.

The aim, it is important to remember, is to attack the problem, not the schools and colleges. The central issue is not whether these institutions are doing as good a job as they used to do toward developing the abilities of our youth; there is good reason to believe that on the whole they are doing better. The real question is whether they are doing enough better, whether they are keeping pace with our mounting needs, and the blunt answer is that they are not.

To do a better job our schools and colleges will need greater support, but they will need also to make many changes in their present methods of operation. The most critical requirement, of course, is to attract into teaching enough of the Nation's finest quality manpower, for it takes talent to produce talent. Of particular concern to this report, however, are those changes in educational procedures which will enable and encourage each individual student to pursue his education with maximum efficiency and effectiveness.

The importance of accommodating the individual differences of young people of similar age is widely recognized, yet many of our conventional academic arrangements inhibit the nurturing of these individual talents and capacities. The reasons are understandable. Over the years we have developed the "grade system" as a convenient administrative device for handling the "traffic management problem" of our schools. Each child begins at age six and moves forward one grade each year until he emerges from high school 12 years later. Then he may march through four years of college, still in step with his chronological peers. This solution to the problem of educational logistics has many administrative advantages, but pressed toward its logical extreme it defeats our efforts to serve the individual capacities of children. At its worst it has become a chronological lock step which in practice, if not in theory, treats students of similar age as if they were all alike