of millions of Americans trying to prove to themselves that they can "make it" and that they are as good as the next nian.

To motivate effort and achievement, we deprive our children of excuses for not doing well. This works-for those children who are well-endowed and have received the necessary grounding in the basic social and intellectual skills in the early years. This spark of discontent which we plant in our children does, in fact, motivate children from the humblest social levels to strive for lofty goals, and there is evidence on every hand that it can be done. But there are some who just can't do it. When we say that they lack the necessary preparation in their family backgrounds, we do not mean that their families are not "good" families. We simply mean that they have failed to equip their children with the kind of character and skills which children need in order to achieve respect and recognition in our kind of a society. Such children, deprived of socially acceptable excuses for their backwardness, feel the indignity of their position more keenly than would children of most other societies. În a way, the delinquency to which they are prone is a characteristically American response. If they are not as good as the next man according to the prevailing rules of the game, they are reluctant to sit back meekly and accept this judgment. The response, rather, is to deny the validity of the rules, and thereby to deny that they are, as a matter of fact, not as good as the mext man. Rather than acknowledge that they haven't got what it takes, they will repudiate the rules and play by a new set of rules, tailored to their own needs and capacities.

We have not tendered any solutions in this article, whose purpose is primarily to analyze in an objective way certain of the relationships between the schools and juvenile delinquency. We do feel that any realistic effort to formulate policy intelligently will have to cope with these problems. We have not piously concluded with remarks about the need for better trained teachers, fewer students per teacher, more adequate classrooms, etc. We think that all these things can be readily and amply justified simply in the interest of improving the quality of our children's education. But, if the reasoning of this statement concerning the school's role in juvenile delinquency is correct, these changes alone will make no dramatic differences in the rate of juvenile delinquency.

EDUCATIONAL TELEVISION FOR EXTENDING

EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY

(By John W. Taylor,85 executive director, WTTW, Chicago
Educational Television Association)

May I thank you for your recent letter requesting a statement for your subcommittee report on education and juvenile delinquency. As you may know, the Chicago Educational Television Association has come into being largely because several hundred thousand parents in this area were dissatisfied enough with what was available as television fare for their children to contribute over $275,000. The asso

85 Dr. Taylor is former president of the University of Louisville and was acting Director General of United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (UNESCO). During and immediately following World War II, Dr. Taylor was head of the Education and Religious Affairs Branch, Office of Military Government for Germany.

ciation has been operating WTTW on channel 11 on a regular 30-hour-a-week schedule since December 11, 1955, all of which was made possible by contributions of over $1,250,000 by individuals, business and industry (including commercial television), and foundations.

The present programs include, for example, preschool storytelling, clubs for early elementary and intermediate grade children, teen interest activities, college level courses for credit, adult education work (in the fields of science, foreign relations, medicine, history, fine arts, literature, foreign languages, baby care, photography, home budgets, and investments), community activities (urban renewal, armed services, religion, etc.). Joseph Lohman, sheriff of Cook County and former professor of sociology of the University of Chicago, has been conducting a program entitled "Spotlight on Delinquency" over WTTW since our first week of operation. A feature of the program has been a series of on-the-air press conferences with 125 editors of high school newspapers of the area. Plans are underway to record this series on film for distribution to educational television stations all over the United States.

Future programs include high school series in physics and mathematics to be carried on in cooperation with Chicago City schools and telecast during school hours to the classrooms. These subjects were chosen since the most acute shortage of qualified teachers is in these fields.

The Fund for Advancement of Education has just made a grant of $165,000 to the Chicago Board of Education to aid in the first year of a 3-year program of televising the courses in general education at the junior college level, to begin in the autumn of 1956. These courses will be used both in class by the city system's three junior colleges and by students at home who will also come to centers for periodic class discussions and examinations.

Schools and colleges are perforce assuming larger roles in action programs both for the prevention and treatment of delinquency. The beginning of the tidal wave of pupils is already straining the resources of our school systems so that we must find means of relieving teachers of peripheral activities in order to increase efficiency as well as to provide manpower to meet increased needs which are growing out of responsibilities being added as a result of the undoubtedly relaxed home influence on children.

