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Show The Challenie To Education America's school population is growing by a million and a quarter pupils a year. Its population of ages 5-17 inclusive, thirty million in 1950, will reach 43 million in 1959. By 1965, it will soar to 48 million. At the college level the explosion is even more spectacular. Today our colleges enroll about 30 per cent of all those in the 18-21 bracket. The colleges will be hit not only by the tidal population popu-lation wave but by the ever-increasing proportion of youth who, pursuing the American dream of opportunity for all, will come hammering at the doors. Already in California 51 per cent of college-age youth are in college. College enrollment in the U. S. will double in 14 years from three million last year up to six million by 1970, or even to seven million. We must reproduce in the next fourteen years our higher-education plant of today, one that required over 300 years to build. Still another dramatic trend is going to push education into the political forefront. Americans are shocked when they learn that educational progress in the USSR has been faster than our own. The Soviet primary school system has nearly 100 per cent enrollment. The secondary system is scheduled to outstrip our figure of 80 per cent before I960. In institutions above the secondary level the USSR has already exceeded our totals. And they appear to be doing a far better job than we do in holding their best young talent in the educational system. There are tragic flaws in the Soviet educational system. It is designed to train men and women for the service of the state, not to educate them for their own happiness and fulfillment. We are dedicated to our own goal of educating individuals who, in Adlai Stevenson's words, are "unique, different, unpatterned." Yet the Soviet system is a most formidable competitor in a technological tech-nological world. It says to the billion people of the under-developed lands, the billion who hold the world balance of power, "Follow our example, follow our lead, and you too can pull yourselves up by your bootstraps in a generation!" Sir David Eccles, president of the British Board of Trade, told the Council on Foreign Relations at a dinner in New York, "The prizes will go to the peoples with the best system of educationboth edu-cationboth in the sciences and humanities." In this remark, he positions education right along with our defense budget, our jet planes and hydrogen bombs. Those 208 votes, mostly Republican, against HR 1 are soon |