Education: Report Card

¶ By the end of 1950, U.S. cities (pop. over 100,000) were spending $246.71 a year per public-school pupil—a rise of more than 90% since 1940.

¶ Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, 27—the first Negro ever admitted (after a legal battle) to the University of Oklahoma Law School—got her diploma. Her record: “satisfactory.”

¶ Said Clarence R. Graham of the Louisville Free Public Library: “In a democracy, what the people think is right. If you want to save the world, all you have to do is to make people think. Never before has it been so important that people think, and never before has it been so important that they think in a hurry.”

¶ Ready for the opening of school next month, Chicago department stores are featuring: for kindergarten, coonskin caps; for finger-painting class, dusters and smocks; for boys of seven and up, a ten-way suit with jacket & pants to match, extra pants of another color, a vest that is a solid color on one side and plaid on the other.

¶ Banned from Canton’s Communist schools as “feudal and reactionary”: Confucius.

¶ The Princeton University Library acquired an arithmetic notebook kept by a 14-year-old New Jersey schoolboy back in 1721. Sample problem: “A Certain man and his wife did usually drink out a vessell of beere in 12 dayes and the Husband found by offten experience That his wife being absent it would Last him 20 dayes then. Question is how many dayes the wife would be a drinking it alone.”*

*Answer: 30 dayes.