A Letter From The Publisher: Sep. 1, 1967

EVEN in the kindest and gentlest of schools, children are afraid, many of them a great deal of the time, some of them almost all the time.” That statement, at first startling but on reflection quite understandable, comes from a teacher named John Holt, whose new book, How Children Learn, is discussed in EDUCATION this week. Teacher Holt goes on to suggest that schools “could well afford to throw out most of what we teach, because the children throw out almost all of it anyway.”

It is the treatment of such subjects, which often are not in the week’s headlines but which relate in an important way to the lives of nearly everyone, that absorbs much of the time and attention of the sections in TIME that we, in office lingo, call “Back of the Book.” The people involved in these stories are not necessarily well known. Take, for example, THE LAW’S chilling story about one Clarence Jackson, who was a successful businessman in Phoenix, worth perhaps a quarter of a million dollars, until luck, lawyers and the law, in a bizarre series of circumstances, took away everything he had, including his wife.

Others in the cast of characters are, of course, better known and often involved in situations that reveal insights into little-explored facets of our culture. Such is RELIGION’S story of the young couple, garbed in white head coverings, slippers and robes, going through their marriage ceremony in a place called the Sealing Room, where they are joined for “time and eternity” and where, by religious law, the bride’s parents were forbidden to enter. The bridegroom was George Scott Romney, son of a prospective candidate for President of the U.S.

Fairly often a story in the back carries a nostalgic note that surfaces in an unexpected frame of reference. Like ART’S recollection of the sad night in May, 1925, in the old Madison Square Garden, which was about to be demolished. There was Boxing Announcer Joe Humphreys, bellowing at the crowd with a genuine sob in his voice, delivering an ode to the Garden and the gilded copper nude that stood atop it: “Farewell to thee, O Temple of Fistiana, farewell to thee, O sweet Miss Diana.”

At times there is a downright frightening aspect in those sections. Take MEDICINE’S story on the venereal-disease detectives, who found the number of cases increasing at a runaway rate in the U.S., despite the efficacy of antibiotics, and discovered cases of children who had contracted VD before they attained their teens. On the other hand, there are refreshing notes, like SPORT’S story of the mighty minnows who are keeping the U.S. pre-eminent in girls’ swimming competition.

Occasionally, there is an anecdote that seems mostly for guffaws but actually tells a lot about the people who are center stage in our times. So Richard Burton recalls, for the cover story in SHOW BUSINESS, how his wife and Sandy Dennis used to engage in belching contests. “Elizabeth is also a good belcher,” said her husband, “so they had competitions, but Sandy nearly always won for number and volume.”

Is all this “news”? We say emphatically that it is, in every sense except a cliche definition of the term, because we believe that it adds a fascinating dimension to TIME’S continuing discussion of what contemporary life is all about.