SERVICE IN GERMANY

ON INVITATION from the War Department, several staff members of the U. S. Office of Education are serving in a consultative capacity during the next few months in the reorientation of the German educational system. They will spend on the average 60 days in Germany or Austria.

Howard R. Anderson and Philip G. Johnson, both of the Secondary Education Division, left the United States early in February. Dr. Anderson is one of a group of seven educators whose purpose is to help German educational leaders develop new programs in the social studies in accordance with the recommendations of the United States Education Mission to Germany, of which Dr. Bess Goodykoontz, of the Office, was a member. They will work primarily in a number of curriculum centers in the American Zone which are attempting to provide textbooks, courses of study and curriculum materials consistent with the democratic philosophy. Their work will also be concerned with teacher training.

In addition to Dr. Anderson, members of this mission are: John Haefner, Head of Social Studies, University High School, University of Iowa; Allen Y. King, Director of Social Studies, Cleveland (Ohio) Public Schools; Margaret Koopman, Central State Teachers College (Michigan); Frederick J. Moffitt, Chief, Bureau of Instructional Super

vision (Elementary), New York State Education Department; Burr Phillips, Head of Social Studies, Wisconsin High School, University of Wisconsin, and J. R. Whitaker, George Peabody College for Teachers.

On another mission, Dr. Johnson along with Keith Tyler of Ohio State University, will work in the area of visual aids.

Mary Dabney Davis of the Elementary Education Division arrived in Germany March 1. Her assignment is threefold: Concerning the elementary school curriculum especially in relation to the social studies and the fine arts; the incorporation of kindergartens and nursery schools in the elementary school program; and the relationship of elementary to secondary schools in the remaking of the German school structure.

Dr. Davis plans to attend the organization meeting of a proposed international federation of professional organizations concerned with education in the 2- to 8-year age level.

Ronald R. Lowdermilk, specialist in educational uses of radio, U. S. Office of Education, arrived also March 1. The mission of which Dr. Lowdermilk is a member, is concerning itself with all phases of communications.

Arriving abroad later in the spring are other members of the Office of Education, including Ray L. Hamon, specialist in school plants; Helen K. Mackintosh, Elementary Education Division; and David Segel, specialist in tests and measurements.

Public Health Nursing Week

Services of the public health nurses of America are dedicated to the home care of the sick, the prevention of disease, the development of sound minds and bodies, and the establishment of constructive individual health prac tices. Tribute will be paid to their work by the Nation in the observance of Public Health Nursing Week, April 20-26, 1947.

Aims of the observance include:

1. To inform people not already conversant with public health nursing serv ices of the broad scope of the work done.

2. To spread the message that public health nursing services are for everybody and are not limited to those in the lower income brackets.

3. To encourage more nurses to enter the field of public health nursing. 4. To interest more high school and college girls in choosing public health nursing as a career.

5. To help relieve pressure on hospitals by calling attention to the fact that part-time professional nursing care is available to people at home.

6. To stimulate the development of organized health services in all areas of the United States.

Services of the Public Health Nurse

More than 20,000 public health nurses are employed in the United States and Territories by local, State, and national, agencies. They work for health departments, boards of education and (See page 9)

THE HIGH SCHOOLS OF THE FUTURE

W

by John W. Studebaker, U. S. Commissioner of Education

ILL the high schools of the future be different from the high schools of today? They certainly will. In trying to be a prophet, I am not unmindful of the hazards involved. First, I cannot claim-as in the case of a well-known radio predictor of things to come-a batting average of 82 percent. Second, our high schools of the future will adapt themselves to the needs of the times, and those needs cannot be forecast with complete precision. We know for a certainty only one thing about them: They will be unprecedented.

Education is the only means society will have for making the necessary manifold adaptations. Education has always been essentially a means of social adaptation.

We have never thought of our schools as buildings sequestered in certain blocks of our town-in a sort of extraterritorial status. Rather we have considered them to be the very center of community life, responsive to social needs and to social change, reflecting the broad characteristics of their social setting.

