Reorganization of secondary school education to fit it to modern needs must include, according to Dean Spaulding, an acceptance by the individual schools of their responsibility to help each student discover his special talents and help him make the most of them. As examples of schools where such an aim has already been established he cited vocational schools in New York and elsewhere, the Civilian Conservation Corps, Midwestern schools which encourage student investigations into community affairs, and others which make sure that a student leaving the school is prepared for a definite job, and which help him to get it.
Another reform which lies in the direction of the "expanding horizons" of public education is the employment of teachers who are broadly trained by practical contact with the world and who are thus equipped to teach subjects "far from respectable in terms of purely academic standards," Dean Spaulding said, asserting that many of the school teachers today have gone into the profession "in order to escape the pressure of supposedly more practical callings."
Public Sentiment Needed
Vital to the effecting of any of these much-needed improvements is "public recognition of the need for changes in the conventional school program," he stated; with such recognition, "if America as a nation really wants schools that will meet the educational needs of its young people, there is no good reason why it cannot have them."
Another problem which would come up is that of providing a groundwork for the necessary large-scale planning, "in terms of those phases of economics, of sociology, of public administration and public finance, which bear on education as a national undertaking."
Such planning, Dean Spaulding believes, goes beyond the scope of our present teachers' colleges and university schools of education, but as schools of education become loss isolated from other university departments, he said. the resources of the universities can be used more directly for solving educational problems and this opening new horizons for youth.
Donham Asks Cooperation
A solution to the most pressing problem of American industry today, according to Dean Donham's speech last night, lies in the direction of greater co-operation between government and business for the better application of science. "Science gives us our complex modern fools and is constantly reshaping our industry and society, he said, "but science neglects human emotions and thereby creates mere administrative problems than it solves."
"There is disturbing evidence that our capacity to produce new and potentially destructive instruments of power has outrun our capacity to control and direct them for constructive social ends." Dean Donham declared. "In 1989, industry spent some $215,000,000 on pure and applied science. The job was to find new products and processes and the result was to atimulate and accelerate social change