Here is me very simple explana tion of the "shortage of technicians" about which so much fuss has been made How can a nation be expects to produce engineers and mathema ticians if its schools do not teach arithmetic? Lamenting the decline in mathe matics teaching and in academic standards genera!! y. J. Donald Adams wrote in thi New York Tones' Book Review on fob. 10. 19,52: "I am a product of the New Yqrk City school system in the days v la a it produc'd literate chirms The t})’■<■• ■- year lug!) school course •tlirma h which I passed at Townsend Harr Hall. 199-1 to 1!«I7, gave the equivalent. of what would pass for a college education in many states today Standaids have been debased all along the line, and not only in arithmetic Why Johnny Can't Read” became a besf-selle’' because in plenty of American homes today. Johnny actually can’t read, and p.n cuts want to know why Because the elementary schools graduate semi-literates. In his it 150 annual report to the president of Columbia University Dean William C. Warren of the C lumbia Law School said; "The in - come to us. to read and write is a malady of epidemic p-oportions Thi- devastation of the U. S. school system is the work of "Education ists," not true educators That the schools are not a great deal worse than they are is owing to the real, dedicated teachers who know how to teach and who see "progressive education" from the hollow sham which li is. These latter, however, are voices crying in the wilderness, drowned

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