In secondary education in the United States today the premium is on group acceptance, on conformity and fitting in. "Intellectualism" and the will to learn are inevitably coupled with unpopularity. Herschell Podge failed to realize his potential in high school because he started with three strikes against him.

Life-Adujstment

Primarily there was the philosophy of education trumpeted by the educator quoted above--"life-adjustment." Almost every high school in the nation requires its students to take at least two semesters of diluted kindergarten psychology usually called something like "senior problems." The textbooks, veiled in the blushing sociological jargon of the thirties, hint at sex and domestic problems long since resolved with a good deal more clarity in schoolyards and on lavatory walls. If the high school student hadn't conquered them by his senior year, he was already an irrevocable neurotic.

The Little Things

The senior problems classes are accompanied by a vast menagerie of "special courses" geared to group dynamics and round-edged social intercourse--required courses in home economics (for girls), hygiene (for everyone), a daily period of physical training, and government classes for student leaders elected to campus offices.

As a result of such an overburdened schedule of trivia, over half of U.S. high schools have no foreign language requirement, no science requirement, and no mathematics requirement for graduation. There are no available facilities for advanced study in English literature. Where 75 per cent of our high schools offer typing courses, only 40 per cent have school newspapers appearing as regularly as once a month--and some of those are mimeographed. Advertising, shorthand, auto shop, and a half-term of empirical economics teaching you how to avoid being gypped when you purchase an automobile--these are the trade and social courses which compose the high school academic gamut.

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.

Out of the great morass--the American "Leveling" Philosophy, the equating of equal opportunity with "sameness"--came Herschell Podge. His teachers were underpaid, and his school turned most of its limited funds into a complex hierarchy of extra-curricular activities, the financing of a football team and rereleased motion picture entertainment for lunch period ennui. If Herschell were a colored boy, he wouldn't get decent school facilities in a good many sections of the South. If Herschell came from a Plains state, his high school probably couldn't offer a course in physics.

Counsellor as Savior

Herschell's one chance of redemption would be a trained counsellor, able to recognize talent and intelligence, and equipped to help him get the courses needed, find the stimulation to work outside of his school's limitations, and apply to the right college. But good counselling costs too much money. An American Sunday Supplement estimates that only one out of three U.S. high schools has an adequate counselling program. The closest thing to a counsellor in most high schools is the unholy combination of college sociology major and boys' dean--where guidance gets confused with discipline.

Thus Herschell, and most of America's gifted children--in order to survive in high school communities where the premium is put on social acceptance--and the scholar is only compensating for his big feet or his bad looks-generally adjust to that norm. The very educational system entrusted with the responsibility to train Herschell Podge and his fel- lows too often succeeds in converting intellectual interest into dance committees, campus clean up campaigns, school legislatures, and high school fraternities. Herschell is wasted.

II. Suggested Solutions

"For too long," commented a California school board member, "education has addressed itself to the needs of the backward student. It is time we paid the same care to our bright children. If we gear ourselves to the dull and the most backward, what we produce is mediocre at best."

Conformity: Neglect

The most urgent fact of American education today is not our schools' neglect of Herschell Podge, but our society's need for him. The tragedy of the gifted child is no longer individual and personal, it implies the critical tragedy of American society itself, for if Herschell Podge is not available to sustain and improve us, the only ones left to do the job will be the midgets of conformity who applied the stigma to his intelligence.