Word: high
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...restrain a distressed and discontented majority,'' warned Britain's Lord Macaulay. "This opinion," retorted President-to-be James Garfield. "leaves out the great counterbalancing force of universal education/' The focus of a European town remained the cathedral; the focus of an American town became the high school. By the 20th century, quipped Britain's Historian Denis Brogan. U.S. public education was a "formally unestablished national church...
...remarkable achievements. It homogenized waves of immigrants, inculcated morality without religious affiliation and boosted brainpower across the nation. From an eighth-grade education in 1940, the median schooling of adult Americans has risen to 10.8 years (and will be 12.2 by 1965). Against 95,000 graduates in 1900, U.S. high schools this year produced 1,500,000, and half of them are going to college. And out of public schools in every corner of the land have marched armies of the nation's future leaders...
Splendid & Shameful. The outstanding feature of James Conant's long (1933-53) reign as president of Harvard was his interest in education-notably public schools. Among besieged educators, he was well known (and trusted) long before he became U.S. High Commissioner and Ambassador to West Germany (1953-57). Among plain citizens he has won towering respect since The American High School Today (McGraw-Hill; $1) was published early this year. This fall Conant embarks on a second study: the junior high school. Nobody has already done more to convince Americans that high schools can improve-"with no radical change...
...high schools because they cost less (no labs or shops needed). The teachers are paid less; the schools are not always citadels of learning. And the problems of combustible half adolescents in the seventh and eighth grades are one of the key blind spots in education...
...bright-eyed youngsters invaded the schools last year, and this new school year of 1959-60 begins with 1,843,000 more children than the schools have room for. One-third of the schools are potential firetraps ; some are still using gaslight; nearly 75% of the high schools are too small to pay for anything resembling a nuclear-age curriculum. And though wise men urge the country to spend at least twice as much money for education, the U.S. maintains an "educational deficit" estimated at anything from $6.8 billion to $9 billion yearly...