We would not, in my opinion, be able to double the teaching corps in the next decade, even if we could find the money. Therefore, another solution must be sought if we are to handle simply the teaching of basic subject matter for the increased numbers, not to mention coping with the broader aspects of the educational program. I believe that television can be used by our secondary and higher schools to increase educational productivity in the areas which lend themselves to the use of such a medium. I also believe that we are resourceful enough to come up with this solution. If we can, then, with present and foreseeable resources, the schools and colleges will be able to carry their increased share of the burden being placed upon them by the mounting juvenile delinquency rate.

QUESTION OF RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MODERN EDUCATIONAL PRACTICE AND JUVENILE DELINQUENCY VIEWED AS A MATTER FOR A SCOTCH VERDICT

(By Albert Lynd, author of Quackery in the Public Schools)

I am honored by your letter of March 7, regarding my book, Quackery in the Public Schools, and your request for my opinions about the possible causal relationship between modern educational practice and juvenile delinquency.

I must say that in my personal view, much as I dislike the pragmatic or Deweyian approach to education, I have not been able to discern any direct relationship of that sort. The new education is undoubtedly lowering intellectual standards in our schools, but whether its pragmatic bias is contributing to delinquency is still, in my opinion, a matter for the Scotch verdict of "Not proven."

Here is the principal stumbling block to such a conclusion:

Generally speaking, juvenile delinquency is worst in our largest cities. But it is in the largest cities that the progressive educational theories have had least application. On the other hand, the incidence of juvenile delinquency is least in the more prosperous suburbs, where the Deweyian educational theories have been most strongly influential. This does not indicate, of course, that the causal relationship works in reverse, either. Whatever relationship there may be between the new theories and the behavior patterns of students (as distinguished from their intellectual development), I do not believe the subject has had nearly sufficient systematic study.

I regret being of so little help, and I do hope your committee will itself inspire more systematic studies of this subject. In the meantime, I can only suggest two ideas that the committee may have already anticipated in its program.

Home influence has undoubtedly relaxed in the last generation. When I was a member of a suburban school board in Massachusetts, I used to hear bitter complaints from the old-time teachers—the good disciplinarians who were formed in an older day-that many students came to school with practically no disciplinary formation from home. Whether the schools today are worse or better intellectually than they used to be, the opinion of these veteran teachers was that the school has had to cope with a serious lack of home training. In fact, the efforts of conscientious teachers to discipline refractory youngsters was often met with serious complaints from easygoing parents.

The quality of teachers today may be rather seriously affected by the wretchedly low pay scales in effect in so many communities. It is difficult to set down this opinion without sounding as though one is carping at some very good people. Nevertheless it is a fact that in the long run, very low pay will not attract very many people of strong personal force. The ability of a teacher to impress his students-to exert a good influence is to a great extent a function of his or her innate capacity to inspire respect as a man or a woman. This quality of personal force in teachers may be quite as important for your subject as the educational theories under which the teacher happens to be operating. It would be miraculous, in spite of honorable exceptions, if teacher quality were not declining in the face of low salary scales.

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND THE SCHOOLS

(By Albert J. Reiss, Jr., department of sociology, Vanderbilt University) Delinquency may be viewed as the failure of personal and social controls to effect behavior in conformity with the social norms that are laws in society. Personal controls, those which are intraindividual, are of two major types. There are the conscience controls which deter the individual by inducing anxiety in the form of guilt. And, there are the more rational ego forms of control which bring conformity as the result of conscious decisions. Social controls, those which are interindividual, also can be viewed as two major types of controls. There are the direct forms of social control where the individual is subject to direct interpersonal controls in concrete group situations. These controls operate as primary social relationships in groups such as the delinquent gang and the family, and as secondary social relationships in situations such as the teacher-pupil classroom situation and the policeman-child community situation. There also are the indirect forms of social control where the individual is controlled by a social system. The culture of a community including the kinds of laws it has, the number and kinds of institutions in a community, their relative location and opportunities for participation in them are examples of such controls.

