earlier, the range in mental age will span at least 4 and maybe 8 years, and achievement levels will vary still more. In fact, at that age the top quarter of the class could be studying academic subjects that are beyond the capacity of the average and below average three quarters. But the commission's curriculum is not concerned with academic studies. It advocates that students conduct "community surveys each year," and that "community studies be as prevalent as book study." The curriculum is to include "family life education for all students" and student counselors are to be "as concerned over a student's first serious love affair as her choice of a college."

So much for the "model high school curriculum." The commission sets out the school's "educational" goals under 10 headings. Only the last one is concerned with what I define as the school's technical task. It says, "All youth need to grow in their ability to think rationally, to express their thoughts clearly, and to read and listen with understanding." Two others have some vague connection with basic education: All youth "need opportunities to develop their capacities to appreciate beauty in literature, art, music, and nature" and all need "to understand the methods of science, the influence of science on human life, and the main scientific facts concerning the nature of the world and man.' The other seven points have to do with "salable skills," good health, understanding of rights and duties of citizens, family life, skill in purchasing goods and services, leisure time activities, how to live cooperatively, etc.

CRITICISM OF THE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL

When schools abandon their technical task, as ours have done, because it cannot be done in an undifferentiated comprehensive school system, they shirk their responsibility. Education, like politics, is the "art of the possible." If the school cannot develop its pupils' intellectual powers to their highest potential because serious studies cannot be done when children differing widely in mental age are kept together, it follows that the only possible solution is to abandon comprehensive schooling at the point when these differences become unmanageable—about age 11-12. Otherwise no pupil gets an intellectually challenging education.

This, in my opinion, is the chief lesson to be learned from European education. It makes no sense to reject it as "class" or "aristocratic" education for, as I have said, when education is free and open to all children it is by definition "democratic." Where American educators

go astray is that they try to transfer political concepts of democracy into the realm of the mind. We are committed to government by the people, with every normal adult assured an equal vote and all citizens equal before the law. This has given us the freest and best form of government. But when political principles are mechanically carried into education we get noneducation. For education cannot be "handed" out. To be worth anything at all, it must be earned. It is just this that the educators refuse to accept.

One cannot steep oneself, as I have done, in official and nonofficial writings of educational officialdom without being made aware of their desire to make academic reward the "democratic right" of every American child; but a right that carries no corresponding obligation. This is why we have automatic promotion; why we have report cards that camouflage the student's real standing in class; report cards that

do not show the extent to which he has attained a specified grade achievement level. What is abroad normal procedure, the teacher's evaluation of a pupil's schoolwork to determine whether he is ready for promotion to a higher grade or a higher school, is represented here as unhealthy cutthroat competition from which our children must be protected at all costs. All our children are entitled to "equal education and equal status" in school, the educators say. We don't "judge" our children. Each is unique and valuable and has his own special talents. In our schools, the child "competes only against himself." He would suffer pain and loss of face if he were not allowed to move ahead with his "peer group." And so on, and on, and on.

This seems to me extraordinarily muddled thinking. The educators are arguing in a circle. All our children are entitled to higher education, they say. Not to promote them just because they've been unable or unwilling to do their schoolwork would be "unfair." But if they are promoted without being ready for the next stage in education, then instead of progressing up the educational ladder they actually stand still. This is camouflaged by giving the same step on the ladder a higher designation each year. Our educators do this all the time. They hand out high school diplomas to children who haven't attained elementary achievement levels, and college diplomas to students who haven't even done the work of a decent college preparatory course. And some of our Ph. D.'s would not rate a baccalaureate in any European country.

To quote Mr. Spears again. He describes in glowing terms a typical high school commencement. Children marching in college caps and gowns, the whole community present to applaud as each receives his parchment scroll. He goes on to say:

In keeping with the school's guiding star of equality to all American youth, these ceremonial robes have been accepted by school administrators chiefly because of the equalizing effect upon the dress of a class of graduates representing the country's most extreme range of economic backgrounds.

