POINTS IN THE WORK OF THE HIGH SCHOOLS OF NEW YORK CITY Issued each month of the school year to all teachers in the High Schools of the City of New York. Published by the Board of Education, 110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, New York. Books concerned with educational matters may be sent for review to Mr. A. H. Lass, Fort Hamilton High School, Shore Road and Eighty-third Street, Brooklyn, New York. School textbooks will not be reviewed. The columns of HIGH POINTS are open to all teachers, supervising and administrative officers of the high schools. Manuscripts not accepted for publication are not returned to contributors unless return is requested. All contributions should be typewritten, double spaced, on paper 81⁄2" by 11". They may be given to the school representatives or sent directly to the editor. Local Representatives Abraham Lincoln........JESSE GRUMETTE DeWitt Clinton.. Forest Hills . . . . . . . . . CATHERINE COLUCCI Brooklyn Automotive Trades HENRY AHEARN Central Needle Trades. MILTON DICKMAN East New York Vocational ELIZABETH DOBBINS Jamaica Vocational......ANNE R. LAWRIE Food Trades Vocational. MARY K. GANLEY Jane Adams Vocational. MARY A. RIORDAN Chelsea Vocational..MILDRED C. PASCALE Machine and Metal Trades High School MARGARET ROBERTSON Manhattan Aviation Trades JAMES NAIDICH Manhattan Women's Garment Trades RUTH G. MINSKY Metropolitan Vocational. FRANK H. PAINE McKee Vocational................ MARY SEESTED Murray Hill Building and Metal Trades MORRIS J. DEUTCH New York Industrial....BENJAMIN STERN New York Printing.....JOHN J. HASSETT Queens Vocational.... MARCELLA NOVOTNY Industrial Art......S. ALEXANDER SHEAR Yorkville Women's Service Trades FREDA L. ALEXANDER Samuel Gompers....... .....HARRY SHEFTER Brooklyn Women's Garment Trades NORMA ROMER Central Commercial. Catherine B. DwYER Woodrow Wilson Vocational DAVID L. GOLDWYN Cover by Ernest Costa and Layout by the Art Department of the Abraham Lincoln High School A Study of Some Relationships Between Negro and White Placement Tests in Foreign Languages at the University of Wisconsin Theodore Huebener 80 The contents of HIGH POINTS are indexed in THE EDUCATION INDEX which is on file in Libraries 33 Negro and White Students in New York Public Schools SABRA HOLBROOK "What," asked the exasperated teacher, emerging from a classroom of colored students in which a near-riot had just occurred, "do these Negro children want?" What does any human being want? Food, shelter, comfort, security, love, opportunity-these are some of the fundamental needs. The color of one's skin neither adds to nor subtracts from these. To ask, "What does the Negro want?" implies that the Negro is different from other human beings, and has a special set of desires which the rest of us do not share. A person who can ask such a question is a person who has not yet achieved any realistic sense of unity with his fellow men. His thinking about people is compartmentalized. This race is pigeonholed neatly in this compartment, that race in another. Each religious group has its own box. National origins are similarly filed. It is this same kind of compartmentalized thinking that sets special interests such as the farm and labor blocs against each other in our Congress, builds sectionalism, divides us into economic classes, pulls management and the working man apart, and slowly and insidiously befogs for every citizen the dream of "perfect union, to secure justice, domestic tranquility, the common defense and the general welfare"-resulting finally in what the late Raymond Clapper referred to as "the Balkanization of the United States." The present war is the price of compartmentalized world thinking, and though even in the midst of payment some of us find it hard to accept the interdependence of nations which we have boxed with such neat and convenient separateness for all of our lives, two such wars within a generation have begun to teach us in our international life, that all human beings need the same things, and need each other to get these things for each one. EAST AND WEST. A Negro High School youngster remarked to me the other day that the Cairo Conference had put Kipling out of date. "East and West can and did meet," the boy explained, when I asked him what he meant, "and, for the first time in modern history, a man of color, Chiang Kai-shek, sat down with white men to |