Report Card

P: In the course of questioning a 16-year-old suspect charged with stealing an automobile, Judge Samuel Leibowitz of New York City's Kings County (Brooklyn) Court discovered something about U.S. education that left him "speechless." Though the boy could spell both "dog" and "cat" orally, he could not write either. As a matter of fact, he could not write at all. Had he never been to school? Yes, indeed--he had had three terms of high school. "This," said the judge, "is unbelievable."

P: After surveying more than 50 different communities across the nation, the U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Education Commissioner Samuel Brownell suggested a plan to ease the teacher shortage. The plan: to get various communities to set up special teacher-training programs aimed principally at the housewife with a B.A. In this way, they said, thousands of American women will at last be able to put their rusting degrees to work, and the nation's schools will be assured of a whole new supply of "mature, qualified women."

P: At the behest of Wisconsin's Joseph McCarthy, the U.S. Senate issued contempt citations against Harvard Physicist Wendell Furry and Psychologist Leon Kamin. Reason for the citations: though both men had finally discarded the use of the Fifth Amendment, and though both had freely admitted that they had once been members of the Communist Party, neither would play informer against others who might have been members too. P: Appointment of the week: Clark George Kuebler, 46, president of Ripon College, Wis., to succeed J. Harold Williams as second provost of the University of California's Santa Barbara College. A former assistant professor of classics at Northwestern University, Kuebler took over Ripon when only 35. In the eleven years since, he has upped enrollments from 160 to 600. boosted his endowment from $750,000 to more than $3,000,000, strengthened the quality of his faculty by appointing only Ph.D.s from first-class universities to professorships. "Education," says he, "must dispel the all too common notion that ideas and ideals do not count, that education is not concerned with what is good and what is evil, but is really only a matter of adjustment to environment. It is high time for all educators to question our values, not cynically, but to seek aid wherever we can find it--in the arts, in literature, in philosophy and in religion."

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