Education: Report Card

¶ After questioning 998 Cincinnati schoolchildren on their TV-watching habits, Professor Walter Clarke of Xavier University had some disquieting news to report. The average 12-and 13-year-old, he found, spends 3.7 hours every schoolday before the screen. Over a week, he is apt to consume as much as 30 hours—five more than he spends in school.

¶ Lest anyone think that a teacher can be ”bribed” by the gifts she receives from her pupils at Christmas, a sixth-grade teacher in New Castle, Ind. reported the following Yuletide take to the Kansas City Times: six pieces of double-bubble chewing gum, one bottle of Night in Bagdad perfume, three pictures of Actor Lash Larue, two rolls of mints, a loaded cigar, a Dewey-for-President badge. ¶ Gift of the week: the 30-room Southampton, N.Y. mansion of Manhattan Stockbroker Charles E. Merrill to his alma mater Amherst College. Amherst’s plan for the mansion: to set up a Merrill School of Economics for advanced summer training of students who show “marked talent as promising economists.” ¶ In Switzerland, Geneva police banned the sale of a Brooklyn-brand of bubble gum called Freedom’s War. Reason: parents had been long dismayed by the pictures inside the wrappers of battle scenes in Korea (e.g., a news photographer getting shot while riding in a jeep, U.N. soldiers being hit by a hail of snipers’ bullets). The gum, said Geneva’s Y.M.C.A., was just too “bloodthirsty . . . There is enough warlike propaganda in the world without selling these exaggerated scenes to receptive children.”