Word: preps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Year after year, as headmasters and college deans see the process repeated they ask themselves: Why do so many prep-school graduates find the first two years of college so dull? Why do so many able students seem to fall asleep...
This week, after a year of research a special committee of six educators from three prep schools (Andover, Exeter, and Lawrenceville) and three universities (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton) finally had an answer. For most students, says the committee's report (General Education in School and College; Harvard, $2), the first two years of college are a serious waste of time...
...college as they should. Superior students suffer from having to keep pace with the dull ones, and too few ever learn just what a liberal education is all about. What U.S. education needs, says the committee, is a complete overhaul of the years between the second year of prep school and the third year of college. Among its suggestions...
Conant had always shown an ability to surprise people by doing a great deal better than might be expected. In prep school at Roxbury Latin he had discomfitted his chemistry professor by a few knowing sorties into the field of quantitative analysis, something he wasn't supposed to take up until his sophomore year in college. He bought himself equipment for a laboratory his father had set up for him in an old shack by giving "magic shows" for kids in his neighborhood; he billed himself as "the Young Edison," charged admission, and performed some of the more spectacular experiments...
Presumably, these losses would be a sacrifice to the miniscule number who study while others entertain. Presumably, too, they would be a sacrifice to the principle of Social Pattern, dear to the hearts of prep-school administrators. In any case, this work represents as logical a bit of reasoning as belief in Santa Claus...