Academic Policy: The Eye or the Finger?

ACADEMIC POLICY

In colonial Williamsburg, where Thomas Jefferson submitted a visionary plan for common schools that would provide for "more general diffusion of knowledge" in 1779, Lyndon Johnson last week called the persistence of worldwide illiteracy one of "the shocking facts of the 20th century." Eloquently addressing some 150 of the world's most distinguished scholars at an international conference on the world crisis in education, Johnson deplored the fact that man's "awesome talent for destruction" still competes with his "determination to build." He posed, as a key question of the age: "Can we train a young man's eye to absorb learning as eagerly as we train his finger to pull a trigger?"

The conference, suggested by Johnson last fall and chaired by Cornell University President James Perkins, devoted five days to work sessions designed to set up priorities for closing the educational gap between the schools of developed and underdeveloped countries. The private talks tended to turn into what one participant termed "a brilliant exchange of misunderstandings" —mainly over what Britain's Barbara Ward called "a sense of tension between the Americans who are managers and the Europeans who are humanists." Generally, the argument was over whether a nation's educational system can be evaluated as a whole by comparing its aims with its means in a U.S.-style "systems analysis" approach or whether education is too complex for such treatment.

The conference's summary report, inevitably, stressed generalities. It urged each nation to collect "accurate and up-to-date information about its students, teachers, income and expenditures," set up colleges to train professional school administrators, pay its best teachers as much as it pays any of its other professionals. More concretely, the scholars called for less emphasis on traditional classical education, which "only prepares a student for the ranks of the unemployed," and recommended creation of a new international consortium of agencies to channel money into the schools of needy nations.