Education: Cut the Cloth

“Are the schools acting as baby sitters? Are they seeking to perform the functions of the home? Are they including in their training specialties designed more to attract children and parents than to school the children themselves?”

These sharp questions were asked last week by Kenneth C. Royall, chairman of the New York State Committee on Education and onetime Secretary of the Army (1947-49). What Royall said next was a severe jolt to the 800 citizens gathered in Manhattan for the state conference, a prelude to the White House Conference on Education which begins in Washington Nov. 28 (TIME, Sept. 12). The stock solution for the schools’ problems is to make them bigger and better. Royall’s advice: contract the educational system.

“Until we have funds enough to provide sufficient classrooms . . . and obtain and keep enough competent classroom teachers,” he said, “we should cut our specifications for less essential functions of our schools . . . Cut the cloth of our educational garment . . . Then perhaps the finances really needed for education will be within the reasonable hopes of attainment and our essential and immediate problems susceptible of solution.” As Royall talked, the delegates buzzed with surprise. “The speech had value in that it will create almost unanimous dissent,” snapped a member of the state committee later. Royall’s thinking on education, said another, was that “of the oxcart, not the jet plane, age.” Mrs. Lillian Ashe, president of New York City’s United Parents Associations, gave a shot of adrenalin to the stock solution: “The assumption that there is only a limited amount of money for education and that we must do the best we can within these limitations does not square with the tremendous and growing resources of our country.”

When New York’s Governor Averell Harriman rose to give the principal speech, he offered a solution hardly less controversial than Royall’s proposal: federal aid to education. The way to solve the crisis in the schools, he said, “is through a system of federal grants.”