Brave New World

Throughout the land last week, with a fresh urgency born of war's end in Europe, young educators were seeing visions, old educators dreaming dreams. If all of them should come true, the following fiction would become fact: On his first day at school, 5-year-old Peter Mathews was annoyed by the nice lady who asked him strange questions and made him put blocks in holes. After the lady decided which group he belonged in, things began to seem better. On the second day, a Mickey Mouse cartoon telling how to pronounce the alphabet, a play session with model airplanes, and a telecast of Mother Goose songs ushered Peter into the wonderful audio-visual-tactual routine that was to keep him fascinated during all eight years of studying the "Common Learnings." At first he disliked being one of the group who got their long vacation in winter (his only free stretch in summer came when the National Teachers'. Alliance local struck for vacations with pay).

That peeve passed when his schedule was revised so that he could attend the school's summer camp.

He was ashamed to go home the day he flunked in fifth-grade Tolerance, and again on the day his model crashed into the airport during an eighth-grade flight exam. But it was not until he took his post-Common Learnings aptitude test that he really became troubled: the test unmistakably marked machine-minded Peter as a potential teacher of economics.

During his year in liberal arts high school, Peter envied his vocational school friends who spent six months working on big new mockups of rocket planes and FM distributors, and six months making money at a job. But after the first of his monthly field trips to Mexico and Canada, he began to take a broader interest in the world, got to thinking that the Great Books his teachers talked about might really be worth reading after all. During his 100-day, 10,000-mile tour of the country, he found himself more interested in the business side of things, decided that maybe the post-C.L. test was right. In his Chinese and Russian classes, he got As and Bs in all his voice-recordings. His graduation trip to Shanghai was a whopping success.

After his six months of compulsory military training, Peter easily won one of the 25 federal scholarships assigned to his district. In college, with leave to advance as fast as he was able, he spent just two years as an undergraduate; he made fast friends among the many foreign students, lived most of the time in a campus boarding club (although his father constantly urged him to join one of the few remaining fraternities). After graduation, Peter wangled a federal grant for research, finally won his M.A. two years later at the age of 21--in June, 1980.

In May, 1945 some features of this vision are already in practice. Classification tests, mechanical aids, and language-teaching methods have been highly developed by the Army & Navy. First-grade-through-college aviation training has been adopted by some 15 states. Tolerance classes are routine in Springfield, Mass. Several school boards have established summer camps for individual schools. Especially in large cities, vocational high schools and work-experience programs are no longer a novelty. The fast-as-you-can-go college course is a going experiment at the University of Chicago.

All of the other features are being vigorously advocated. The year-round school with alternating vacations is a pet project of the National Education Association's Howard Dawson. That "the high school must become . . . what liberal arts colleges are now" was urged by the University of Minnesota's Professor Lee I. Smith in a recent report to the American Chemical Society. Federal scholarships and research grants are advocated by those who fear direct federal subsidy. The author of the proposal to send all high-school students on a 10,000-mile learn-as-you-go junket is Economist Beardsley (Ruml Plan) Ruml.

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