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PARTISAN REVIEW
Kurt Scholz:
The number of Austrian students going to the internation–
al universities is quite high....
Sanford Pinsker:
No, the international programs at the high school level,
in Austria, in international schools.
Kurt Scholz:
We have two. The enrollment in those schools is not high;
a number of pupils from the international schools go to the public schools,
and the standards of the international schools are not higher than those of
Austrian schools. The university careers of public school pupils are exact–
ly the same or even better than those of students from international
schools. Generally, the international schools present some competition for
me, but as long as there is no flight from public schools to international
schools I think the public system is doing quite well. But I wonder
whether I understood your question.
Edith Kurzweil:
I'd like to add something. It seems to me that the
International Baccalaureate here is set up in order to improve something,
to step outside of public school education. In Europe, the international
schools primarily are for the children of foreigners who come to Europe
and whose parents mayor may not leave these countries in a year or two.
So there's a different purpose. Moreover, as Kurt was telling us before, in
the public schools in Austria and Germany, and in England, you learn for–
eign languages as a matter of course. He told us that in some schools you
start at the age of six, in most of them maybe at the age of eight or ten. So,
there isn't that need that we have here for it. I'd like to add one other thing
that for some reason none of us have touched on here, and that is, when
our students compete with foreign ones, we find out that they're at the
bottom of the ladder. To some extent that may be due to our ethos of being
against elites. Even the word "elitism" isn't as central in any other coun–
try.
We have a fear of being part of an elite. I think we have to let our
students know that it's perfectly fine to belong to an elite. How else is the
country ever going to be competitive on any level
if
we don't believe that
our students may aspire to excelling? We all have different aspirations and
competencies and our most accomplished students should succeed and be
able to compete.
Dick
Lanham:
I'm a physician from New York who came here to put a
face to the names of some of the people whose books I enjoy, as I do
Partisan Review.
Other than being an instructor in clinical medical school
and teaching mathematics to high school kids who had flunked one sum–
mer, I have absolutely no educational experience. Some of my ideas may
