Word: sputnik
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...evidence of decline was depressingly easy to find. About 13% of all 17-year-olds, and perhaps 40% of minority youth, are considered functionally illiterate. In 19 academic achievement tests given in 21 nations, American students never finished first or second and were last seven times. Before Sputnik launched a paroxysm of educational reform in 1957, average test scores were actually higher than they are now. From 1963 to 1980, the average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests fell more than 50 points in verbal skills (to 424 out of 800) and 36 points in math (to 466). And there...
...president said that he is optimistic that these changes combined with a new "gathering consensus to get behind public schools," will help reorder U.S. educational priorities, similar to what occurred after the Russians launched the Sputnik space satellite...
...Governor James Hunt of North Carolina and Dr. David Hamburg, president of the Carnegie Corporation, assembled a blue-ribbon panel of 50 business, education and government leaders. Last week the coalition issued a report declaring that the present economic challenge from Japan and other countries is "more profound than Sputnik." The Federal Government, the group insists, must take the leadership to provide an educational system that meets the needs of our technological economy. Concludes the report: "The failure to attend to our educational system is the equivalent of unilateral disarmament...
...Director of Harvard's current $350 million fundraising campaign Joseph G. Carr Radio airtime, relative to other forms of media exposure, was considerably less expensive in 1958 than it is now. And the future of American colleges was a pressing concern--only, recently come to prominence--in the post-Sputnik, pre-Mercury days...
Soviet hydrogen weapons and Sputnik foreshadowed a kind of stalemate. Once general nuclear war threatened both sides with tens of millions of casualties, the very existence of nuclear arsenals came to be perceived by many as a menace. Traditional wars had been sustained by the conviction that the consequences of defeat or surrender were worse than the costs of resistance. The nuclear specter banished that conviction. Fewer and fewer objectives seemed worth the cost or the risk...