Educator Claims Schools Neglect 'Underprivileged'

Horace Mann Bond, Negro educator and author, last night sharply criticized our educational system for its neglect of gifted children from low economic and social backgrounds.

Bond, delivering the Inglis Lectures on Secondary Education, asserted that the child of a professional worker has a thousand times better chance of receiving a scholarship than the child of a laborer.

The findings of the National Merit Scholarship Corporation for 1956, he stated, show that in those Southern states with segregated schools, not a single Negro child was among the scholarship winners. "I cannot believe," he said, "that there is no child of potential talent among the 10,000,000 Negro children of the South."

Bond suggested that social and cultural factors should be weighted against standardized test scores in determining recipients of scholarship awards. He argued that students of low economic background with high test scores have done better in college than those students of higher economic status with high test scores.

The present task of our educational system, Bond declared, is to see that all children are able to receive adequate education.