Education: Third R

Mathematics, the schoolboy's horror, is perking up again after a long sabbatical in the educational doghouse. During the '30s the proportion of high-school pupils taking math dropped a third in six years, and many an educator dismissed algebra, to the vast relief of pupils, as a useless subject. But last week there were signs aplenty that U.S. schools were returning to the view that there is much to be said for the third R.

> Private-school headmasters learned that too many boys knew too little math to qualify as officer material for the Army...

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