The National Education Association, strident P.T.A. chapters throughout the nation, school boards, and educational theorists hiding in our universities, have elaborate programs for action. Unfortunately, the ghost of "progressive education" haunts any program of experiment. The failure of total student freedom in the classroom, the neglect of basic skills for intellectual meandering,--those character defects of modern education which have come to be associated with "progressive education" have engendered in the minds of parents and the press an idea that education must return to the little red school house, the three R's, and the straightlaced New England discipline. Weekly, Time, the Saturday Evening Post and many other national magazines provide a forum for an older generation to call for the standards of "the old days."
Down with Levellers
A return, however, is not enough. There must be a full-scale reevaluation of the Levelling Philosophy. For the benefit of all students, we can institute course requirements in language, mathematics, and science--and provide for advanced work in literature and history. If the grammar school has not taught its charges the fundamentals of reading writing, and spelling, the secondary school should not compound the folly and bequeathe colleges a simple-sentence, monosyllabic thinker.
They Are Special
But for Herschell and the gifted children even this is not sufficient. The most obvious answer to their need may be derived from the words of the school board member quoted above. The gifted child must receive special attention. There must be special, advanced level classes in English and social studies, science, and mathematics. "Segregation" on the basis of intellect and ability--contrary to the charge of "undemocratic"--is in the best interests and tradition of a democracy in seeking out its best and training them. Bright students should be classed with bright students for stimulation and competition, instead of subjected to the frequent resentment of their slower classmates.
High schools in New York, New England, and California have embarked on elaborate programs along this line. It is significant that these are the states, according to U.S. News and World Report, which produce the best qualified students for college.
Financed Experiments
Experimentation with "segregated" classes on the basis of ability is the urgent need of every school where bright children must mark time and rehear explanations they understood at once repeated a fifth time for the classroom dullard. This experimentation should be given a fair chance--unlike faint-hearted programs poorly endowed and incapably administered in one school district for one school year, and then abandoned. Experimentation, and change, are not bad per se.
In Los Angeles Country, experimental programs in world problems, both economic and social, were abandoned in face of criticisms from such diverse groups as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the press, and the Gerald L. K. Smith Christian Nationalists. A trial course combining science and sociology in a New York school, for advanced students, was dropped after a single year--despite the enthusiasm of both instructors and students.
Advanced students may be readily determined on the basis of reading comprehension and special skills--determined by simple, inexpensive, and easily available standardized tests formulated by major American universities. This is our best hope.
Better Counselling
Second, school districts can and should embark upon adequate counselling programs, using as models some high schools in Westchester Country, N.Y., or Long Beach, Cal.--where comprehensive counselling programs have for years encouraged special interests and solved the particular problems of students with high intelligence and unique talents.
Third, the issue of better teaching can be met head-on. In spotted school districts throughout the nation, a high school teacher is required to have a Master's Degree. While a step in the right direction of qualified instructors, such a stipulation ignores the more basic problems. Immediate among these, is the low pay of teachers.
Higher Pay
Not only is teaching among the three lowest paid professions in the United States (bedfellowing with journalists and clergymen), but the pay scale is antiquated and detrimental. Teacher's salaries still increase on the basis of years of service, not talent, initiative, or accomplishment. In every industry or business concern anywhere in the nation, talented and hard-working people are rewarded on the basis of their initiative, not their tenure. Only teaching maintains this deadening idiosyncrasy.
Teachers' colleges are, by and large, farcical diploma mills churning out second-rate instructors on a conveyer belt of picayune courses--motion picture camera projection, physical education, fingerpainting. And because their facade is so widely realized, they attract primarily the aimless high school graduate with no particular talents and less interest in any profession. Staffed and stocked by this brand of mediocrity, education will continue to devolve.
The question of funds for school improvement and teachers' pay must be met now, and if states and individual school districts and school bonds are unable to provide the necessary financial resources, a comprehensive aid program will have to go into effect.
Such improvements are not long-range hypothesizing, nor mere suggestions in a tolerable situation. Each is an urgent requirement if our society is best to serve itself and its members, not to mention maintaining or improving its status in the Cold War. If administrators and school officials fail to act in meeting what may be properly termed a crisis--for more than the gifted child--then it is up to parents and citizens of the community to fill in. The nation's press has recorded events in Lakewood, Ohio, where parents launched after-hours special classes in language and science when the school board failed to provide them.
The Need for Utopia
It was the oft-stated and much-trumpeted hope of the Enlightenment and three centuries of liberal thought that education was the key to Utopia. As one by one the other panaceas have proved to be illusions--from Marxian economics to social engineering, our high school system should not midwife despair of ever reaching such a goal.