. Too many bright students do not even finish high school. And despite compulsory education, millions of Americans never glance at a book from year to year (only 25% say they do). Some 8,500,000 can barely read...
...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-labor laws, compulsory school attendance...
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...
...this reasoning, all men working at full 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...