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They Went to College Early
but they bear with particular force upon the able student. Too
often the able student is prevented by the "lock step" from
progressing as far or as fast as his abilities will permit. Too
frequently the result is boredom, loss of momentum, and serious
waste of time in moving toward intellectual and professional
objectives. Many able students, marking time in an unchallenging
high school environment, lose interest in education and do not go
on to college. Two kinds of waste often occur at the college level.
On the one hand, the student from a poor high school frequently
must spend most of freshman year closing the gaps in his prior
preparation, while the well-prepared student often finds it
necessary to repeat in college work that he has already done
successfully in high school.
The net effect
of these two weaknesses in the American educational system is a
waste of what has rightly been called America's most precious
resource—the potential talent of its ablest youth.
FIVE
ATTACKS ON THE PROBLEM
With these
considerations in mind, The Fund for the Advancement of Education
has supported a combination of five experiments which have attacked
this common problem from different directions.
One of these
projects involved a joint effort by several school and college
people to seek out the present weaknesses in curricular
arrangements for the eleventh through the fourteenth grades and to
devise alternative arrangements that would ease the transition from
school to college by treating the last two years of secondary
school and the first two years of college as a continuous process,
conceived as a whole. This study was a joint undertaking by faculty
members of three preparatory schools—Andover, Exeter, and
Lawrenceville—and three universities which receive many of
their students from these schools—Harvard, Yale, and
Princeton. It culminated in a challenging report, entitled
General Education in School and College (Harvard University
Press, 1952) which not only pinpointed the weaknesses in
the