Education: Report Card

¶ Scattered over five U.S. campuses—Arizona State College, Oklahoma A. & M., the Universities of New Mexico, Arizona and Texas—100 Guatemalan teachers last week began what may well become a major experiment in Good Neighborliness. With $170,000 from the Foreign Operations Administration, the teachers will spend two months studying U.S. public-school methods, will also get some idea of what the U.S. is all about. Apparently, the program has already had effect. Said Pedro T. Cruz of San Carlos University: “I am charmed . . . I am going to take this lesson in democracy back to Guatemala and help remove the Communist poison from the minds of our people.” ¶ Worrying about the mounting debt of the world’s most famous undergraduate debating society and nursery of politicians (e.g., Gladstone, Asquith, Attlee), President Michael Heseltine of the Oxford Union hit upon a scheme to make money: the opening of a new nightclub, located in the Union cellars and fitted out like a Left Bank boite de unit. ¶ Though the U.S. still has more trained engineers than Russia. President John T. Rettaliata of the Illinois Institute of Technology bluntly warned that the American lead is rapidly shrinking. “From 1951 to 1954,” said he, “the number of Russian engineering graduates totaled 154,000, compared to our 116,000—an average of 39,500 a year, against our 29,000.”