Word: slum
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...embarked on a new career-unofficial Inspector General of U.S. Education. Dr. James Bryant Conant toured high schools, investigated curriculums and teachers, and in 1959 mildly concluded that the U.S. high school could be improved "with no radical change." But then Conant got around to taking a look at slum education. His report, Slums and Suburbs (McGraw-Hill; $3.95), published last week, shows how incensed a former Harvard president...
...typical Negro slum, Conant found, one-third of all children come from families in which there is neither father nor stepfather. Almost all their homes lack books and newspapers. Young girls say that their "biggest problem" is to get home without being molested by men. Teachers struggle "tenaciously and bravely" against the adversities of home and street, but bow before the realities. They assign no homework because it is an impossibility in filthy, noisy tenements. They teach no foreign languages in junior high school because half of their pupils hardly know English-they read at sixth-grade level or below...
Within these limitations, slum teachers score remarkable successes. They do manage to bring some order to otherwise chaotic lives. Says Conant: "The outward manifestations of discipline, order and formal dress are found to a greater degree in the well-run slum schools of a city than in the wealthier sections of the same city." Yet in most big-city slums, more than half of the students drop out of school when they reach the legal age, usually 16. Two-thirds of the dropouts fail to find jobs; even among those who get high school diplomas, roughly half cannot get work...
...Ballot, to New York. There on Manhattan's Lower East Side, "five minutes by car from Wall Street," Ballot found exactly what he was sent to find: a New York family living in the same poverty and filth that LIFE'S camera had shown in the Rio slum. Photographer Ballot sighted in on the family of Felix Gonzales, 53, a Puerto Rican immigrant and part-time car washer...
...Cruzeiro's account of slum life "in the shadow of the Chase Manhattan and First National City Bank'' was every bit as graphic as the LIFE study of Rio. Ballot's picture of eight Gonzaleses crowded into a single slum-house bedroom had much the same impact as Parks's shot of the Rio favelados crowded into theirs. Fact was that Ballot's most moving picture-Gonzales' frail nine-year-old son Ely-Samuel asleep on a dirty mattress and apparently crawling with cockroaches-was posed. The photographer caught and distributed the roaches...