Trouble Spots

Education

Rich uncles of U. S. education, the great Foundations pour out their millions of dollars each year through funnels pointed at trouble spots in the educational system. Pedagogs, ever eager to see what the Foundations consider trouble spots, last week thumbed through the annual report of the General Education Board, affiliate of the Rockefeller Foundation. That most generous of all the educational Foundations, they discovered, was pointing a big funnel at the senior high school, the junior college.

Six years ago the General Education Board set itself two major tasks. One was to foster a more co-operative attitude between colleges and secondary schools. The other was to raise the standards of the colleges. By last year the Board felt that it had started both those balls rolling, could safely leave the colleges to push them on. Under the guidance of its British-born President Trevor Arnett, the Board turned to a new job, to the building of a brand new type of general education for the millions of students who have no use for the classical curriculum. The new curriculum would give the student an understanding of his physical and social environment. It would show him how to use his leisure. It would be heavily weighted with ''cultural" courses. It would include vocational adjustment, perhaps vocational training. The senior high school and junior college together make up the field in which this new type of education must arise.

Grants totaling $600,000 started off the new program. The Progressive Education Association got $90,000 for a try at reorganizing the secondary school curriculum. Another $70,000 helped train the individualistic young women of Bennington College (TIME, Jan. 7). The biggest grant, $300,000, will be dribbled out over a period of five years to the American Council on Education.

Of the rest of the $3,028,723 which the Board funneled out in the fiscal year 1933-34, the biggest part went, as usual, to the South. Like the Rosenwald Fund, the General Education Board long ago made Southern education its special ward. In 32 years it has granted $57,418,075 for thi education of Southern whites, $32,331,203 for the education of Southern Negroes. But, like the Rosenwald Fund which year ago closed its program of building Negro schoolhouses (TIME, Dec. 11, 1933), the General Education Board is withdrawing from some of its early work in Southern schools, trusting to State legislatures to carry on. Henceforth Southern colleges will get as much as ever, Southern schools less.

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