As one.seeks to appraise the social setting of our schools today, he must note the persistence on the world's horizon of the age-old fundamental conflict of freedom versus tryanny, of democracy versus dictatorship. At home, against our own horizon, he notes how our national structure is settling ponderously into the ways of peacetime, not without many vibrations; he sees the appearance of some fissures, and hears the grinding of part on part. He notes the symptoms of social and economic dislocations in strikes, in divorce courts, in juvenile delinquency, in the increasing incidence of mental illness-to mention only a few. The high schools, too, registering these social dislocations like a seismograph, are shaken on their foundations.

I have not mentioned the single most imperative fact of the present hour in our history-the fact of atomic

1 Address delivered at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, Atlantic City, N. J., Mar. 1, 1947.

energy. With spectacular suddenness it has presented to us the choice between world peace and world suicide. Not one of us knows whether this age will bring splendid material and spiri

tual benefits to all mankind or whether there will be a third world war more totally destructive than we can now imagine.

And again, what of the schools? What shall they do to prepare boys and girls for life in the atomic age? Crippled as our schools are by the teacher shortage, handicapped as they are by obsolete and inadequate plants, equipment, and textbooks, they must nevertheless respond to the demands of this new era that is dawning. Under the impact of unprecedented pressuresfrom the inside and from the outsideour schools must carry on as best they can today, confident that tomorrow education will come to occupy the very center and front of the world's stage.

Tomorrow? What course will the high school of the future follow? Barring the unpredictable, we may be certain that the high school of tomorrow will have its roots in the high school of today. I grant that some of But those roots are weak or puny. others are hardy and tough. They have vitality. With care, they will grow straight into the future. Let us lock at some of these more promising roots-seek to envision the sturdy trees they well may nourish.

Learning the Lessons of One World

First, there is the international root. There is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization. Throughout the world UNESCO is proclaiming the power of education as an international force for peace. No other international instrument offers greater potentialities for peace.

The international aspects of learning, scarcely rooted today, will have great influence in shaping the world of tomorrow. In a world of interdependent nations and races of peoples, the provision of knowledge that leads

to sympathetic social understanding will be an absolute necessity.

It is a platitude to say that prejudice against peoples is a sign of ignorance. Somehow, we do not like what we don't know anything about. We are too willing to believe, therefore, in spite of the lack of evidence. We do not size things up. We don't try hard enough to understand other people's points of view. Prejudices are among the few things in the world that thrive in the dark. They cannot stand up to the light.

Now, we can hardly count on the high school of the future to transform human nature—even though we might devoutly wish for a few minor alterations here and there. But the high schools of the future can and will, I predict, go so far as to modify humair nature. The degree to which they do modify it will depend on the effort they put into teaching intelligent devotion to the American way, a real understanding of other people's points of view, patience in compromise, and social concern for all mankind.

Do I promise too much? Mark Twain was very serious when he said, "Don't give up your illusions. When they're gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live." Am I indulging in an illusion? Possibly. In all earnestness I predict that the high school of tomorrow will provide fertile soil for growing the sturdy roots of world awareness.

School Population

Let us look at the second root-that of our school population. Tomorrow our high schools are going to achieve the ideal of education for all. At the rate we are going, it is safe to say that the number of normal youth of high school age who will eventually be studying in high school will closely aproach 100 percent. This will not happen in 5 years. It may possibly happen in 20. The trend toward total enrollment

steady.

is most encouragingly

There are two excellent reasons for this. And notice, incidentally, how they stem from the social soil of the times. One reason is the tendency of our economic output per man-hour to increase because of newer and better sources of power. Therefore, it will

3

be advisable for young people to remain. in school for a much longer period. It will not be economically advisable for them to try to compete on the labor market. Such a trend, interrupted by the war, is showing itself again.

The other reason for nearly 100 percent persistence of young people in school will be the greater attractiveness of the offerings of the high school of tomorrow. Let me put it this way: Youth of the future will have no productive place to go, unless to high school; and, in addition, they will find that high school is the best possible place they can go.

