Foundations of Learning

What will be the retribution of the wealthy individual [for his support of general education]? /) The peopling of his neighborhood with honest, useful and enlightened citizens. 2) When his own descendants become poor, which they generally do within three generations, their children will be educated by the then rich . . . and thus give them a chance of rising again.

--Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Joseph Cabell, 1818

Well before the birth of the Republic, wealthy individuals gave generously to public education. This week, for reasons that probably are closer to Jefferson's first retribution than to his second, a trio of privately endowed charitable trusts continued the tradition.

The Ford Foundation gave $1,330,000 toward meeting a growing public menace that former Harvard President James B. Conant recently called "social dynamite": the high school "drop-outs," who this year numbered 900,000, during the next decade may total 7,500,000. Out of school and out of work, such teen-agers (mainly in slum areas, many Negro migrants from the South) become a drug on the increasing skilled-labor market (compared with the national unemployment rate of 6.8%, the rate for youths 16 and 17 is 18.4%), prone to both crime and violence. Says Conant: "The building up of a mass of unemployed and frustrated Negro youth in congested areas of a city is a social phenomenon that may be compared to the piling up of inflammable materials in an empty building in a city block. Possibilities for trouble--indeed, possibilities of disaster--are surely there."

Mobilizing to meet the threat, the Ford Foundation donated $190,000 to the National Education Association to set up a national clearinghouse that will advise local schools and community agencies on specific ways to catch dropouts before they trip (work-study programs, improved counseling, intensive reading courses), gather exact statistics on the drop-out rate (now reportedly 40% nationally and 60-80% in blighted urban areas), and help unemployed kids find jobs.

To head the centralized agency, the foundation picked able, imaginative Daniel Schreiber, 51, who showed that demoralized, bored Manhattan slum pupils eagerly looked toward higher educational horizons when and if they got the chance (TIME, Oct. 12, 1959). Said Schreiber, who now leaves his job as head of New York's "Higher Horizons" program: "These are the future goon squads for any subversive willing to pay them."

Ford's additional grants of $1,140,000 will go to continue projects in the depressed neighborhoods of Detroit, Philadelphia and St. Louis (special tutorial work, cultural-enrichment trips to museums, theaters), for support of a private community group in Richmond, Calif., aimed chiefly at a recent wave of Southern Negro arrivals, and for a job-school experiment in New York City under which potential dropouts will attend classes and work in a city agency on alternate weeks.

The Carnegie Corporation of New York, challenging the official educational myth that a child is not physically able to read until the age of 6 1/2 (when his eyes suddenly can focus on letter shapes, the theory goes), granted $61,900 to the Denver school system to pursue a unique program that teaches parents to teach their preschool tots how to read. The reading technique, originally developed for use in Denver kindergartens, was devised by Dr. Paul McKee and Miss M. Lucile Harrison, both professors of elementary education at Colorado State College, relies on a system of phonics based on the sound of initial consonants to help a child associate words he knows orally with the way the words look on a page. ("Listen as I say the names of these things: mitten, man. They start the same way. Put these two picture cards in this box because their names begin alike.")

A pilot weekly TV series explaining the new technique was watched last year by 3,000 to 4,000 Denver parents. Said Dr. Arthur R. Olson, administrative director of the city's elementary schools: "Parents became stimulated by turning teaching into a game and satisfied at being able to contribute to their child's education; it more than compensated for their effort."

The system faces its first real test this fall when preschoolers entering kindergarten will be given a special test to find out how much they have learned. But so encouraged is Olson that he has already planned for a beginning reading program in September for at least one kindergarten class in each of Denver's 90 elementary schools.

The Avalon Foundation, founded in 1940 by Mrs. Ailsa Mellon Bruce, daughter of Aluminum Tycoon Andrew W. Mellon* and ex-wife of U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's David K. E. Bruce, gave $500,000 to endow a new chair in the history of science at Yale. The Avalon Foundation has made grants totaling more than $25 million since its founding, including $2,500,000 to Manhattan's Lincoln Center and $1,100,000 to all 86 U.S. medical schools to supplement scholarship funds.

* Whose A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust has given away $157.8 million mostly to found Washington's National Gallery of Art and to educational and civic rebuilding projects concentrated in Pittsburgh during the last three decades. Among the various family trusts blooded by Andrew W. Mellon, the largest is Son Paul's Old Dominion Foundation, which has given more than $22 million to his alma mater, Yale.

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