Word: reforming
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...violence contributes to the election of conservative politicians or the failure to pass legislation aimed at social reform, this must be viewed as a short-term cost. The outcome of any particular political action must be measured not in terms of changes in government policies but by its impact on the participants. The choice of tactics-an election campaign, throwing deans out of their offices, hit-and-run raids depends little upon the issue itself, or on the short-term effects of the action. Tactics are chosen with an eye to radicalizing those who participate...
Students are likely to secure reform within the university through means short of direct violent action. They may help to bring pressure on the government to end the war through activity in the societies at large. However, violent activity against the university with an aim to purify it of the sins which it shares with the rest of society is likely merely to weaken the university without appreciably depriving the Defense Department or anyone else of the services they now receive...
There is a good reason to seek a separation between the university and the government. A society is more likely to reform itself if it has several centers of influence and an intellectual community which is not committed to an official policy which it may have played a part in concocting. However, this is not to say that the university's refusal to service certain outside groups would deprive them of any essential output. Action against the university may lighten the burden of the soul, but it will have only a limited effect in achieving wider change...
...Many children in England and Wales still take a rigorous exam around the age of eleven that funnels the gifted minority into grammar schools, which prepare them for universities. The academic chaff is relegated to so-called secondary modern schools that tend to brand their graduates as lifetime "duds." Reform has centered on the establishment of comprehensive schools, their version of U.S. public high schools, which teach all things to all children...
Verging on Hysteria. The essays' editors charge that the reformers fatally gear their standards to "the unlucky, the ungifted, the indolent or the otherwise lame." This shrill voice is echoed in every essay. Tory M.P. Angus Maud writes: "We must reject the chimera of equality and proclaim the ideal of quality." Novelist Kingsley Amis encapsulates mass education with the slogan, "more means worse," and blames student unrest at universities on the presence of the academically unfit. Psychologist Sir Cyril Burt offers statistics purporting to prove that skills in reading, spelling and arithmetic have dropped in the past 55 years...