Fischer, superintendent of the Baltimore public schools, said that confusion about communism is the main weakness in high schools today, and "it need not be feared if understood." He urged viewing it in a new way--as a social doctrine rather than as a menace.

Fischer suggested that we underestimated the high school student's ability to study and consider communism and other world problems.

He also stressed the importance of programs to allow teachers to study communism at universities on leaves of absence before teaching it in their own schools.

Counts, professor emeritus of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, followed by mentioning the goals of Soviet education and the American lack of knowledge toward communism. He said that the Soviets aim to reeducate the people entirely, through an all-inclusive state-control system.

Soviet-controlled universities in East Germany have within themselves "their own instruments for liberation," Conant said last night in the last lecture of the conference.

He told an audience in Sanders Theatre that these universities do not train their students to be "imaginative" and to be able "to make decisions," two requirements necessary to keep an industrial society alive.

Speaking on the subject, "Education in Europe and the U.S.", Conant devoted a main part of his lecture to explaining the basic differences between American and European universities.

He said that European universities are more like our graduate and scientific schools than our liberal arts colleges. He added that the Germans find it difficult to understand what a liberal arts college really is.

Only "four to seven percent of European youth ever reach the university level," he said, as compared to almost 33 percent in America. In Switzerland, he said, those considered qualified for university work, are sent to special university preparatory schools at an age between ten and thirteen.

After this strict preparatory school regimen, the foreign students finds university life very free. Lecture attendance has traditionally been voluntary; the Communists have antagonized the East German students by making attendance at lectures and examinations obligatory