Social controls are of crucial importance for inducing social conformity in two major respects. They are, first of all, the means by which the personal controls are internalized. The models of conduct

or the social roles represented by persons with whom the child comes in intimate contact, and the means they use to get the child in internalize these conduct norms and roles determines the content and effectiveness of the personal controls. The social controls then are crucial in building nondelinquent personalities. An individual with strong internal controls usually can resist the temptations of a delinquency inducing environment and/or may structure group situations so as to reenforce the tendency to social conformity. It is characteristic of adolescents, however, that the personal controls are not fully mature. They are in need of considerable reenforcement from the external social world, if conformity is to ensue. The second way, then, in which social controls are effective in inducing conformity is that they either reenforce conforming tendencies or go counter to delinquent ones by exerting social pressures on the individual to conform. It follows, too, that in some cases, such as in the delinquent gang, social controls may actually impede the development of strong conforming personal controls and hinder their effectiveness in group situations. The result, then, is that an essentially strong set of personal controls (for an adolescent) may become inoperative in group situations if the external social controls are weak or run counter to social conformity.

These remarks are made by way of introduction to place the discussion of the role of the school in inducing social conformity and in preventing delinquency. Since the child enters school with an imperfect set of internal controls, he is in need of strong external social support. The school, therefore, has the potentiality of being the major means of building and strengthening the internal controls of the child outside of the family context. Below we shall see that the modern urban elementary and secondary school is structured in such

a way, and operates in community settings, so that it is relatively ineffective in this control function. The school can serve, too, as a means of external social control by motivating the child toward conforming behavior and by operating as a central community institution which exerts pressure toward social conformity. It is also maintained below that apart from its central function of formal education, the modern urban American school exerts little effective influence toward social conformity, particularly in delinquency areas. The school no longer functions as a community institution, but rather as a specialized institution of a mass society. The discussion below is not intended as an exhaustive treatment of the problem of juvenile delinquency and the schools. Only a few aspects of the problem are treated.

(1) Delinquency among adolescents is more characteristic of the behavior of lower than of middle social status persons, and of boys more than of girls. It follows, then, that the external controls of our society have been less effective in inducing conformity among lower status boys than among boys at other status levels. The question discussed here is, How is the school probably ineffective in inducing conformity among lower status boys, and how may the school be made more effective for this task?

The American public-school system has been oriented primarily toward such values as a general intellectual preparation for advanced education or vocational training and the values of achievement in a competitive society. This has typically meant emphasis upon intellectual attainment, competitive achievement, the denial of overt aggression and the dependence of the child on the approval of the teacher and parents for achievement. These values, in fact, culminated in the institution of compulsory labor laws and compulsory school-attendance laws so that the child is coerced by society into attending school, if he or his parents are not motivated toward these values. The child today compared with the child of 50 years ago, in fact, is delinquent (truant), if he does not attend school and his employer is delinquent, if he employs him in an occupational role considered unlawful for persons under age. It should be emphasized that these laws are particularly designed for and enforced in urban communities. The American farm family generally is excluded from provisions of child-labor laws, and it characteristically withholds the child from school for extended periods of time to do farm labor, without facing any threat of court action. The urban family cannot withhold the child from school without threat of court action. Some delinquency results, then, from our compulsory attendance laws which assumes that all urban children must attend school and that they must not work full-time for pay. It is in this sense a price we pay for making education a universal opportunity and for emancipating the child from familiar-occupational exploitation. It is maintained there, that these laws, together with the other aforementioned values promulgated in the school situation, are not accepted as generally by the lower status parents and children, particularly the male children. This often brings them into conflict with the school and society-in truancy from school, a starting point for much delinquency, and in aggression toward school property and authorities. More particularly, it leads to rejection of the values represented by school people and the acceptance of the value of delinquent peer groups which are,