Horizontal-enrichment, as I’m sure you already know, it’s just that I can’t take a chance on it, is knowing a little something about almost everything. Vertical-enrichment, naturally, is knowing practically everything about very little. Vertical-enrichment right now is In, I don’t know why. Horizontal-enrichment is Out. Nobody wants to be broadly educated; they want to be intensively educated: a foolishness which I attribute to the Sputnik and those other scientific things. Dr. Spock, for instance, is an example of a vertical education topped off with verticalenrichment. He knows so much about babies that he has even realized they can grow up without the benefit of as much knowledge as Dr. Spock can offer them; and I personally believe that he has taught so many generations of young mothers to relax and leave their children to Topsy’s method that he has no more patients. Left as he is with all that permissiveness and no one to permit he has unfortunately chosen North Vietnam as his next beneficiary. This is not to be confused, however, with horizontal-enrichment. This is horizontal impoverishment: in fact, the nearer Dr. Spock gets to the oriental horizon the closer he comes to the educational level of the U.S. poverty program.
What to Give Dr. Spock:
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