Education: Reconciling the Old & New

When he took over the "wreck" of Washington, D.C.'s integrated public schools 2½ years ago, Superintendent Carl F. Hansen confounded pessimists everywhere by raising academic standards higher than they had been under segregation (TIME. Feb. 1). His latest innovation may do even more to revolutionize the capital's educational system. Called Amidon School, it is a determined effort to resolve the longstanding war between "basic" and ''progressive" education by developing a curriculum that combines the best of both.

Begun last month in an urban-renewal area in southwest Washington. Amidon is open to any Washington child whose parents provide transportation. Its 465 students, about half of them Negro, are housed in a two-story red brick building that looks like any other elementary school in the land. The big difference lies in the premise on which Hansen has founded Amidon: "The main purpose of organized education is to cultivate the basic subjects as the building blocks of intelligent behavior."

Indians & Doorbells. Hansen has no quarrel with progressive education's contention that problem solving is more interesting than rote learning. But he thinks progressives underestimate the pride that children take in acquiring intellectual skills. Instead of directly teaching the skills necessary to solve problems, progressive schools resort to a kind of subliminal advertising. They start out with "units of experience" built around such hardy fascinators as "the Red Man." After interviewing an imported chief in full headdress, children write Indian themes—supposedly absorbing grammar and spelling along the trail.

Instead of liberating young minds, argues Educator Hansen. this method often imprisons them. When science is cloaked in a "home unit," it may get stuck at the doorbell—and never reach the principles of electricity. Says Hansen: "One is inclined to be interested in what one knows. Children want still more of the American Indian because that is what they know. This is not helping them to learn."

Teaching & Thinking. Unlike all-out progressive educators, Hansen refuses to "leave learning to chance." Though Ami-don's youngsters will get plenty of "experience-centered activities," they will not be "lost in a hodgepodge of unit teaching." Reading begins with phonics in first grade and formal grammar starts in fourth grade (two years earlier than in most U.S. schools). Writing is heavily emphasized because it "improves and refines thinking"—and the same goes for math and science. More outrageous yet by progressive standards, geography focuses on specific places, and U.S. history is taught in chronological order "to develop an historian's capacity to see and evaluate primary sources."

Forward Step. All this, insists Hansen, is not just "a reversion to the stilted education of the turn of the century." In fact, he adds with a quiet smile. "I could be wrong, but I think this is the direction education will take in this country."