Herschell Podge is a gifted child. He has an IQ of slightly more than 120, an enthusiasm for Shakespeare which survived high school senior English, and, if he's lucky, a handful of muddled aspirations--perhaps to go to college, perhaps, someday, to "change the world" in some small way.

Needy and Needed

Herschell, of course, is a stereotype, one of thousands of America's gifted children turned out of high school incubators with a diploma, a pat on the back, perhaps a tear or two, and three or four years of intellectual stasis behind him. His are the narrow shoulders upon which the nation expects to climb to the moon, to harness atomic energy for peaceful purposes, to solve the questions of sociological change, and to patch up the globular balloon for another generation of battering. He is also our greatest tragedy.

Herschell probably won't get to Harvard, but if he does, he won't be prepared for college work. It will take a composition course like Gen Ed Ahf to teach him how to express himself, and three full-year educational gargantuas--in the humanities and the social and natural sciences--to broaden his horizons enough to allow a certain selectivity in later narrowing them.

Because Herschell doesn't believe that learning is very important. In high school he's discovered that it doesn't take much more than monthly midnight oil to make straight A's, that there would be nobody around to guide him if he decided to do more than the regulations prescribed. "With all the complications of modern civilization," stated a principal of a 2000-student high school, "our primary business is just teaching our boys and girls how to get along with others." And that's what Herschell's high school spent three years doing--teaching him how to get along.

I. The Problems

According to a recent issue of Scientific American, America's high school population numbers among its opinions the following:

Forty percent believe the earth to be the center of the Universe.

Forty-two percent will resist any attempt to change that mystic nebulosity, "the American Way of Life."

Forty-seven per cent think that democracy "depends fundamentally upon the existence of free business enterprise."

Fifty-eight per cent would allow "the third degree" by the police and the F.B.I.

Sixty-per cent sanction book and motion picture censorship by police and "other groups."

We might expect more thoughtful answers from Herschell Podge--a gifted child; most of the students questioned had never given much thought to the matters involved--matters, of course, basic to their modern society. But another national magazine survey revealed that the intelligent student merely refrains from comment on the questions.

Getting Along

Three quarters of America's high school students believe that the most important thing they can learn in school is "how to get along with people." Academic achievement rated first with fourteen per cent. Two thirds of U.S. college students would rather be popular than brilliant, and hold that the main purpose of education is to develop a well-rounded personality.