Guidance program for a ghetto school

High school students from the ghetto have special problems that often need more attention than mere talk. Many students lose all sense of personal motivation and worth, for example, due to overcrowded conditions or teacher conflicts in the school, or lack of money or parental guidance outside of school. To help students find concrete solutions to their problems, a new guidance program is suggested for the ghetto school, and the Center for Personal Advancement, now in effect at a Philadelphia high school, is offered as one example.     

Information Processing and New Ideas — Lateral and Vertical Thinking*

‘Vertical thinking is concerned with digging the same hole deeper. Lateral thinking is concerned with digging the hole somewhere else.’ This is how the author differentiates between the two types of thinking. Education, according to the author, only teaches vertical thinking because lateral thinking has always seemed impossible to teach. He then outlines why (with the increased interest in creativity and the computer) there is growing interest in the thinking processes. Describing how the brain operates and how creative behaviour may be increased Dr. de Bono goes on to discuss the nature of vertical thinking. It is sequential, based on the idea that one must not be wrong, works on the most promising approach, only moves in a planned direction, only considers the relevant, and tends to build up large established patterns. To describe the lateral thinking process the author poses a number of problems discussing their solution and the difficulties which people normally encounter in solving these problems. Finally, he sets out the four main categories of the techniques of lateral thinking; and the reader's attention is drawn to several books which Dr. de Bono has written on the subject.     

Descensus and Development: A Response to Recent Rejoinders

Two articles were published in this journal in 2009 responding to and criticizing my 2007 article on Hans Urs von Balthasar's theology of Holy Saturday. The article below responds to those critiques by establishing the following points: (1) Balthasar's theology of Christ's expiatory descent into hell (that is, one in which Christ's human soul suffered the pains of hell) is thoroughly traditional and can be found asserted throughout theological literature; (2) on the question of (the possibility of) universal salvation, the development from Augustine's consigning of the majority of the human race to hell to Vatican II's assertion that all human beings are connected to the paschal mystery took place independently of Balthasar's theology (a development which of course he accepts), and thus to criticize him on this point is implicitly to deny the very rules for authentic development as outlined by John Henry Newman that both my interlocutors claim to accept.     

A SEX COMPARISON OF FACTORS RELATED TO SUCCESS IN NAVAL HOSPITAL CORPS SCHOOL1

Background information, Comrey Personality Scale scores, and a standard Navy aptitude test score were obtained on 600 Navy enlisted men and 600 Navy enlisted women prior to beginning Naval Hospital Corps School training. A comparison of the men and women indicated that the sexes differed on a number of background and personality dimensions. A double-split cross-validation design with multiple regression was then employed in the development of a test battery for predicting school completion. Results indicated that the men were more predictable than the women with cross-validities on the order of .53 for men and .41 for women. For the total sample, cross-validities were approximately .47. An empirical comparison of the utility of these equations for screening candidates for paramedical training suggested that the use of separate equations with the sexes would not produce results which were substantially different from use of the single equation developed on both sexes combined.