The T-shirt with the monogram, the old school colors, and the 19? might still be the gift which father brings junior from the campus co-op on the annual homecoming visit to the old alma mater

Junior might be indoctrinated with the loyal son spirit, but because father and junior have decided that junior must go to the old school is of little consequence unless junior starts to prepare when the T-shirt with the school colors is about size ten. Indeed, it has become critically important that father and junior start very early to plan and to work if junior is to get into the high school course that will most adequately prepare him for college, or into the independent secondary school where he was registered three weeks after he was born.

Today there is a growing movement on the part of discerning public and independent school officials to use placement tests and to provide high school courses according to the abilities and capacities shown in the elementary school years. Thus, if junior has not mastered

the fundamentals of English grammar in elementary school, his parents might be told that his chances of competing in a foreign language are so remote that he cannot hope to pass the college preparatory course. They might learn to their sorrow that junior's dislike and neglect of arithmetic will leave him so much corrective work to do that he can never hope to keep up in the college preparatory mathematics classes. These are only symptoms of things to come, but there are signs that the movement will grow and spread to more and more public school systems. One indication of the trends is to be found in the stiffening of the requirements for entrance into state-supported schools. State universities whose doors were once open to all high school graduates are now requiring entrance exams of candidates for admission. The seriousness of the problem demands that parents take a critical look at what junior is doing in the third grade, and the fourth grade, and on. Unless concern goes beyond whether or not junior's painting is on the class bulletin board or what part he has in the school operetta, both junior and parents might be due for great disappointment when measurements for eight long years of elementary school show little achievement.

Even more critical and precarious is the plight of the candidate for the independent secondary school. Time was when admissions officers had to answer such questions as "Is there an indoor swimming pool?" and "How often does the camera club meet?" or "Does the school have a rifle club?" In the mad scramble for entrance, some independent schools now have places for only one out of four applicants who pass the entrance exams and qualify in all other respects, The questions seem to have narrowed to one: "What can I as a parent do to help my child prepare?" A glance at what the tests for entrance require of the seventh or eighth grader applying only adds to the gravity of the question. Both the Educational Testing Service, Princeton, New Jersey, and the Secondary Education Board, Milton, Massachusetts, supply junior scholastic aptitude and achievement tests. Practice book forms of the tests are available and parents should acquire copies. These may be obtained through the school to which the child is applying for entrance, or by ordering directly from the agencies named above.

The junior scholastic aptitude booklets are made up of several tests, in some cases eight, and require between an hour and a half and two hours to take. For a child who has spent eight years in school and has never had a test requiring an attention span of more than twenty minutes at a sitting, the time for execution can itself be a mountainous test. The tests are presumably devised to measure the native ability of the child for aptitudes in handling materials associated with English and arithmetic, but they go far beyond this as the content indicates. The content of the tests is of such degree of difficulty as to indicate what aptitudes have been successfully used in the accumulation of knowledge throughout the eight years of elementary school.