Word: merite
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nevertheless, it is not personal merit which will probably earn Brooke a ticket to Washington. Paradoxically, his appeal is based upon the two elements which should be against him--his minority party affiliations and his color--and he makes the most of both opportunities. In his recently published book The Challenge of Change, he warns against the dangerous trend towards a one-party system. As attorney general and a former chairman of the crime commission, Brooke can attest authoritatively to what he calls "the climate of corruption springing from one-party government." He also harps on Democratic complacency, committee control...
...First, some claim that the present students are better students than those who would replace them, and thus that the national interest would be impaired by wiping out the special interest of the academic incumbents. This objection has little, though some, merit. Money is not the sole criterion dividing students from non-students in American society, and abolishing the 2-S might lower the general standard of education somewhat. But this unverifiable and hardly earth-shaking possibility cannot counterbalance the gross injustice of the present system. Concern for national interest should override concern for equity only when the national interest...
...Third, some contend that the 2-S deferment serves the national interest not by protecting either education per se or those now receiving education but by providing a general social incentive toward education. Unlike the other objections, this one is totally without merit. If this compulsively ambitious society ever needed such an incentive, it no longer does. The fetishistic attachment to grades and degrees in this country long ago became a National Neurosis. The 2-S, and the newly-instituted exams, merely accelerate the tendency to equate education with a collection of glittering honors and badges. To foster this disease...
Deferments and exemptions untainted by class-privilege should also be maintained, and some extended: physical and mental disability, family dependency, conscientious objection. Some occupations and types of training may still merit deferments or exemptions in the national interest, but the criteria of national interest should be very carefully and conservatively defined. The draft code should not serve as a general social incentive, pushing young men back and forth between large occupational fields. If we are to have rational economic planning at the national level, let us use a more responsible and objective agency than the Selective Service...
...policy was necessitated, Paul said, by the flexibility of the field which combined math, chemistry, physics, and a number of other sciences. It is possible for a student to get grades that would merit highest honors, while taking only introductory courses. When this problem first arose, the Committee on Physical Sciences referred it to the Committee on Educational Policy, which cancelled highest honors...