Walk a Little Faster

James Bryant Conant's first three books, written when he was a Harvard professor, were chemistry texts. His fourth was a wartime manifesto; his fifth an essay on the teaching of science. Last week, at 55, Harvard's President Conant published his sixth--and for the first time got around to a full-dress treatment of the subject that has been most on his mind the past 15 years: education, and what's wrong with it. Readers of Education in a Divided World (Harvard University Press; $3) will find it a relentlessly rational but occasionally sprightly discussion of the subject by a man who is well qualified to write about it.

U.S. education, says Conant, has failed to keep pace with the changing country. The leisure class and the "cultured gentleman" are gone, but as yet the schools don't seem to realize it: "It is as though a country parson [with] a small and homogeneous congregation should suddenly find himself . . . spiritual leader of the crowd that fills the Grand Central Station . . ."

Goodbye, Snobbery. In the new America, Conant argues, art, literature and history cannot be sold in the schools on the oldtime snob appeal. But smart teachers will have no trouble peddling their substance in the form of handy guides to how the U.S. got the way it is ("Curiosity is more widely distributed than innate love of literature"). While imparting this kind of general education, Conant says, schoolteachers must keep an eye out for "gifted" boys & girls. Conant thinks that students with special aptitudes for mathematics and languages can be spotted in high school, almost as early as those with musical talent--and encouraged to walk a little faster than their neighbors.

He has high plans for this cream of the educational crop. But at the same time "the weight of the school should be thrown heavily against all forms of snobbery," and in favor of the equal dignity of protozoologists, shoe salesmen and senators. Only then will "a boy or girl [choose] a career . . . because of a real interest, not in order to climb into a better economic or social group."

Conant gags on the phrase "higher education," with its undemocratic implication that anybody who doesn't go to a university or four-year college is "forever on a lower plane." To rescue the colleges and universities from the student who enrolls only because of this social blackmail, Conant favors local two-year colleges, such as some states--notably California--have already set up. He would authorize them to grant a new degree of B.G.S. (Bachelor of General Studies)--"not a B.A.," says Conant, "but something that sounds just as near like it as you can come." Then, Conant thinks, only the walk-a-little-faster group, those with genuine aptitude for the professions, will be inclined to attend a university. On this count, Conant finds himself squarely against the President's Commission on Higher Education, which would almost double the number of university students by 1960 ("much too ambitious").

Hello, Equality. Talent alone--not geography, economics or race--should decide whether a student deserves a university schooling. Unfortunately, Conant says, "as many promising boys & girls fail to go to college for economic reasons [alone] as the number who now enter ..." To provide genuine equality of opportunity, Conant favors: 1) federal aid to "shockingly inadequate" state school systems; 2) federal scholarships to the gifted but poor. And he disagrees with "defeatists" who fear federal control.

In the next few years, Conant hopes, U.S. universities will devote themselves particularly to "the advancement of knowledge." But he warns: "One condition is essential: freedom of discussion, unmolested inquiry ... On this point there can be no compromise even in days of an armed truce . . ." As for Communism, no university worth its name will duck the subject: "The first requirement for maintaining a healthy attitude ... is to get the discussion of modern Marxism out into the open."

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