Education: A TWELVE-BOOK CRAM COURSE

For books on U.S. education, 1961 was a vintage year of able analyses of top issues in readable English. The issues will not go away in 1962, and neither should the books. A dozen of the best:

What Is U.S. Education? The fullest description in years is Martin Mayer's The Schools (Harper; $4.95), a perceptive reporter's first-hand account of everything from team teaching to teacher training, plus live children in live classrooms. The year's most important single issue is summed up in James B. Conant's Slums and Suburbs (McGraw-Hill; $3.95), a sobering report on the growing gap between have and have-not schools, with special emphasis on the "social dynamite" building up in big-city Negro ghettos. Sociologist Patricia C. Sexton's Education and Income (Viking; $6), focusing specifically on the same problem in Detroit, argues persuasively that underprivilege equals undereducation and that low IQ often, and unfairly, reflects low income.

No less an issue in its way is that posed by Arthur S. Trace Jr.'s What Ivan Knows That Johnny Doesn't (Random House; $3.95), a chilling comparison of Russian and U.S. textbooks that pegs the vocabulary of Ivan's typical first-grade reader at 2,000 words and Johnny's at 300, owing to the U.S. mystique of "vocabulary control." Equally indignant about U.S. reading deficiencies is Charles C. Walcutt's Tomorrow's Illiterates (Atlantic-Little, Brown; $3.95), and it has the added virtue of describing key reading reforms throughout the country. Critics who blame it all on progressive education, without real knowledge of the subject, might check Lawrence A. Cremin's Transformation of the School (Knopf; $5.50), the first history of the movement by an able scholar who knows his facts and discounts his prejudices.

As for where and how Johnny can crash into college, David Boroff's Campus U.S.A. (Harper; $4.50) is a highly readable romp through higher education, from Harvard to Pomona, that tells almost everything college catalogues do not. Nor should aspiring freshmen neglect Katherine Kinkead's slim, fat-titled How an Ivy League College Decides on Admissions (Norton; $2.95), an illuminating account of Yale's headaches.

What It Could Be. One cure for secularism in schools is suggested by Christopher Dawson's The Crisis of Western Education (Sheed & Ward; $3.95), a brief for the restoration of Christian culture in learning, by Harvard's first professor of Roman Catholic Studies. Philip H. Phenix's Education and the Common Good (Harper; $4) is a Presbyterian's plan for teaching religious values in secular schools without violating laws or liberties. John W. Gardner's Excellence (Harper; $3.95) is an eloquent case, by the articulate president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, for high standards at all levels of U.S. society. And to the extent that standards can be raised by drastically reorganizing schools, the year's most influential blueprint is J. Lloyd Trump's and Dorsey Baynhan's Guide to Better Schools (Rand McNally; $1.25), which is already revamping high schools across the U.S.