Get Adjusted

In the years A.F. (After Ford), cleanliness was next to Fordliness, Ford was in his flivver, and all was well with the world.

Writing about this Brave New World in 1932, Aldous Huxley described the human hatching & conditioning centers, where everyone was taught his place. The highest were a super class of executives known as Alphas, the lowest were Epsilons, or sewer workers, who were taught Ford's memorable words: "History is bunk."

"And that," put in the Director, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue--liking what you've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny."

Pink-faced, aggressive little John Ward Studebaker, the onetime Des Moines school superintendent who is now U.S. Commissioner of Education, had been looking at the figures. Only four out of ten U.S. children finish high school, only one out of five who finish high school goes to college. But most of the 25,000 U.S. high schools were still acting as if all their kids intended to go to college. Studebaker believes that educational reverence for the "whitecollar myth" produces frustrated and maladjusted citizens. Why not frankly admit that most girls would be housekeepers and most men mechanics, farmers and tradespeople--and train them accordingly?

The commissioner invited nine prominent educators to Washington to help figure out a plan. Last week his group, the Commission on Life Adjustment Education for Youth, made its first suggestions.

Said the Commission:

P: Every "life-adjusted" youth needs to master practical English, social science, physical education, basic science.

P: It is a waste of time for most high-school students to read Il Penseroso, Ivanhoe, Silas Marner and other compulsory classics. It would be enough for many to secure "sufficient competence in reading to comprehend newspapers and magazines reasonably well." Only a gifted few can achieve any real understanding of algebra or geometry. It should, therefore, be a matter of choice whether a student takes algebra, literature, Latin, foreign languages.

P: For these courses, students should be allowed to substitute part-time jobs under supervision--in department stores, drugstores, etc. (Says Studebaker: "The youth adjusted to life is adjusted to his job. . . .") High schools should add courses in homemaking and job-hunting.

High schools in 35 states are already working out this kind of "life adjustment" education. The next step, said the commission, is to get everybody doing it.

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