November 1, 1983

The Peronist party was defeated in Argentina for the first time in nearly 40 years as Raul Alfonsin, the leader of a middle-class party, unexpectedly won a presidential election. Mr. Alfonsin received 52 percent of the vote to 40 percent for the Peronist, Italo Luder. Ten smaller parties split the balance. (Page A1, Column 6.) At least 12 people were killed early in the invasion of Grenada last week when an American Navy plane bombed a building that turned out to be a civilian hospital, the Penatagon acknowledged. Officials said the building was not marked as a hospital and was situated in a military complex from which gunfire was being directed at American troops. (A1:1.)

The United States has decided to remove some of the economic sanctions against Poland dating from the imposition of martial law in 1981, Reagan Administration officials said today. They said the decision, made last week, had been conveyed to the allies and to Poland, and would be made public soon. In Warsaw, an offer of amnesty for underground leaders of Solidarity expired and there were indications that it might be extended as a gesture of reconciliation. (Page A7.)

MOST of the current discussion of how to improve the nation's schools focuses on higher pay for teachers, a longer school year and more structured curriculums. To Amitai Etzioni, though, such ideas are, for the most part, beside the point. ''It's all too mechanical,'' said the 54-year old sociologist. ''The assumption is that kids are machines and that all you have to do to get more output is to increase the input of books, teachers and time. They are neglecting the development of the children as human beings.'' Mr. Etzioni, who is University Professor at George Washington University in Washington, has frequently been an advocate of paying more attention to the personality development of students in American schools. On the basis of a new analysis of data compiled in the late 1970's by James S. Coleman of the University of Chicago, he now offers additional support for this position.

Talk about chaos. The price of Texas Instruments stock shot up and the price of its home computer shot down yesterday in the wake of the company's withdrawal from the turbulent home computer market. The stock market traded nearly two million shares of Texas Instruments, and the price per share jumped $22.75, to $124.50. And for a while it seemed possible that some retailers, at least in Manhattan, were unloading the company's previously popular 99/4A home computer for as little as $20 each - if buyers managed to get rebates now being discontinued.

Even in Caesar's time, says Mayor Koch, when all they had was chariots, they had potholes in the Appian Way. Today the Mayor presides over an empire of potholes, more than 700,000 of them a year, and over a crumbling road system that is the legacy of long neglect. His chariot traffic of automobiles and heavy trucks travels an estimated 44 million miles a day over the 6,200 miles of roads and highways in New York. After years of neglect, the street repairs have now become the single biggest expense in the Mayor's 10-year plan for capital development. The bad streets are also a serious source of indirect costs, including damage to vehicles and working time lost in traffic.