Education: The Stretch

In a classroom at the University of Chicago one morning last week, a group of city high-school students wrestled with an odd sort of problem. The class happened to be in mathematics, but the sort of math the teen-agers were tackling went far beyond anything that even most college students know. Based partly on the theories of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, it involved symbolic logic and sentence calculus. “Logically valid conditionals and bi-conditionals, or the implications they embody,” blithely explained the professor, “give rise not only to rules of sound inference—by which to proceed step by step through an argument—but to overall plans of attack which can result in various strategies of proof.” With that in mind, the class proceeded to translate a series of statements into equally valid equations: e.g., “The White Sox win, or the Yankees win. The Yanks do not win. The White Sox win,” which became ((PVQ) ∧ ∽ Q)—> P.

Bold Experiment. To Harold B. Dunkel, director of the University of Chicago’s precollegiate education program, this sort of work is part of a bold new experiment. A professor of education with a Ph.D. in Greek, Dunkel has long been worried about the “enormous gap in communication” between the nation’s high-school teachers and its college professors. (“Communication between the two groups is not only bad, it is practically nonexistent.”) Last summer, with a $30,000 grant from the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education, Dunkel started some college-level courses for high-school pupils, invited a number of high-school teachers to sit in as observers. In this way, says he, “you not only get the two groups of teachers together to discuss their problems, but you get them to work together on living students. It’s also just about the only way to answer the old argument that the college expects too much of the high school: if you expose high-schoolers to college work, you can soon find out.”

This summer 160 pupils and 70 teachers are taking part in the program. The students are all volunteers, and in selecting them, the university picked the first applicants that came along until its quota was filled. Each student can take two of the seven courses offered; the university asks no questions about his scholastic record, or even whether he intends to go on to college.

Healthy Antidote. Whether he goes to college or not. he certainly gets a taste of it. In English composition last week, students were analyzing the fine points of style in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi. In biology they were examining the dominant and recessive characteristics of a generation of fruit flies, and in the humanities course their discussion ranged from early Greek metrical forms to a comparison of a Beethoven string quartet and T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. In social studies they have sampled everything from De Tocqueville to William Graham Sumner. But however tough the work, they seem to thrive. Says Chicago’s Assistant Professor Guy Omer Jr. of his science class: “I drew the lessons from our third-year college work, and this bunch of high-school kids has on the whole done as well in five weeks’ time as our third-year college students.”

The teacher-observers have apparently been equally impressed. Of last year’s enrollees, 40 have clubbed together as a “School and College Group,” meet every week to discuss ways to stiffen high-school classes. To the all-too-current theory that the public school must keep pace with its slowest members. Director Dunkel thinks that his experiment may offer a healthy antidote. “The real effort,” says he, “is to stretch the student. If you ask more, and seem to expect it, you get more. If high-school teachers expected more, they’d get more too.”