6-4-4 Preferred

Most educated U. S. grownups trudged in youth through eight years of elementary school and four years of high school. But in the last 20 years junior high schools and junior colleges have burgeoned. Today, the 8-4 plan, still the rule for most youngsters, is considered old-fashioned by many educators. The up-to-date child rides through his public schooling on a 6-3-3-2 or 6-4-4 model. In the 6-4-4 system (notable example: Pasadena Calif.) the pupil spends his childhood in a six-year elementary school, feels his adolescent oats in a four-year junior high, grows to manhood in a four-year senior high which takes in the junior and senior years of the old high school, the freshman and sophomore years of college. He gets a general education until the last two years, then buckles down to preparing for a job or a university.

Last week a national commission that comes as close as any body to speaking for the nation's educators as a whole, formally condemned the 8-4 plan, recommended 6-4-4 as a design for U. S. public education. The group was the National Education Association's Educational Policies Commission. The report* was written by fat-jowled. conservative Professor George Drayton Strayer of Columbia's Teachers College. Prime argument for this plan, which has long been championed by University of Chicago's President Robert Maynard Hutchins, is economic: it neatly disposes of the generation of youths between 16 and 20, who once went to work but today are at loose-ends, unable to get a job and not keen for college.

*The Structure and Administration of Education in American Democracy--National Education Association, Washington. D. C.

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