and rough grazing, but she cannot feed herself and has to depend on food imports. In mineral and fuel resources Britain is very poor compared to us and to some continental countries. These facts must be kept in mind when comparing American and English education

statistics.

PRIMARY AND JUNIOR GRADES

Schooling is obligatory for 10 years-from ages 5 to 15. It is free to age 19 in the state system, in which 94 percent of England's children are enrolled. Only 6 percent are in private schools receiving no tax support. Children attend primary school for 6 years or until the fall of the year in which they have reached age 11. Education is comprehensive during the primary stage. Children usually stay 2 years in an infant's and 4 in a junior school; sometimes the two are combined. Five-year olds get into solid work immediately, doing much reading, writing, and arithmetic every day. In large schools they are "streamed," that is grouped by ability. The school year is divided into three equal trimesters separated by vacations. This makes it easier to let the very bright accelerate since they can do it a third of a school year at a time. Acceleration is more common in private than in state schools.

Primary schools are usually housed in sunny pleasant buildings. The atmosphere in school is friendly and relaxed yet the children move ahead at a fast pace and by age 11 are usually 1 to 2 years ahead of American children who have completed the sixth grade. And this despite the fact that English children are a year younger, having begun schooling at 5 while in this country it is usual to start at 6. They are ahead because the school has concentrated on basic education, the teaching has been skillful, and the need to study is more clearly understood by the children and their parents. It is better understood at least in part because primary school ends with an examination that will determine what kind of secondary education each child is to receive. Finally, there is about 20 percent more class instruction in a given English school year.

PRIMARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM

The schoolday lasts from 9 to 4 with time out for lunch. Incidentally, England has since 1906 had school lunches at nominal cost, and free for those unable to pay. Medical care goes back to 1907. The primary school curriculum is so arranged that children devote the biggest block of class time to study of the English language--7 to 10 hours per week. The less able get more instruction to help them keep pace with the more able. Arithmetic and geometry-in some schools some slightly higher mathematics also take up roughly 321⁄2 to 4 hours a week; about 1 hour each goes to nondenominational religious instruction, to history, to nature study, and to geography. Art, music, and some craftwork take 2 hours, and every day there is some form of physical education, with or without apparatus, some swimming, dancing or games.

As regards mastery of the English language, all but a small percentage of English children will be reading well by age 10 or 11. During the last 2 years in primary school, children will be doing compositions. By 11, as one official handbook puts it, they will "know that con

ventional spelling is a necessary civilized convenience." I know American college students who have not yet grasped this simple truth. An interesting comparison of arithmetic achievements here and abroad is made in a booklet by the Council for Basic Education, entitled "Teaching the Third R.'" This divides arithmetic into 12 separate "study units," such as "multiplying whole numbers by decimals" or "percentages." By means of textbook comparisons it then shows when these several units are begun and completed. We find that of these 12 units only 2 are studied in England in the same grade as in this country, 6 are studied 1 grade earlier, 2 are studied 1/21⁄2 grades earlier, 2 are studied 2 grades earlier. Lest we think this is some particular English virtue, let me hasten to tell you that in France children are 2 years ahead of us in six units, 11⁄2 years in 2, and 1 year in 2. Incidentally, I notice in Max Raeff's "Report on Russia's Big Red Schoolhouse," an algebraic problem that is studied by Leningrad fourth graders but which usually occurs for the first time in American eighth grade textbooks.

Mind you, this is in the state system, in common or comprehensive schools attended by children with aptitudes through the full range from slow to bright. We have no excuse for teaching our children so badly that they are behind English and continental children at this early age. And just in case it is objected that the health of England's children will be ruined by all that studying let me mention that in a number of comparative studies on physical fitness, Englishand other European-children consistently outdid our own pampered children.

