Noted Anthropologist Attacks U.S. Teaching In Ford Hall Speech

"A very large number of (our school children) are bored to death and permanently alienated from learning," said Margaret Mead at the Ford Hall Forum last night.

Covering dozens of separate points, Dr. Mead forthrightly and sometimes humorously analyzed the good and the bad aspects of American education and suggested improvements. She criticized the repetitive teaching of American history, and the eight years often spent on arithmetic. She suggested that "We teach children mathematics instead of arithmetic."

By reducing repetition, having more people teach, and using modern methods of education and simplified material, she said, "What we take eight grades to teach our children we could teach them in two." Questioned specifically about school television and Professor B. F. Skinner's teaching machines, she said that television is excellent when it is used imaginatively, but that we cannot yet judge teaching machines because we do not know enough about them.

Dr. Mead was particularly concerned with the fate of many of the adolescents of poorer neighborhoods of cities. If they do not go to college and are not accepted for military service, she pointed out, we have no institutions whatever that care about them. They must take blind-alley jobs, and often delinquency is the only way they can get any attention at all.

Turning to the education of the upper strata, she said that "the differences between a good public high school and some of our very best private schools are much less than one would think." And, about the economic value of college diplomas, she said "We are becoming a degree-ridden country."