Ceremonial robes that for centuries were earned by students who had completed a rigorous university course are thus being "used" to give a spurious glamor to a high school course that for the majority of students represents no more than the elementary school course abroad. Spears goes on to say:

Regardless of the variation of high school courses and the range of scholastic achievement that are presented by the graduates as evidence of accomplishment, straight thinking and democratically minded school administrators have long since adopted the idea of the same diploma for all.

And he notes with approval that

no longer does the diploma in its wording discriminate among the graduates, as was once the case when it carried the name of the course in which the student went through school, consequently implying that the accomplishments of the youth who did not take the highly academic lane were less worthy.

Mr. Spears is a good reporter. He describes accurately how educators have felt for decades. Only in recent years has public demand, spurred by the critics and sputnik, made the educators shift their viewpoint slightly. One cannot help feeling that this shift has been in response to pressure and does not represent a genuine change of heart.

Procedures that are essential for the school's technical task are rejected by the educators because they read into them social discrimi

nation. They would not do this in sports or in art or music. Nobody suggests that to train star athletes is "elitist"; that all youth of the same age must train together and participate together in football games, and that this must include the lame and the halt. Nobody expects that tone-deaf children, children of average musical talent, and children of potential concert ability should all study the piano together, under the same teacher, each receiving the same diploma at the end of the course. Differences are perhaps easier to see in these cases. But educators ought to be able to recognize the parallel with intellectual differences. A tone-deaf child obviously would derive no benefit from being instructed in the same class with potential Van Cliburns or Leonard Bernsteins; neither is an average or below average child benefited by sitting in the same class with bright children. The notion that the bright ones will act as a sort of yeast is nonsensical; isn't this supposed to be the function of the teacher? Besides, isn't it a fantastic presumption to misuse our small treasure of talented youth by turning them into stimulators of slow learners, thus sacrificing their own educational needs? To me this is a kind of child labor, quite as bad as employing children in factories or mines.

The educators, however, are firmly committed to what Conant calls

a common core of general education which will unite in one cultural pattern the future carpenter, factory worker, bishop, lawyer, doctor, sales manager, professor, and garage mechanic

all of them supposedly learning to get along together and absorbing the proper democratic attitudes. This is simply asking for the impossible, but to this end educators cheerfully sacrifice our bright children's best learning years.

In the same breath that American educators reject as "undemocratic" separate secondary schools catering to varied abilities and educational objectives they reverse themselves and talk a great deal of the uniqueness of each child and the teacher's duty to provide him with his proper education. But how can our overworked teachers cater to 30 or more of these unique entities? You cannot provide individual tutoring in any mass education system. It is also not necessary to do so.

Children are unique but they also have a great deal in common. If they are to pursue serious basic studies, the most important thing they must have in common with their classmates is intelligence; intelligence within a range that permits them all to do their studies together. Additionally they must have reached approximately the same achievement levels so that they can move ahead, equipped with the same background knowledge. Children will then learn a great deal through the mutual stimulus of intellectual effort in which all can participate. In hearings before the Senate Labor and Public Welfare Committee, Morris Meister, at the time principal of the Bronx High School of Science in New York, spoke of this stimulus among his own highly intelligent students.

The impact of good mind upon good mind raises the sights, and raises the standards, and gives you the kind of excellence that I think we need in this day and age.

When children vary greatly in intelligence you get no such stimulus; their minds are too far apart to have an impact on each other. How vast is the learning gap between an average high school class and a

class in the Bronx High School of Science was described by Mr. Meister who had taught physics in both. The bright children in the Bronx school, he found "learned faster, they learned more deeply, and they understood better. Things that I would take two or three periods to explain in the average school would be done here in 5 minutes."

