College For Everybody?

When U.S. educators realized in the 19505 that their schools had gone totalitarian, they looked back with regret to the missed opportunities of the decade before.

The end of World War II was also the beginning of the end for U.S. education's traditional freedom from Federal control. In the postwar years, schools were unprepared to handle the demobilization of youth from war and war industry because: 1) their plans were incomplete; 2) they were poorly organized, understaffed, overworked; 3) local funds were meagre; 4) the Federal Government did not act to aid the states--and all attempts to have it do so were blocked by citizens who feared that Federal aid would necessarily bring with it Federal control.

The result: to meet a deepening crisis of postwar reconversion, Washington organized the National Bureau of Youth Service. NBYS took youths out of the labor market, put them in well-subsidized schools. By 1936 NBYS was so powerful that the national administration was using it for political campaign purposes; it was an open secret that Washington censored its teaching and its texts. There were no real centers of resistance left.

On this chilling prophecy Philadelphia's Superintendent of Schools Alexander J. Stoddard based the high points of his keynote address to 2,500 delegates at the influential National Vocational Assembly's annual convention in Philadelphia last week. The prophecy's source: Education for All American Youth, recently released by the National Education Association's potent Educational Policies Commission, of which Dr. Stoddard is chairman. Product of two years' study, steered by such educators as Harvard's President James Bryant Conant and U.S. Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker, the report persuasively argues that: 1) local control of schools should be retained; 2) educational opportunity can be equalized only by means of Federal subsidies.

Wartime Federal grants to schools and especially to colleges have changed the pattern of U.S. education irrevocably; few hereafter will dare to challenge the right of any U.S. youth to a college education simply because he or his parents cannot afford it. To keep Washington a rich uncle and prevent it from becoming the hard master of U.S. education, Dr. Stoddard recommends that the Federal Government grant to the states $100 to $200 a year for each student between 16 and 20. The annual cost, within a decade: $1,750,000,000. The alternative to such a program, he believes, is something like NBYS.

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