Education: Costly Schooling for M.D.s

Simple inability to raise or even borrow the money is a major bar to the study of medicine in the U.S., reported the Association of American Medical Colleges last week. Spending an average of $10,000, medical students pay about twice as much for their training as other graduate students. Yet two out of three nonmedical graduate students get an average $2,000 a year in outside help, compared with $500 for one out of two M.D. students. Unlike the prospective Ph.D., “who characteristically makes his living by going to school,” the medical student or his family pays four-fifths of the cost of his education. Only 8% comes from scholarships and loans. About 21% comes from outside jobs that steal time from studies.

To take the pressure off medical students and attract better ones, the association urgently recommended a five-year aid plan costing $86 million, to be raised by states and private sources. Last week New York’s $114 million Commonwealth Fund, long active in medical research, announced that it will switch much of its giving to medical education.

School for Spirit

“The place reeks of tent pegs and clean living,” scoffs one critic about Scotland’s famed Gordonstoun School. Founder Kurt Hahn, 74, is often accused of “Germanizing” British education. But as they met last week in London, 900 Old Boys of Gordonstoun took pride in more than the presence of a famed alumnus, Prince Philip, or the fact that Top People now clamor to get on the waiting list. Their real pride lay in the resolute character that they feel Gordonstoun gave them.

German-born Schoolmaster Kurt Hahn thought out his concept of a school while a student at Oxford’s Magdalen College, where he watched tame deer browsing .spiritlessly in the park and saw an analogy with tame schoolboys. Turning to Plato’s Republic for guidance, Hahn designed a stern academy to “molest” the overly contented. His “seven laws”: 1) give children opportunities for selfdiscovery; 2) make them meet with triumph and defeat; 3) give them the opportunity for self-effacement in a common cause; 4) provide periods of silence; 5) train the imagination; 6) make games important but not predominant; 7) free the sons of the rich and powerful from the enervating sense of privilege.

In 1920 he put his laws to work in founding Germany’s Salem School at Baden-Baden. Headmaster Hahn flourished until Hitler came to power and jailed him for loudly defying Naziism. Britain’s Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald petitioned Germany’s President Hindenburg, who freed Hahn to go to England. While Salem continued fitfully in other hands, Hahn started a new school at Gordonstoun on the bleakly beautiful Morayshire coast of Scotland.*

Moral Equivalent. Hahn used the perils of the nearby sea and mountains to make Gordonstoun unique among British public schools. Headmaster Robert G. Chew, who took over when Hahn retired in 1952, continues the pattern. Last week 395 boys were busy ramming small boats through rough surf, manning coast guard lookouts, spotting forest fires and assaulting craggy cliffs, doing the school’s chores and striving mightily to win badges for moral and physical fitness. Hahn is sure that Gordonstoun has found William James’s “moral equivalent of war.” Says Hahn: “The last war proved a wonderful channel to canalize the spirit of adventure of the young, and to develop their courage and physical and mental resourcefulness. In peace, there is no means of doing this.”

Gordonstoun’s method is to give each boy a “training plan” that he is honor-bound to fulfill. Daily items: a dawn run on an empty stomach, two cold showers, calisthenics, “N.E.B.M.” (no eating between meals), room cleaning, diary keeping, and silence during free periods to foster “intellectual life.”

Unlike many British public schools, Gordonstoun is free of junior toadies and senior bullies. The harshest punishment is a solitary ten-mile walk. The school also curbs excessive academic competition, ranks academic achievement far behind such official report-card items as a boy’s “ability to follow out what he believes to be the right course in the face of discomfort, hardships, dangers, mockery, boredom, skepticism and impulses of the moment.” Striving to mix fishermen’s sons with noblemen’s sons, it sends more graduates to the Royal Navy and the merchant service than to universities.

