Grade-Schoolers Need Stiffer Dose of Basics, Bennett Says in Farewell

William J. Bennett, in his final report as education secretary, said Tuesday that American elementary schoolchildren need stronger doses of math, science and literary classics, as well as foreign languages starting in the fourth grade.

Students are willing and teachers are “for the most part good and capable,” Bennett said, but too many schools suffer from defective curricula.

Bennett released a report summarizing his views of what should be taught to the 32 million youngsters enrolled in kindergarten through the eighth grade in 81,000 elementary and junior high schools.

Bennett said he still believes, as he concluded in a 1986 report, that elementary schools are “in pretty good shape” and “face fewer and less severe problems than now plague our high schools.”

By some measures, he said, achievement in the elementary grades stands “at its highest level in three decades,” but American youngsters still have an “insufficient grasp of basic school subjects, and they lag well behind their foreign counterparts.”

Bennett said the culprits include:

--Dull texts that make reading a chore instead of a joy.

--”Dismal” social studies courses that start teaching children about self-development when they are more interested in dinosaurs and space.

--Math courses that rely on drone-like, repetitive work books.

Bennett, who is leaving his Cabinet post Sept. 20, said his suggestions include teaching American history in each of the first five grades, world history and geography in sixth and seventh grades and world geography and American government in eighth grade.

He would have all youngsters take either algebra or pre-algebra by eighth grade, biology in seventh grade and some chemistry and physics in eighth grade. Foreign language instruction should start no later than fourth grade, he said.