Word: laxness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...make it solvent, but so far no one has been willing to pay the political price. Reagan could urge any of several changes: moving back the age of eligibility for full benefits from 65 to 68 or older, reducing the automatic annual cost-of-living increase, tightening the scandalously lax $15 billion-a-year disability insurance program. But if the President fails to propose Changes or simply sets up another study group, he will make it clear that he has no stomach for a political hot potato...
...decline in American inventiveness that has occurred is due to several factors, including the point that companies have been more interested in short-term profits than in research. Government regulations have been too restrictive, science education too lax. But the decline is also due to the cautionary voice of citizens, a voice grown stronger in the past several years as the ramifications of what science can achieve have become clearer and more frightening. Harvard's Daniel Bell has pointed out that most of America's early inventors-Eli Whitney, Edison, the Wright brothers- were tinkerers with tunnel vision...
...teachers were getting far more training than ever before. In the early 1900s, few elementary school teachers went to college; most were trained at two-year normal schools. Now a bachelor's degree from college is a general requirement for teaching. Today's teaching incompetence reflects the lax standards in many of the education programs at the 1,150 colleges around the country that train teachers. It also reflects on colleges generally, since teachers take more than half their courses in traditional departments like English, history and mathematics...
...students' advising needs is just what Harvard lacks. Undergraduates claim the Faculty does not make the effort to insure that students get the personal help they need. Peter Dale, Adams House senior tutor, says that the longer a House affiliate member is around, the greater the tendency to be lax about seeking contact with students. Fifty per cent of the students surveyed in the 1979 housing study said they had "no experience" receiving academic or personal counsel from their senior tutors. Though 60 per cent of the students said they introduced themselves to their House masters upon arrival...
...require English composition for all freshmen regardless of entering grades or Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. But the battle does not end with the freshman year. Dartmouth recently discovered that the skill of some students who did well in freshman writing actually declined in the next three years, so lax were the college writing requirements...