EUROPEAN SCHOLASTIC SUPERIORITY: SUMMARY

I will summarize my answer to your question, Mr. Chairman, as to why European children are ahead of ours scholastically:

First, the schools concentrate on their technical task and, since this. task is to develop children's minds, European schools adopt procedures that take account of intellectual differences. The English "stream" children even in the primary grades. "Stream" is the English term for ability grouping. Within particular streams, the English sometimes divide children into so-called "sets" for particular subjects. These "sets" take account of the fact that within any ability level, children often have special aptitude for the linguistic or the mathematics-science field or for some other subject. Thus a student may in a particular subject be in the same class with children from several streams. Perhaps he is in the top stream generally but is not good at foreign languages. In his French lessons he may be with children who are in general somewhat less intelligent than he but who have a talent for foreign languages. Children abroad usually take these groupings in their stride, recognizing them for the technical procedures they are.

All European school systems have several kinds of secondary schools, adapted to the learning pace of children and to their educational objectives. In all of these different schools European children move ahead faster than children of similar ability do in our schools. For this reason they finish a given educational course in fewer years.

Second, as part of their acceptance of differences in ability, European schools recognize that teachers must be more intelligent than the average of the classes they teach and must know more about the the subjects they teach than their students. Hence teachers in the upper or academic secondary schools must meet more stringent educational requirements than those in the lower tracks.

With better teachers, more can be taught in school. Then, too, abroad schooling is taken seriously by all concerned. There is more homework and there are few distractions during schooltime. Fun and games are relegated to after hours.

Finally, children receive much more classroom instruction in any given school year. The schoolday is longer and so is the school year. On the Continent a little over 8 years contain as many hours of class instruction as do 12 years here; in England, it takes 10 years to cover the same number of class hours. We never take this important point into consideration when we congratulate ourselves on giving more schooling to more children than any other country. Count up the time actually spent in school-not in homestudy period but under instruction by the teacher-and we no longer have any advantage in time. In fact, since just under half our children do not even complete high school, this half receive less schooling than children in any of the leading European countries where attendance during the compulsory

period is practically 100 percent. And 8 to 9 years has been the compulsory period on the Continent for a very long time, while in England every child must attend school for 10 years, with an extension to 11 currently being debated.

The swollen school attendance figures that give us so much pleasure turn out, on examination, to reflect merely the unconscionable stretchout in American education. Now that explosive population growth threatens to outrun our ability to provide enough classrooms and teachers, this stretchout has become intolerable. Unless we overcome it, we shall not even be able to give future young Americans the kind of education our children now receive an education quite inadequate to their needs and to the needs of our country.

RELEVANCE OF ENGLISH SCHOOL REFORM TO AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL ISSUES

Mr. CANNON. We know you have for some years been studying different European school systems. Is it your contention that the English have the best system?

Admiral RICKOVER. No, sir. As a matter of fact they are only now catching up with continental European education. But just because they have been educationally behind the most advanced continental nations, they have had much the same difficulties we have at the moment in our own country. All through the 19th century the English struggled with school reform. Many of the obstacles they had to overcome are not unlike those we must overcome if we are to upgrade American education. And England, too, was slow to recognize her educational deficiencies and slow to overcome them. In the end, what really spurred her on was competition from other countries that had established better public school systems. These countries were able to move faster because they had authoritarian governments while England, like ourselves, is what I call a Consensus Country. That is, her citizens are politically free and, before government can expand into hitherto private areas, Englishmen like Americans have to be persuaded that this is necessary and in the national interest.

England could not improve her schools as fast as this was done by her chief 19th century rivals on the Continent, particularly Prussia. Prussia was what I call a Decree Country, that is her authoritarian government, or rather her absolute monarch, could decree school reform without consulting his people. Our chief rivals today are the totalitarian countries and they, too, simply decree what their schools are to do, while we must first develop a public consensus for reform. So the English experience seems to me particularly relevant for us.

The English were slow to get started, but in the last two decades they have moved forward so fast that they have almost closed the education gap between themselves and the Continent. And in doing so, they have invented a number of ingenious procedures that seem to me the kind we might like to copy or adapt to our own needs. Then, too, it is easier for us to learn from them because of the common heritage we share and the similarity in our basic attitudes toward life and the relations of people to each other and to government. This gives me hope that we will observe England's educational practices sympathetically and with an open mind. In the past we have bor