Atlantic Colleges. Gordonstoun’s success inspired the equally successful Outward Bound schools in England and Wales, where boys come each month from all over the Commonwealth to test themselves in rigorous physical trials on land and water. Hahn now has an even more ambitious idea: 14 “Atlantic colleges,” a NATO-inspired chain of campuses from the U.S. to Turkey, where boys aged 16 to 18 would combine university preparation with training to “equip a young man morally and physically to help his fellows.” Last month private sponsors raised money to buy the first campus, St. Donat’s Castle in Wales, onetime pleasure dome of U.S. Newspaper Tycoon William Randolph Hearst. Due to open next year, St. Donat’s will use the Gordonstoun theory throughout its curriculum.

Philosopher in San Antonio

In San Antonio every Sunday morning, television viewers brace for an intellectual earthquake: Sidney Thomas Greenburg, 43, president of Roman Catholic Incarnate Word College. Greenburg bills himself not as teacher, preacher, lecturer or entertainer, but boldly as philosopher.

Talking with force, passion, glee and anger, he bucks for integration in education, which to him (though he backs racial integration too) means denouncing specialization in teachers, students and people at large. A bristling individual, he is concerned that “we are today witnessing the assassination of the individual person.” Injecting Aristotelian logic into a discussion of pro football or Karl Marx, he has built up a Sunday intellectual ghetto audience of 75,000 listeners.

Greenburg is at work on a massive book (100,000 words so far) calling for integrated teaching in U.S. education. Passionate on the subject of “uneducated educators” (especially college presidents), he says that education will return to its proper role of “perspective” only when it rediscovers teachers with “the intellectual guts to expose themselves to criticism and improvement.” For five years Greenburg has exposed himself on San Antonio’s commercial station WOAI-TV, driven his viewers to read one “great book” a week and sit still for the torrent of gibes, jokes, sneers and slang that he delivers with cheerful self-esteem after arduous homework (he has read The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy 444 times).

Jew to Catholic. Raised in Brooklyn, the son of a master cooper, Greenburg lost the use of his legs when he got polio at 16. He took up weight lifting, soon huffed through 500 knee bends at a time. (He now mows his lawn at a dead run, each day drives up to 200 golf balls 200 yds.) Jewish by family background, he was converted to Catholicism after reading St. Thomas Aquinas at Brooklyn’s St. John’s University. He took his doctorate at Columbia, where, despite the ubiquitous influence of John Dewey, he remained a disciple of Aquinas.

Greenburg has taught philosophy at Incarnate Word since 1949, with two years out as president of Benedictine Heights College, which was then slowly dying in Guthrie, Okla. He saved it by selling the grounds and moving the entire college to Tulsa, where it is now prospering. This year he became the first lay president of Incarnate Word (1,200 girls), where he has integrated science and religion to an unusual degree. (The college was racially integrated some time before the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling.)

Open Secret. All the while, Greenburg has hungered to bring San Antonio an educational TV station—”the most important tool ever put in the hands of the educational world.” By last year, after seven years of trying, a group of like-minded citizens had raised only $7,500 of a needed $400,000. Taking over one afternoon, Greenburg marched into San Antonio’s three commercial TV stations, raised $150,000 from them. To keep the drive going, he climaxed his weekly telecasts crying: “If you want $1,000,000 worth of education, send me a buck.”

From Austin’s KTBC-TV, in which Mrs. Lyndon Johnson holds a majority of the stock, came $25,000; the Ford Foundation pledged $40,000. With $112,000 to go, Greenburg got another philanthropic windfall of $55,000. Keeping it secret, he called a mass meeting of businessmen to spring his surprise. “I’ll take 5% of what’s left,” cried a gleeful brewer. In ten minutes channel 9 had a full till.

Last month the FCC approved the educational station for San Antonio (46th in the U.S.). Last week, as building plans were being drawn, Greenburg promised that the new station will shun “canned material from the BBC and the Ford Foundation,” will be strictly a platform for great teachers to “shame” poor ones. “The classroom won’t be a secret any more,” says Greenburg. “It will be open to the public eye, and brother, teachers had better perform.”

*Prince Philip went to Salem in the 19305, but his inability to stifle his laughter when he saw Nazis strutting and saluting led his German relatives to transfer him to Gordonstoun, where he became Guardian (head boy). But for the switch, Philip might have graduated from Salem into the German armed forces, fought against Britain in World War II and never become the Queen of England’s husband.