An Emerging Concern

To take the "lock step" out of U.S. schools and get every child moving at his own pace, the mighty Fund for the Advancement of Education has spent $12.3 million in the past two years. Last week Fund President Clarence H. Faust suggested that the job has just begun. In a report on the fund's efforts since 1957 (notably in teacher training, educational TV), Faust pinpointed "an emerging central concern" of U.S. teachers and parents: the spreading notion that the sole goal of U.S. education is developing national manpower in competition with the Russians.

"Preoccupation with the manpower aspects of education, however statesmanlike," wrote Faust, "runs into the fundamental question whether the individual exists for society or society for the individual. On this question, the American commitment would seem to be clear, that the individual is not primarily to be regarded as a resource of the state but the state as a means for assuring the full flowering of the individual . . . There are already signs that many parents are disinclined to bring up their children as manpower resources."

To hear some U.S. polemicists tell it, the goals of American education should match those of the Russians. Not so, warned Faust. The aims of Communist education are unquestioning obedience and technological specialization in the service of the state. The vastly different American ideal focuses on "the development of each individual's capacity to think for himself. We are convinced that every individual is entitled to discover or rediscover the truth for himself and that only as he makes the effort to do so can he really grasp it, truly understand it, and make it a part of himself."

Yet this ideal, Faust believes, is becoming overlooked in the increasingly specializing U.S. Faust hopes that more public debate will help matters. "Perhaps we may even come to see that education should not be conceived of primarily as a means to an end, but as an end in itself, that the acquisition of wisdom is infinitely more important than the acquisition of 'know-how.' " On the other hand, "it is conceivable that we shall fail to be wise about these matters and that a mixture of confusion in our own ideas and ideals, and of unthinking imitation of totalitarian practices in countries which build themselves up as our rivals, will initiate or accelerate a process of degeneration in education that will ultimately undermine the way of life to which we thought ourselves committed."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.