Hunt Defends Public Schools Against Report by Griswold

A University Professor, in his first year as a member of the Harvard faculty, yesterday disagreed with Yale President A. Whitney Griswold's recent report to the Eli alumni.

Dr. Harold C. Hunt, the Charles William Eliot Professor of Education, took issue with Griswold's statement that secondary schools turn out students so poorly prepared for college that "the whole fabric of higher education becomes a bridge built upon rotten pilings."

Hunt, Superintendent of Schools in Chicago for six years, and a professed defender of public school education, said, "Mr. Griswold and others think of the standards of another day and times. In 1900 there were 600,000 boys and girls in the high schools of the nation. This fall, there are seven million, a 12-fold increase, while the population has doubled.

"In 1900, for every hundred boys and girls who entered the fifth grade only four graduated from high school. There are 50 today. In education then we had a selective factor no longer operative. Today we have the responsibility of educating all the children of all the people."

Better Equipped

In his report, Griswold said that in his experience as a teacher at Yale he could find many students who might know the course material but who might have failed if they were graded in rhetoric.

Hunt conceded that students may spell and write poorly, but he says that they have been exposed to much more--TV, radio, cars--than 50 years ago. "They have sacrificed some of the perfections," he said, "but in poise, assurance, personalities adjusted to reality, young people are far better equipped."

"I think," he said, "Mr. Griswold is trying to say that boys go to Yale whose interests are primarily other than academic. I'm not alarmed at this. Critics say, too, that high schools do not teach pupils how to think. They do not suggest that knowledge of itself is of scant value. You have to be able to translate it.

"The pessimists want an aristocracy of intelligence. They want everyone to fit into the pattern. Today, with a broader background, that is no longer possible."