Word: pygmalion
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Died. Julius Fleischmann, 68, heir to the Fleischmann liquor fortune, who used his wealth to help finance the Ballet Russe, Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera and numerous Broadway plays (Pygmalion, 1946; Caesar and Cleopatra, 1949); of cancer; in Cincinnati...
Critics of the public schools, particularly in urban ghettos, have long argued that many children fail to learn simply because their teachers do not expect them to. That proposition is effectively documented in a new book called Pygmalion in the Classroom (Holt, Rinehart & Winston; $4.95). The book tells of an ingenious experiment involving several teachers at a South San Francisco grade school who were deceived into believing that certain of their students had been spotted as "late bloomers." Eight months later, the chil dren's academic abilities showed dramatic improvement...
...deception was carried out by Pygmalion's authors, Harvard Social Psychologist Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson, former principal of South San Francisco's Spruce School. They told the teachers that a new test could predict which slow-learning students were likely to "show an unusual forward spurt of academic and intellectual functioning." The exam, actually a routine but unfamiliar intelligence test, was given to all pupils. Teachers were then told which students had displayed a high potential for improvement. The names were actually drawn...
...according to presumed ability, which may only mire the lowest groups into self-confining ruts. If children tend to become the kind of students their teachers expect them to be, the obvious need is to raise the teachers' sights. Or, as Eliza Doolittle says in Shaw's Pygmalion, "The difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she's treated...
Distracter. Under Wieland's tutelage, Silja appeared in 33 productions. Still, as long as she played Galatea to Wieland's Pygmalion, many listeners regarded her as an extension of her mentor. Now, however, she is making it handsomely on her own-but not at Bayreuth. Soon after Wieland's death in 1966, his widow fired Anja on the grounds that her miniskirts were "distracting the personnel...