Parity or Excellence

Before resigning as president of Harvard last January to become U.S. High Commissioner in Germany, James Bryant Conant made quite a stir as the aggressive champion of the comprehensive public high school. "A dual system [of schools]," said he in a speech in Boston, "serves and helps to maintain group cleavages." Last week another topflight Ivy Leaguer took an uncompromising position on the other side of the question. As things are going now, said Princeton's President Harold Dodds at a Loomis School ban quet, a single school system would be a national calamity. One reason: because the public-school system is not doing a good enough job.

Said Dodds: "No school for normal youth can escape the duty to develop the intellectual approach to life and to train the mind as a means for personal enjoyment and as a solver of problems. Unfortunately, when we come to view America's vast system of tax-supported secondary education, we are bound, I fear, to admit that, with all it has to its credit, it is not fulfilling its duty to the mind ... Its greatest weakness has come from playing down academic scholarship ... in favor of universality at a level of intellectual aptitudes adjusted to a common denominator.

"We are all aware that one of the growing issues in education is the right of the privately sustained institution to survive and prosper. Stated bluntly, the issue which is growing up here, as it is in England, is whether a man should be permitted to pay for the education of his son, or must he be compelled in the interest of democracy to take what the state provides . . . The growing radical demand in

England that secondary-school programs must be remade to guarantee 'parity of esteem' for all is . . .a demand to destroy the prestige of excellence in society generally. To deny the esteem and prestige which nature attaches to excellence is no service to democracy . . .

"The privately sustained school ... is sadly needed to help keep alive and nurture the spirit of liberal learning . . . It is its fidelity to the tough subjects such as a foreign language in addition to the mastery of English, to mathematics . . . and to the discipline of history that renders the independent school so necessary today. These subjects, and this philosophy, can still be found in many high schools, but many high-school teachers report that the pressures and trends are against them . . .

"If private enterprise means anything ... it signifies the right of the individual ... to express himself, to venture and risk along new lines of endeavor, but equally ... to oppose and resist trends, political or educational, in favor of more traditional values which he believes to be more fundamental than the policies of the numerical or political majority . . . The function of [the independent school] is to keep alive and flourishing this element of critical independence in our national school system."

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