IN SCHOOL AND OUT

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29292, 25 August 1960, Page 13

IN SCHOOL AND OUT

"Space Between The Ears"

Many public school educators are confusing mediocrity with equality, Mr Samuel F. Pryor, vice-president of Pan American World Airways, said at the Princeton Conference on Financing the Independent School. “The idea that not only are all men created equal but are supposed to remain equal in intelligence for the rest of their lives would quickly down-grade our space programme, and all of science, art, and literature. It would also halt business progress because the mass never produces progress,” Mr Pryor told the 275 business executives and school officials at the conference.

“The real democratic idea is not that every man, woman, and child be on the dead level with every other man, woman, and child; but rather that every American is free to develop to the highest degree those abilities with which God endowed him,” Mr Pryor said.

Pointing out that one in every seven boys or girls attending an independent school in the United States is there because he or she is receiving scholarship aid, Mr Pryor said that increased funds would enable the independent schools to broaden their scholarship programmes. "When more people realise how effectively their money can be used by the independent schools in educating academically-talented boys and girls they will invest more of it in their worth-while cause as a tax deduction rather than sending it to Washington to be used in a programme of Federally-subsidised education,” Mr Pryor said. “The average public school does not stimulate competition to anything like the highest degree,” Mr Pryor said, adding that 39 times more graduates of independent schools appear in "Who’s Who* in America” than do graduates of public schools. The purpose of the independent school should be to develop indi-

viduals who could think for themselves, act alone when necessary, and keep their heads in an emergency, Mr Pryor said.

“The survival and strengthening of the free world will require American businessmen to be diplomats and men whose actions not only reflect credit abroad on the United States but will also confirm the principles for which we stand—respect for a world based on laW, not on subversion and terror.

“Khrushchev has already put us on notice that the Socialist Soviet Republic will not only out-pro-duce us but will run their Socialistic society more efficiently than our democratic society and eventually ‘bury us’ economically speaking,” Mr Pryor stated. "Because of the very nature of this war, education is democracy’s strongest line of defence. Our future will not be decided in outer space. It will be decided in inner space—the space between the ears,” Mr Pryor said.