THE HAMPERING OF U.S. SCHOOLS BY "PROGRESSIVE" EXPERIMENTERS

Since English primary education is carried on in comprehensive schools, we could easily, if we wished, set ourselves the goal to match her achievement levels at age 11, at least for our 12-year-olds. There is nothing in English primary school objectives or practices that would go counter to our own educational philosophy. We would merely need to lengthen the school day and year somewhat, make certain all our children receive a full day's schooling-we still have some_areas where the schools are on double shifts require of our teachers better subject mastery, and jettison "look-say," "reading-readiness," and the whole nonsense of progressivism and life adjustment. The last item is the most important one. If our teachers are to succeed in bringing normal children to the point of literacy and to use an English expression-numeracy, both of which are achieved by normal English children in 6 school years, they must be freed from the incubus of the experimenters and the so-called scientific researchers who produce all the notions that prevent our schools from doing their technical task.

The intellectual and educational qualifications of most of these experimenters and researchers are unimpressive but, on the strength of having majored in sociology or psychology at a teachers college, they consider themselves qualified to research the American child and lecture the American teacher and parent on the "learning process.' These "researchers" have an aura of precision about them-a satisfied certainty of having the right answer yet their theories are never quite the same for 2 years in a row.

As one teacher remarked who finally quit in disgust:

One year it was bundles of wooden sticks and red and blue poker chipsmillions of them-to replace the multiplication table and give the children a sense of learning by doing. Another year it was a series of readers, so arranged that children could be taught to read without the boring and unlifelike process of learning the alphabet. Yet again it would be a revised social studies curriculum, according to which students were to spend weeks on "orientation to school, "my family," and "our neighborhood," while ancient history was resolutely dropped from the course of studies altogether.

Sociology and psychology, in the hands of intelligent, well qualified professional persons, can be of great benefit. But indiscriminately applied by unqualified people it can do great harm. And much of the educational "research" in this country has been harmful. I have shelves of books and pamphlets in my library, filled with the outpourings of educational researchers. As I force myself to read through page after page of muddled thinking and murky writing, two thoughts are uppermost in my mind. Regret that so many trees had to be felled to produce the paper on which the stuff is printed; how much better off we should be if we still had the trees! And a strong desire to cry out, "Won't someone stay home and keep shop? Won't someone stay in class and teach our children the fundamental skills of the three 'R's'"?

We are plagued with a chronic shortage of teachers, but we have an overabundance of researchers. For some odd reason educational "research" seems to bestow a higher status than teaching. And so the classrooms get more crowded but the "research" just goes on and

on.

It always amazes me that our educational officialdom looks down on Europe's allegedly outmoded teaching methods-"rote" teaching is the stereotyped epithet that educationists use even though the schools abroad are so much more successful in getting children through a given study course. Consider the recent report of a conference of reading experts who spent the winter of 1961 on a "project" financed by the Carnegie Corp. and intended to dispel the "confusion" in the public mind as to methods of reading instruction used in our schools. Unwittingly the report acknowledges that the simple task of teaching children to read is just too difficult for our schools to accomplish in 12 short years. Twenty-seven of the twenty-eight education professors and administrators participating in the project concluded that "reading instruction is needed beyond the high school!" As Oliver Wendell Holmes said:

At this time we need education in the obvious rather than investigation of the obscure.

American educators now sometimes admit that European children do move faster, but they still criticize European schools for allegedly paying no attention to modern sociology and psychology. To my mind, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Our wonderful "scientific" and up-to-date teaching methods produce inferior results, so why continue them? And as to the constant accusation that European schools go in for "rote" learning-the truth is quite the opposite there is more rote learning here.

That disastrous progressive blunder, the "look-say" method of teaching our language as if it were a language of single-word Egyptian hieroglyphics or Chinese characters-is nothing but one vast boring

system of rote learning with the children being made to read endlessly repeated idiocies such as "Oh, oh! Come, come! Look, look!" just to learn three simple words. No one has brought out the absurdity of this system so well as Rudolph Flesch in Why Johnny Can't Read. And now we have a book by the Council for Basic Education, Tomorrow's Illiterates, that spells out in terms of massive inability to read among large percentages of our youth just where this ridiculous progressive method has taken our children. Another progressive error, the "reading readiness" dogma, postpones and postpones the moment when an American child finally comes to grip with the printed word. His English cousin has meanwhile happily gone ahead learning to read at age 5 and nothing has happened to his tender psyche.

