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The article examines the problems in American secondary education. There are several structural deficiencies in the organization of schools as learning environments. The most fundamental defect, which has been suggested here, is that most teaching is not useful for understanding day-to-day problems. Moreover, the rapidity of social change induces uncertainty as to whether the skills a student is acquiring, will ever be relevant. One reason discussed for the low level of motivation among students is that students see little need to focus their energies upon skills of uncertain value. Various problems have been discussed such as the rigid reward system that depends upon the performance of restrictive assignments and the passing of tests with fixed standards. There is little opportunity for students themselves to initiate learning activity. The teacher's role has been criticized and it is felt that he has a dual role: teaching and evaluating. Repeated tests appear to be rituals that permit little time for discovery and self-motivated learning. Teachers, as well as students, have become captives of the evaluation process. It asks for more innovative approach towards course structure.

The article reports that the Committee on nominations wishes to present set its slate of nominees for the American Sociological Association, 1968-69. In an age of domestic and foreign tensions and crisis, successful social change is a crucial challenge and a welcome opportunity. The 1967 Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science will be held between December 26-30, 1967, in the New York Hilton and Americana Hotels, New York. Four papers will address the question of what impact social science research has on policy. They will look not only at the deliberate and intended application of social science findings in reaching policy decisions, but at the unintended consequences of social science analysis and the dissemination of results on the data themselves and on the formulation and implementation of public policy. Participants will discuss the uses of social science in societal self-analysis and decision-making, some social consequences of research on education and on racial relations and the reconstruction of social realities in developing areas.

This article reports secondary findings that emerged from a more general concern with social change. In attempting to make explicit the substantive arguments and implications of various theoretical approaches to the study of social change, sociologists discovered a substantial area of disagreement among symbolic interactionists with regard to this topic. In as much as symbolic interactionism is usually regarded as a unitary theoretical position, this considerable disjunction seemed to call for explanation in its own right. Both the historical development of interactionism and the nature of its principal intellectual sources suggest the possibility of important differences within this tradition. The purposes of this article are, first, to report the extent and nature of the differences that divide symbolic interactionists with respect to a topic of general concern, social change; second, to note certain sociological factors associated with these divergences; and, finally, to explore theoretically the relationship between a particular theoretical stance and a constellation of sociological variables. A central contention of this article is that differences among interactionists are associated with the kinds of relationships in which these sociologists are involved. A sociological perspective focusing upon the nature and types of relationships should be as useful in understanding sociological reasoning as it is in understanding any other type of reasoning.

The article discusses that the most certain thing that can be said about the United States twenty-five or thirty years from now is that it will resemble the United States as it is today in a far greater number of particulars than otherwise. This is obvious to the point of banality, but often manages to be overlooked, or at least underplayed, by those who are addicted to the melodramatic prophetic mode that pervades contemporary culture and has by no means left the social sciences untouched. Yet social scientists have not been very successful in the past even in making limited short-run predictions, though they have not done any worse than others. In recent decades, three major approaches to forecasting the future, all of them questionable, have prevailed. No magical technique for avoiding the ancient fallacy of Eternalizing the Present has been discovered. Much predicting of social change, particularly in areas where refined statistical measures and complex computer-based technology are applicable, takes the form of extrapolating or projecting existing trends forward.

This article demonstrates the powers of a sociological analytic model in identifying issues that are sociological in the formulation of a policy of guided social change and in applying sociological analyses to social reforms. A role system has a systemic, normative character not associated with other types of human behavior. Yet within the institutional structure of a society, given roles or role sets do not necessarily constitute a given, fixed pattern. Certain role components tend to be associated, but role components may vary independently of each other, within limits established by the social system. Role systems crystallize at three salient levels: technical, normative and cognitive. The technical level responds primarily to the impact of changing technology and changing quantities and allocations of resources in society. The position of the role in the stratification system is of major importance. The normative level defines the components of role in terms of the predominant norms and values and the legitimation and sanctioning of the patterns of rights and obligations assigned. The cognitive level refers to the actor's knowledge of the components of the role and his image of the role

The article presents information about various vacancies available for various posts. Two new positions for 1970-71 at the assistant professor level in a rapidly growing departments; to offer courses in minorities, stratification, industrial, social change and others at providence college. New campus in suburban Baltimore has positions available for PhD in rapidly growing discipline; specialization in theory, methodology, statistics, social problems, and social work sought; teaching load each semester is nine hours with two preparations; opportunity for summer teaching exists in University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Health and Welfare Council of Baltimore, requires research consultant responsible for program of research concerned with community planning for health, welfare, and recreational services in the Baltimore metropolitan area. Ataseadero State Hospital requires behavioral or social scientist to develop and implement a program of research on male sex offenders and criminally insane.

This article focuses on outcome measures and social action experiments. Social change and social worth are variables defined by societal values, on which persons' hierarchical rankings are determined by normative properties. The sociological measures used as outcome variables in evaluation studies are not derived from a systematic sociological and ideological analysis of a community's values and goals. Rather, they reflect concerns made salient as part of a political process in which elected officials, entrepreneural academics, business and union leaders, and representatives of the religious sector exercise influence. Undesirable social conditions, deviant behavior, and personal dissatisfactions are the general categories of outcome measures employed in studies with a normative sociological orientation. The social systems approach to outcome measures holds that there is limited likelihood of developing useful outcome ratings across different locales, groups, and cultures. It holds, rather, that criteria measures should consist of the ranking of individuals within defined geo-cultural units. The impact of intervention programs is measured in terms of whether or not there is a redistribution of the rankings of persons or units in the target group compared with essentially little recording in parallel groups unexposed or treated with alternate means.

This article presents the author's view on the currents of social change that have been changing universities and race relations: white student activism; what has come to be known as radical social science; and, most intimately significant for the white sociologist, militant black separatism, which on campus typically aims toward an autonomous black studies program. The severity of the challenge and the suddenness of the onslaught, particularly in the case of black militancy, have precipitated for the white sociologist a crisis of ego, identity, institutional role and status, ideology, pedagogy, profession, and discipline. The crisis is sharpest for the established professor in his middle forties or older, for it is he who tends to have the strongest commitment to the values under attack. Black separatism negates, for example, not only the racial but, as separatism is commonly expressed in black studies programs, the political and economic ideologies of the established professor. After all, integration is more individualist-oriented than equalitarian-oriented; the consummation of integration would be the universal acceptance of blacks as individuals rather than as members of a racial group. The competitiveness of U.S. individualism and the collectivist implications of equalitarianism have long been recognized as in large measure incompatible.

The article presents various comments on the article "Problems in the Application of Sociological Method to Historical Data: A Case Example" published in the May 1969 issue of the journal "The American Sociologist." Since one of the authors is a historian and one a sociologist, the author has a special interest in the interrelationships of the two disciplines and, particularly, the use of historical data for sociological analysis. It was this interest which led them to turn so eagerly to Kai Erikson's "Wayward Puritans," especially after reading that it had received the MacIver Award. It was their hope that Professor Erikson might respond with an account of obstacles he encountered that his training had left him unprepared to handle. They had also hoped that Erikson would discuss more fully their contention that sociologists tend to handle data and the supposed existing state of the society as though the society were not facing any large-scale social change that could not be inferred from a limited set of historical data.