Word: public
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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...
...state will need an insane hospital." When education began to reach sizable proportions in the 1880s. alarmists predicted the downfall of parental authority by "a crime-and-pauper-breeding system." In just one of his dozens of leaflets, Maryland's polemical Pamphleteer Francis B. Livesey blamed public schools for "the Negro problem, the servant problem, the labor problem, the tramp problem, the unemployment problem, the divorce problem, the eyesight problem, the juvenile problem, the bribery problem and the pure-food problem...
...through those years, Conant grew more interested in public schools. In the penny-pinching 19305, he saved Harvard's ailing Graduate School of Education (now one of the best) from extinction. In 1936 he ordered a new Harvard degree: Master of Arts in Teaching, uniting education courses with liberal arts. In 1949 he suggested launching the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools (now the National Citizens Council for Better Schools) to throw intelligent criticism instead of brickbats at the schools. When it began, only 17 citizens groups existed in the country. Today's roster: 18,000 local...
...Gifted. What first fascinated Conant about the public school was its Jeffersonian character-the mixing of children from all social levels. At casteconscious Harvard, President Conant's great theme was the American tradition of respecting any man good at his trade. "Each honest calling, each walk of life,'' he said in a baccalaureate sermon, "has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments...
...matter his score. Let George do it-if he can. Guidance counselors are after bigger game: the brainy boy from a culture-poor family who always thought he was "dumb," the bright laggard who needs to be prodded. To Conant. guidance is "the keystone of the arch of public education...