Conant Sees a Menace

U.S. public schools have been traditionally classless and nonsectarian. To Harvard's James Bryant Conant, that is the way they should be. Last week, in an alarmist mood, he called the rise of private and denominational schools a menace to "our democratic unity."

"There are," said he, "many sincere Protestants, Jews and Catholics who believe that secondary education divorced from a denominational religious core is bad education . . . That such people have a right to organize their own schools I do not question . . . [But] to my mind, our schools should serve all creeds . . . Therefore, to use taxpayers' money to assist [private schools] is, for me, to suggest that American society use its own hands to destroy itself ... A dual system [of schools] serves and helps to maintain group cleavages . . ."

Conant admits that not all parents who send their children to private (or parochial) schools do so for religious or "snob" reasons; many do it because they feel that some U.S. public high schools are inadequate. To these parents Conant offers rather cold comfort: "The family will have to balance these misgivings against the advantages to the boy of mixing with all sorts of people . . ."

Conant's proposed solution is not the abolition of private and parochial schools ("This is a free country, and people will not be pushed around by educators") but to improve the high schools. "The false antithesis between education for the gifted and education for all American youth must be resolved . . . Then one demand for a further increase in private independent education will largely disappear."

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