THE WEEK

• Seems like every time we look around, there’s another standard falling. Take today’s bank robber. According to FBI agent Richard Auerback, he’s “a rank amateur, slow witted and less than average in intelligence . . . unpredictable and dangerous as a rattlesnake.” “He doesn’t seem to plan carefully . . . and often goes to pieces at the crucial moment.” Auerback, understand, isn’t exactly a fan of Willie Sutton; but he says that Sutton and other old-timers handled their jobs like professionals, and “didn’t go around shooting people willy-nilly.” Well, what can you expect when a reform school will graduate practically anybody these days?

• Has American education responded to the “challenge” of the Sputnik? The executive secretary of the National Education Association, weeping crocodile tears over what he sees as he looks out over the nation, thinks not: eight months have passed, he says, and “so far it has been just talk, talk, talk.” The evidence? Ah! Just as we thought: “I have yet to hear of a state legislature or the Congress . . . doing anything. . . . Congress is proceeding as though the space age were a thousand light years in the future.” The appropriate response to the Soviet challenge, in other words, is Federal Aid to Education— not the return of American education to the first principles of Western learning, not the elimination of educational jackanapes like many of the bureaucrats of the NEA, not the avoidance rather than the imitation of the educational strategies of the Soviet school system. Of course the executive secretary of the NEA favored and propagandized for federal aid long before there was a Sputnik, the relationship between the advent of the latter and the necessity for the former having been wholly contrived. Fortunately, enough Congressmen were educated before NEA took charge of the nation’s schools to have developed the intellectual skills to penetrate the hoax.

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• Seems like every time we look around, there’s another standard falling. Take today’s bank robber. According to FBI agent Richard Auerback, he’s “a rank amateur, slow witted and less than average in intelligence . . . unpredictable and dangerous as a rattlesnake.” “He doesn’t seem to plan carefully . . . and often goes to pieces at the crucial moment.” Auerback, understand, isn’t exactly a fan of Willie Sutton; but he says that Sutton and other old-timers handled their jobs like professionals, and “didn’t go around shooting people willy-nilly.” Well, what can you expect when a reform school will graduate practically anybody these days?

• Has American education responded to the “challenge” of the Sputnik? The executive secretary of the National Education Association, weeping crocodile tears over what he sees as he looks out over the nation, thinks not: eight months have passed, he says, and “so far it has been just talk, talk, talk.” The evidence? Ah! Just as we thought: “I have yet to hear of a state legislature or the Congress . . . doing anything. . . . Congress is proceeding as though the space age were a thousand light years in the future.” The appropriate response to the Soviet challenge, in other words, is Federal Aid to Education— not the return of American education to the first principles of Western learning, not the elimination of educational jackanapes like many of the bureaucrats of the NEA, not the avoidance rather than the imitation of the educational strategies of the Soviet school system. Of course the executive secretary of the NEA favored and propagandized for federal aid long before there was a Sputnik, the relationship between the advent of the latter and the necessity for the former having been wholly contrived. Fortunately, enough Congressmen were educated before NEA took charge of the nation’s schools to have developed the intellectual skills to penetrate the hoax.