In arithmetic, too, the readiness dogma holds our children back while the teaching itself is inferior since our elementary schoolteachers, with few exceptions, are less well trained to teach the subject than English or continental teachers. Arithmetic is particularly well taught in England. An observant American visitor will note how quick everyone is in handling the complicated English monetary system. In contrast clerks in American stores have quite a time of it if they have to figure something out themselves. Without adding machines many of them would be lost. Great emphasis is laid abroad on mental concentration in computation processes, on careful development of basic number concepts, and on constant daily exercises and frequent tests. Virtually all European children acquire mastery in arithmetic and geometry in less time than do ours.

That primary school reform is possible in this country and would not take overlong to accomplish is proved by the ease and speed with which Dr. Hansen has been able to set up the Amidon Elementary School right here in Washington. This school has been a great success and is to become the model for elementary education in this city. It is the kind of school Europe has had for a long time but which our educationists have consistently criticized as archaic, fossilized, obsolete, and what have you. The same epithets are currently being launched at the Amidon School by unreconstructed progressives. But I think their day is coming to an end. All they can do is continue to throw up roadblocks and delay the inevitable. Given the importance of speedy reform for our Nation's future, they might however just succeed in causing enough delay to do serious harm to the country. I feel we have given them enough time to prove their theories. These theories aren't working, so let's throw them out and get on with the job of truly educating our children.

To recapitulate: English primary schools give children a better foundation in the elementary subjects so that all of them are ahead of American children of equal ability when they begin secondary schooling at age 11.

TYPES OF ENGLISH SECONDARY SCHOOLS

At this point their paths diverge. On the strength of their school record, of an IQ test, and written examinations in English and arithmetic, children are placed in one of the three types of secondary schools: Grammar School, Technical School or Secondary Modern School. The first two are "selective," that is, to be admitted children must have the ability to pursue a rigorous academic program. We have no

secondary schools equivalent to either the English Grammar or Technical School. Their Secondary Modern School, however, resembles our high school in that it is an unselective school catering to a rather broad range of ability levels. It differs from our high school in that the top 30 percent of the ability range is absent from among its pupils since they are attending the Grammar School or the Technical School. Secondary Modern pupils usually range from IQ 110 down to about IQ 80. There are special schools in England for those below IQ 80; these are called "educationally subnormal" or ESN.

METHOD OF ASSIGNMENT TO SECONDARY SCHOOLS

For England as a whole about 25 percent of 11-year-olds are placed in Grammar, 5 percent in Technical Schools. These are overall percentages, and there are local variations. Assignment to a given type of secondary school is the responsibility of the Local Education Authorities. In some localities Grammar or Technical School places are scarce and talent is abundant, while the reverse will be true in other areas. This creates geographic inequalities in the selection process. Some children cannot get into Grammar School even though they have the requisite ability; others get in who would fit better into Secondary Modern.

Such inequalities are contrary to the intent of the 1944 Education Act which stipulates that placement in secondary school is to be entirely a matter of what is "appropriate to children's capacities." Under the terms of the act, the local education authorities are obligated to provide secondary schools

sufficient in number, character, and equipment to afford for all pupils opportunities of education offering such variety of instruction and training as may be desirable, in view of their different ages, abilities, and aptitudes, and of the different periods for which they may be expected to remain at school.

Not all Local Education Authorities, by any means, have been able to carry out their obligation to provide "sufficient numbers" of the required secondary schools or to equip and staff all of them adequately, though not for want of effort. The postwar years have been difficult for England. Despite heavy taxation, public funds have been inadequate to finance the many pressing needs that had to be taken care of. Extensive war damage has had to be repaired. A variety of new public services demanded by the electorate have had to be provided. There has been too much to do and too little to do it with. În education, sudden expansion always creates a scarcity of places in the higher schools because the kind of teachers needed to staff them cannot be produced overnight. Moreover, many planned improvements have had to be postponed to take care of England's unexpected postwar baby boom. Money and effort that was to have been put into raising the quality of education had to be spent on providing additional classrooms and teachers to take care of what the English call the "bulge." But with population growth back to normal, it will now be possible to build and equip more grammar schools and raise Secondary Modern School standards.

The English school system should be judged by its overall plan, not by temporary shortcomings which the English are doing their best to overcome as speedily as possible. When their plan has been fully put into effect, placement in a given secondary school will be by ability alone. And each type of secondary school will be fully de

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