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BLAME THE NEGRO CHILD!
WILKERSON

function, emphasizing the decisive influence of the organism's encounters with its environment.

It is anachronistic, therefore, for a senior staff member of the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University to assert in 1968 that psychological tests "permit us to determine with a high degree of accuracy and reliability the innate capacity of children," and on that basis to propose part-time schooling and apprenticeship as the proper education for the children of the poor.3 More consistent with modern behavioral-science theory-and also with the democratic professions of our society-is the well-documented conclusion of Schwebel's scholarly new book: Although we do not yet know how to cope with the learning problems of the tiny proportion of children who are neurologically impaired, "for all the rest of our children, there is no known reason to believe that they will be unable to do the work of an academic high school or college. . . . Who can be educated? Everyman."4

If black children-and poor children generally-have the same "native endowment" as children of any other race or social class, then the educational profession would seem to be confronted with the challenge: Teach them or admit your own failure. But no; our ideological resources for escaping that trap are by no means exhausted.

During the early 1960's when the civil rights movement was united around the demand for school integration, the grossly sub-standard achievement levels that prevail in segregated Negro schools were dramatized throughout the country. Sending black children to white schools was advocated as a means to equalize educational opportunity. But public officials found it politically inexpedient to integrate the schools, and they countered with plans for large-scale improvement of the separate Negro schools.

During the past five or six years, special new programs of school improvement have proliferated across the land, mainly-but not exclusively-in the urban Negro ghetto. Generally called "compensatory education," they include developments on all educational levels-Head Start and other preschool programs, a wide range of remedial and enrichment programs within the regular grades, dropout prevention and reclamation programs, Upward Bound and similar programs to facilitate college entrance, and many more. Very large sums

3 Roger A. Freeman, "Schools and the Elusive 'Average Children' Concept," The Wall Street Journal, July 8, 1968, p. 10.
4 Milton Schwebel, Who Can Be Educated? New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1968, 277 pp. pp. 204-205.

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