Education: How to Attract Attention

How to Attract Attention

A few minutes before 9 o'clock one night last week, the lights were dimmed in the grand ballroom of Washington's Sheraton Park Hotel, and all eyes in the room focused on a large screen behind the speakers' lectern. In a filmed talk, the President of the U.S. welcomed 1,782 delegates and 422 observers to the White House Conference on Education—the most prodigious meeting of its kind ever held. "We are," said the President, "faced today with the grave problem of providing a good education for American youth." How is the job to be done? During the next three days, the delegates were supposed to find some answers.

For months, they had been boning up. The 48 states, as well as Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico, had held hundreds of local meetings involving parents and teachers, farmers and bankers, school officials and even governors (TIME, Sept. 12). From most states had come voluminous reports crammed with facts and figures that seemed to indicate a crisis in the nation's schools. But in spite of all good intentions, the conference's opening was not without some preliminary bickering.

Ten days before, the Roman Catholic bishops of the U.S. had issued a joint statement saying that the children in private and parochial schools "have the right to benefit" from any aid the Government might extend to the public schools. Glenn L. Archer, Executive Director of Protestants and Other Americans for Separation of Church and State, promptly denounced the statement as "artifice and studied nonsense." Later the 100 delegates from the A.F.L. and the C.I.O. decided to raise a rumble of their own. The entire White House Conference, they said, had been "stacked" against federal aid to education.

166 Tables. In spite of all this, the delegates heard the President, listened to a speech by Vice President Nixon, and the next morning went to work. They had six broad topics to cover, and the mechanics of the conference were complicated. The delegates were divided up into 166 different tables. They talked for 2½ hours on the topic at hand, came to some sort of agreement, then sent their chairmen off to 16 other tables. These tables of chairmen proceeded to agree among themselves, and each one then sent its leader off to two final tables. From there the last two chairmen were appointed to draw up a report for the convention as a whole.

Inasmuch as the U.S. had been arguing about it for nearly 200 years, Topic 1—What should our schools accomplish?—was, at the least, ambitious. In his opening speech before the round-table discussions began, President James R. Killian Jr. of M.I.T. reported that he had received scores of letters urging the "strengthening [of] the teaching of science . . . more emphasis on high intellectual standards, more attention to the teaching of human relations, to remedial reading, character improvement, citizenship, spiritual education, hand-mindedness, our American heritage, teacher competence, foreign relations, foreign languages, money management, Asia, self-knowledge and sundry other fields." Nevertheless, said he, the conference would have to cope. "People who disagree on the fundamental principles cannot easily agree on school budgets, or on much of anything else connected with education."