STARCHING THE WHITE COLLAR

An outgrowth of the administration of the East India Company, the British Civil Service has always drawn intelligent, widely trained graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. Diametrically opposed in principle, the United States has demanded men of highly specific education directly fitted for one particular pigeon hole. The result has been that Britain's public servants as a rule have been men of broad administrative capacities, far-seeing and able; ours, on the other hand, while sometimes competent in their own narrow field, have not possessed the breadth of view necessary to make really useful public officials.

The trend of the last few years has been the modification of both nations' policies. England, owing to the increasing specialists in the social sciences, and the United States by broadening requirements, is attempting to get a higher type of administrator to handle the rapidly multiplying functions of the government. Since 1914 civil servants in Federal employ alone have risen from 435,000 to 842,000.

The Social Service Analyst Examinations started two years ago by the Civil Service are a step towards recruiting men with broad professional training. By no means accepting the traditional British view that the mind trained in the classics can do any job required, the new examinations are nonetheless culling a type with general background and intelligence, emphasizing that there are possibilities for mental discipline in the social sciences as well as any field.

There is still room for improvement. The examinations should contain questions commanding the respect of thinkers rather than parrots. An informative campaign should be waged stressing the needs of the Service, and complete statistics of the opportunities (or their lack) should be made publicly available. Only by pushing energetically its recent policy of encouraging the college graduate in the Civil Service will the government be able to take full advantage of the many new public administration schools from New Mexico A. & M. to Harvard's Littauer Center.