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ROBERT M. SCHUCHMAN, J. B. Conant’s “ Slums and Suburbs ” - Ralph Raico, New Individualist Review [1961]

Edition used:

New Individualist Review, editor-in-chief Ralph Raico, introduction by Milton Friedman (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981).

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J. B. Conant’s “Slums and Suburbs”

ROBERT M. SCHUCHMAN*

IF THERE IS one observation about Dr. James Bryant Conant which the esteemed scholar has, himself, made painfully apparent, it is that he is a firm supporter of the notion that the public school should assume a vast societal role which would virtually supplant the traditional functions of the home, the church, and private education. In Slums and Suburbs,1 Dr. Conant offers a provocative potpourri of self-assured assertions of opinion, as well as some extremely perceptive insights concerning the ills of contemporary urban education. The book is a hurried summation of several of the findings of the Carnegie Foundation’s “Study of the American High School,” an inquest which is yet to be completed.

The initial premise of this study is “that to a considerable degree what a school should do and can do is determined by the status and ambitions of the families being served.” Thus, there is no ideal or single purpose or curriculum which should dominate secondary education: the function of the school is to be determined by the “socio-economic composition” of its students. Proceeding from this thought, Dr. Conant explores the relative needs of secondary schools in the well-to-do suburbs of our large central cities, where Johnny’s parents are determined that their son shall be enrolled in an Ivy League college, and in the cultural vacuums of America’s urban slums, neighborhoods which the New York State Department of Education would have us call “older, more overcrowded areas.”

Dr. Conant refuses to cloak his recommendations in the silly euphemisms of the social-worker set. He recognizes, forthrightly, that the American slum problem is largely a Negro problem, and that it cannot be remedied without this fact in mind. As a result of decades of patent discrimination, the Negro in our cities rarely expects job opportunities commensurate with his abilities: hence, there is little desire in the Negro slum to progress academically, since the white establishment will not recognize any such progress.

One observation of Dr. Conant should provide a lesson for those who build new slums at public expense in the name of “urban development.” He emphasizes that there is a far greater correlation between desirable social attitudes and job opportunities than there is between such attitudes and housing conditions. Unfortunately, the Conant solution to the lack of slum opportunity is to use the school as the vocational training ground for future employment, a solution which would tend to freeze the urban Negro permanently in his present status as unskilled or semi-skilled worker. One would think it preferable to improve Negro education for the sake of instilling academic excellence among Negro youth, but Dr. Conant has concluded that “in a heavily urbanized and industrialized free society the educational experiences of youth should fit their subsequent employment.” Such “experiences” almost invariably turn out to be a vocationalized edition of life-adjustment education. The best that Dr. Conant can say about the fine “Higher Horizons” project of New York City (which is an eminent example of the use of the school to raise the cultural level and interests of slum youth) is that the project is “encouraging.” Vocational training, on the other hand, is “necessary,” and not just encouraging.

Not all of Dr. Conant’s recommendations are restatements of the vocational heresy, however. He notes that slum parents must be encouraged to support education, perhaps with an adult education program sponsored by the community high school: this would help to create a home environment more conducive to academic success. Dr. Conant also recognizes the futility of arbitrarily shifting Negro and white students to far-away schools as a method of improving the education of Negro slum children. The slum schools should be improved where they are, he concludes; inter-neighborhood integration only lowers the standards of the white schools without appreciably improving Negro education.

Perhaps the most significant finding made by Dr. Conant is the presence of what he calls “social dynamite” building up in our urban slum areas among unemployed, out-of-school youth. The unemployment problem here is directly traceable to the hiring policies of labor unions and management. Dr. Conant believes that the frustration engendered by this incapacity to secure employment may erupt into actual physical violence in slum neighborhoods if the situation is not soon corrected. He would entrust such social treatment to the high school, an institution which, it would seem, is not intended to perform this type of surgery.

Slums and Suburbs serves a valuable function in isolating several significant maladies afflicting urban high schools and their students. But the book suffers from Dr. Conant’s faith in the schoolroom as the central correction agency of American society. He would expand the functions of the public school in the slums to the point where its academic purposes would become at best peripheral. There may well be a need for social action to remedy the problems elucidated by this study, but, we submit, Dr. Conant has offered the wrong blueprint.

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[* ] Robert M. Schuchman received a B.A. in history from Queens College and an LL.B. from the Yale Law School where he was an Earhart Fellow in economics. He is National Chairman of Young Americans for Freedom.

[1 ]Slums and Suburbs, by James Bryant Conant, (McGraw-Hill: New York, 1961), 147 pp.