Word: sputniked
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Teaching in the sciences and languages has improved since Sputnik I. Yet Terry denies that this public awakening is responsible for the school's curriculum changes. In fact he thinks it quite unlikely that Sputnik-inspired pressure will have any effect on the school, unless it be indirectly, through pressure on colleges. Rather, the changes have evolved naturally, through faculty turnover and normal self-evaluation...
With the spectre of Sputnik darkening their countenances, Congressmen and grim pedagogues have proposed a "crash program" for science in the secondary schools. But the problem is not only science; a New Republic feature article disclosed that three quarters of the students in the South--on into their freshman classes at college--couldn't identify Aaron Burr, Leon Trotsky, Martin Luther, or Aristotle ("one of Christ's disciples," wrote a college freshman). Parents, employers, and college instuctors are discovering that great percentages of youth can't spell properly, read quickly, write legibly, or express themselves comprehensibly...
Russia has its share of souped-up space cadets who want to blast off for Mars day after tomorrow, but official Soviet space experts have kept their heads in spite of their Sputnik successes. In Magyar Ifjusag, organ of Hungary's Communist Youth League, Leonid I. Sedov, head of the Soviet Interplanetary Communications Commission, says that unmanned Soviet rockets could reach the moon now, but he is more interested in a deliberate development of manned space flight...
...carrying Sputnik II, says Sedov, proved that an animal can stand the shock of launching and that weightlessness has almost no effect on it. This is only the beginning. Before manned space flight is realized, more Sputniks with animals on board will have to be launched. Return to earth is necessary for a manned space craft, and this problem, too, has not been solved. "My opinion," he says cautiously, "is that in the next 20 years we may ship men out to the neighbor planets...
...Sputnik and the crisis in American education have done their work to sober up the traditional week of reckless abandon, when the "old grads" return to Cambridge, and to the "bright college days" of ten, twenty-five, or fifty years ago. Being a Harvard alumnus has become a year-round...