t
English Courses Said Poorly Presented in Many Schools of Nation
Full Dimensions
Of Growing Crisis
Now Documented
By LOUIS CASSELS
UPI Correspondent
' Take an inadequate number
of teachers, most of whom are
ill-trained for the task. Ask
them to teach the most basic
subject in the school curricu
lum, under conditions ranging
from bad to impossible.
If you think that is a form
ula for educational disaster,
you need wonder no longer
why Johnny can't read, write,
spell, phrase or punctuate.
The reason is that he is
being taught English under
precisely those circumstances.
Colleges, employers, par
ents and others closely as
sociated with America's high
school graduates have long
been aware that something
was horrendously wrong with
their preparation in English.
But the full dimensions of
this growing crisis in literacy
have only now been docu
mented. The documentation is a 140
page report issued by the Na
tional Council of Teachers of
English.
No False Alarms
The council is an old and
prestigious organization, not
given to raising false alarms.
Its report is soberly worded,
backed up by extensive sur
veys, heavily laden with sta
tistics. Its conclusions should be
terrifying to any citizen who
knows that American students
spend more time on English
than any other subject; that
two of the "3 R's" are in
cluded in the subject; and
that a mastery of his native
language is the one indispens
able skill that any person
should be expected to bring
away from a process called
education.
Just how poorly English is
presently being taught in
many U.S. elementary and
high schools is dramatized by
two statistics in the report.
1. Last year, of 600,000
high school graduates who
took college entrance exami
nations, 150,000 flunked English.
MEDFORDns
tU IT
Tribune
SECTION E MEDFORD, OREGON, THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 23, 19(il PAGES 1 to 8
POLD WEATHER EXERCISE Sp5 Daniel
exercise
Willow Freeze". Behind Sowers
Sowers": of Alameds,rCaUf., leads a-iamou,. are MSgt. Melvin Keoppel of Fresno, Calif.,
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'land from Anchorage, Alaska, durlng-.the Soirie 7,000 men are taking part in the ex
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2. More than two-thirds of
America's college and univer
sities now find it necessary to
offer remedial courses in Eng
lish to incoming freshmen.
Several Reasons
The council pinpointed sev
eral reasons for the poor
quality of English instruction.
First, there is a chronic
shortage of teachers who meet
state certification require
ments for teaching English in
high school. A survey indi
cated the demand for such
teachers outran the supply by
27 per cent.
Second, many of the teach
ers who do meet state certifi
cation requirements are ac
tually ill-prepared in English.
The average state requires
only 18 semester hours of col
lege credit in English (three
courses) to qualify as a high
school English teacher. Six
teen states will settle for one
college course beyond fresh
man English.
A survey by the council in
dicated that about half of the
men and women now teach
ing English in U.S. high
schools do not themselves
have a college major in Eng
lish. (The percentage ranged
from 40 in some states to 60
in others.)
Colleges engaged in pre
paring teachers could help the
situation by requiring more
ft . scsJZ? si
I
Small
Worlds
Around
Us
of their graduates than bare
compliance with state certifi
cation standards. But the
council's studies clearly indi
cate that few teacher-training
institutes arc going a good job
of preparing English teachers.
To cite just one hair-raising
statistic, only 17 per cent of
the colleges require a course
in modern grammar of gradu
ates who are preparing to
teach high school English.
Preparation Inadequate
Summarizing the situation,
the council says that the prep
aration of English teachers is
"seriously inadequate" and
"the great body of teachers
now in English classrooms"
are "simply not equipped" to
deal with the subject properly.
That would be bad enough.
But there is more.
Even the most highly quali
fied English teachers are not
able to teach effectively under
the overcrowded conditions
which exist in many U.S.
schools. The average English
teacher carries a "teaching
load" of 150 to 200 students
daily, whereas the council
says 100 is a maximum for
good teaching.
Perhaps the greatest single
weakness, however, is the
chaotic condition of the Eng
lish curriculum. Thousands of
separate school districts plan
their own English courses,
with little coordination be
tween elementary and high
schools, between high schools
and colleges, or even between
Ouf-of-Hospital
Coverage Increases
New York -HIPP- There is a
growing trend in the health
Insurance business toward
providing coverage for out-of-hospital
diagnostic X-ray and
laboratory work.
As of the end of 1959, at
least 32 million persons were
protected by insurance com
panies against the cost of out-of-hospital
diagnostic work.
one grade and the next.
A hodge-podge of assorted
courses bear the name English
(California has 217 such
courses in its public schools)
and the really important
studies - language, literature
and composition - tend to get
lost in a profusion of peri
pheral studies.
The council concluded that
the outlook is desperate, and
can be relieved only by a
massive national pro gram
such as Congress adopted, in
the National Defense Educa
tion act, to improve the teach
ing of science and mathematics.
English is surely no less 1
important. What good is a
scientist who can't read? Or a
mathematician who can't
write a letter?
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(Register Tribune Syndicate, 1961)
Wasps Anesthetize
Victims, Use Them Later
Induced anesthesia to ren
der a patient unconscious, was
practiced by some insects mil
lions of years before man dis
covered it. Chief among these
lower creatures are the wasps
and the spiders, and their mo
tives, of course, are different
from ours.
Certain species of wasp
have perfected the technique
to a really high degree, even
injecting enough of the mater
ial to render the victim in
capable of the slightest mo
tion, and leaving the victim in
a state of helplessness for in
definite periods.
The common mud-dauber
wasp uses this technique in
her daily life. On her ability
to inject the proper amount
and in the right place, de
pends the welfare and future
of her offspring.
Deposited in Crypt
I The female wasp seeks
small spiders to anestnetize
and deposit in a small earthen
crypt of her own making, so
that her offspring will have
fresh food when they emerge
from the egg. She has to pos
sess a certain, instinctive
knowledge of the anatomy of
her intended victim. She must
know just where to make the
injection, as her victim must
not be killed, but merely ren
dered incapable of the slight
est movement. -
The insect victim of course,
resists, and no two victims are
exactly the same size. But
with unerring instinct she
plunges her hypodermic nee
dle into the victim just back
of the head. When the victim
stops its struggles the wasp
delivers other stings or in
jections, i The prey now be
comes limp and helpless, but
is still alive.
Into the farthest corner of
the mud-capsule she has made,
she stuffs the helpless vic
tims. They are the living
dead. There in silence and ab
ject helplessness they await
the hatching ol tne wasps
egg, carefully placed and neat
ly sealed in the capsule.
Task Complete
With this final gesture she
flies away, instinctively know
ing that her task is complete,
that she has built a nursery
and has stocked it with the
proper food. Also, she must
be confident that she has ad
ministered just the proper
amount of anesthesia to hold
the captive spiders in a state
of unconsciousness until the
proper time.
Spiders that might come out
from under the influence of
the drug before the wasp ba
bies hatch would, in their
frantic struggles to escape,
probably kill the tiny wasp
larvae.
Strangely, the "dose" is al
ways right; the insensible in
sects, regardless of how long
they must wait for the egg's
hatching, are incapable of the
slightest motion, yet they live.
They are the food that will
give the wasp babies the
strength to break out of the
earthen crypt and fly away as
adult wasps.
Unlike the human patient
undergoing surgery, and in
sensible to pain because of the
injection of an anesthesia, the
wasp's victims have no future. :
They are forever suspended in
a great void of insensibility j
until the final end and then j
there is nothing. j
Eighty-three motion pic- j
tures were imported and re- j
leased in Japan in the first!
half of 1958. 1
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