Education: The Inspector General

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Rhode Island, a statewide self-criticism meeting yielded money from the legislature for special programs: calculus in Cumberland High School, Russian in Cranston High School, the M.I.T. physics course in East Providence High School. ¶ English composition, a top Conant priority, is getting overdue attention. Main problem: the teacher shortage. To produce one student theme a week. Conant suggested that no English teacher should handle more than 100 students. But correcting 100 themes at ten minutes each takes 17 hours of work—2½ hours seven nights a week. Chicago would need 330 more teachers, adding $2,300.000 to the budget. Solution: hiring part-time "lay readers." college-trained housewives who can take over the chore at 25¢ a theme. The idea is being used in 16 cities. ¶ Across the country, arithmetic is being switched from rote learning and the "social utility" approach, which make the subject either inscrutable or silly. The new idea is to fascinate children with mathematical concepts and analysis so they can reason as scientists do. San Diego tried it last year, got ,000 children of all mental levels to advance twice as fast. This year a revolutionary new textbook embodying the technique will spread throughout the U.S. Everywhere brighter children are reaching algebra much earlier, sometimes by the sixth grade. ¶ Foreign language study is soaring, especially in elementary schools. Last year the U.S. Office of Education urged all schools to begin ten years of language in the third grade, the most sound-sensing age level (all Russian children begin in the fifth grade). This year Washington, D.C. is starting third-grade French and Spanish. Hawaii's elementary schools will teach Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Tagalog. More than 400 U.S. high schools will teach Russian; New York City and its suburbs alone has more high school Russian courses than the entire nation had two years ago. All San Francisco high schools are switching language study from the formal grammar approach to the U.S. Army's faster speak-and-understand system. More and more schools have "language laboratories." electronic playback units that let students compare their pronunciation with native voices. Next step: conducting science, history or English literature classes in a foreign language. ¶ Elementary schools are changing radically from the "egg crate" method of locking all students by age in one grade under a pass-fail system. The new method: the "ungraded school," which usually means eliminating grades one, two and three (as in Marblehead, Mass.) and using ability grouping by subject. In Torranee, Calif., fourth, fifth and sixth graders are being lumped together in a "multigrade" school so that children of different ages can stimulate each other. In East Alton, III., small groups of six to ten move at their own pace; children who reach seventh grade ahead of time take "enrichment" courses.¶The junior high school, a stepchild institution, will get a year-long survey by Conant. His goal: strengthening the link between fermenting elementary schools and high schools. Junior high schools began originally as a euphemistic device for those who did not want to go to high school but needed a touch of it. From 2,653 1946 they have multiplied to 4,200. One reason: some communities build them instead of