School's Open

That big new high-school building the Town has been so proud of is a different place this week from what it has ever been before. With the opening of the fall term, the 30,000 U.S. high schools will buckle down to prepare their graduates not for college, not (except incidentally) for jobs, but primarily for the profession of war. No "revolutionary" movement in U.S. education ever held a candle to this one.

Returning from Washington, where they had heard unequivocal talk from their government (TIME, Sept. 7), school superintendents hastily revised their ideas of what was going to be optional, what compulsory in high-school curriculums. When New York City's 55 high schools open next week, juniors and seniors will immediately start "pre-induction" courses designed to cut down their period of training in the Army.

To qualify as Junior Commandos, New York's 16-and 17-year-olds are going to have to run a quarter-mile in 62 seconds; a half-mile in two minutes, 30 seconds; a mile in six minutes. They will also have to meet certain standards in gymnastics and be able to carry their own weight 100 yards. This wind & muscle-building program will be compulsory.

Some youngsters, not yet in high school, got the jump on the older boys by forming their own Junior Commandos, influenced by the comic strips' "Colonel Orphan Annie," currently leading her commandos against enemy agents. At Detroit's Boys Club playground more than 100 youngsters, dressed in shorts, sneakers and tin helmets, and carrying wooden guns, went through commando drill (see cut, p. 88).

But the biggest single job cut out for U.S. high schools is preflight training. To fly, navigate, fight and service the 185,000 planes the U.S. is scheduled to produce by the end of 1943, more than 2,000,000 trained young men will be needed. There are easily 2,000,000 willing aspirants now in high school: 75% of all students questioned have voted for aeronautics courses. Despite a shortage of teachers, plans are well along to give them what they want. Last week:

> New York State appropriated $150,000 to start preflight training this month in 50 high schools.

> Minnesota high schools undertook to make Army gliders in manual-training classes.

> The Air Training Corps of America, semi-official godfather to the training program, estimated that 500,000 high-school students will be enrolled in its preflight training units this fall.

Meanwhile the plain hard work of the country was being done in many places with the aid of high-school boys & girls. In San Francisco, where it has been planned to have students trained as urban firefighters, high schools opened only to recess for a week after 2,600 students and teachers volunteered to help in California's desperately shorthanded harvest.

Meanwhile U.S. students, geography-conscious as never before, learned last week that in many parts of Russia only the lower grades of school opened; high school would not begin until after the harvest. In Kuibyshev, children spent the first few days of school painting walls and bringing in fuel for the winter.

In Camden, N.J., the heating problem was not so simple; the board of education decided to close all city schools during January and February to conserve fuel oil.

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