The Curriculum

Why will this be so? Chiefly because of the improvements bound to come in the high school curriculum. What improvements will be made? Let us examine this third-or curricular-root.

I will take time for only one broad generalization. Tomorrow's high school will not be negligent with the majority of our youth who are destined neither for college nor for the skilled trades. And here, in using the term "tomorrow," I am talking about the immediate future. Within a very few years our high schools will be more completely geared to give service in both vocational and general education. As to the vocational phase, I predict (1) that it will deal with a much broader range of practical arts than it does today; (2) that it will give greater emphasis to mastering technical disciplines of the various occupational fields and less to the development of the manipulative and other skills; and (3) that it will have substantially more cultural content and value generally than it has today.

As for general education, I prophesy that it will give more attention to the utilitarian aspects of all learning. General education will ask insistently, "What knowledge is of most worth? What attitudes are most essential? What skills are most valuable?"

Thus will the gap between general and vocational education be narrowed, if not eliminated, in the high school of the future. And I would point out that the union between vocational and general education will come because the needs of the times will require it.

In making that generalization about the curriculum of the future I am aware that much has been left unsaid. I have said nothing about the increasing interest of the high school in health and physical education, or the provision of basic health services such as medical and dental examinations; or about camps and camping as an integral feature of the secondary school program; or about the necessity for the regular, intensive study and discussion in classes of the materials in current periodicals designed especially for school use and preferably owned and taken home by the pupils. Nor have I mentioned the use of the community as a laboratory for civic training and participation. All of these auxiliary roots are taking hold to such an extent in the present that one may reasonably expect them to thrive in the future.

Implementing the New Program

But let me turn now to the fourth root-that of school service, or implementation. How are we to provide the means of putting forward all the educational objectives I have sketched? What of the high school building? What of plant equipment? What about counseling and guidance services, school psychologists and psychiatrists, and all the other ancillary services needed to reinforce the service of the modern high school? What about textbooks and teaching methods, visual aids, and radio? Finally, what about the status of teachers?

All of these and many other matters, Idear to the heart of the school administrator, are important. But they are important only as a means to the educational ends all of us seek. Generally, there is far less agreement concerning these means than there is about the broad ends toward which secondary education is directed. Nevertheless, I shall hazard a few comments on the means, as I imagine them, in the high school of the future.

First, the physical plant. I believe it will look like some of our better high school buildings of today-but with a number of distinct improvements. There will be shops, laboratories, a gymnasium, a cafeteria, and libraries. But the classrooms in our future building will not be chopped up into so

many standard-sized cubicles, each seating 30 to 40 students. Instead. there will be several large classrooms similar to the present lecture rooms of our colleges and universities, and accommodating 100 or 200 or even more students. Such classrooms will be equipped with radio and sound equipment, with projection devices for educational films, film strips, and pictures. And, like the smaller classrooms, they will be provided with quantities of textbooks, supplementary library books, workbooks, and other instructional aids for the use of students.

Right here I would like to add my fervent hope that all these future textbooks and workbooks will be writtenall of them, without exception-for boys and girls to learn from, not primarily for teachers to teach from. In other words the school will come to be recognized as a place for learning, not merely for teaching.

Master Teachers and Assistants

Now a word about the teachers of the future. There will be, I predict. at least two or three different classifications of teachers, with different functions. First of all, there will be the skilled and experienced teachers—let us call them "master" teachers-who will be in charge of the larger classrooms, comfortable, well ventilated, acoustically treated, and thoroughly equipped with the scientific aids I have mentioned. Before I predict classes of one or two hundred students again, let me assure you that I do so with all caution. I know exactly what heartbreaking burdens teachers are carrying at this moment with classes of 45 and 50. Could they hear me prophesy that the size of their classes may be still further enlarged they might say that I'm as impractical as the man who dreams of eating caviar and truffles when there's not even bread in the house.

But no, most emphatically, I am neither advocating nor predicting crowded classes. What I am predicting for the future will, I believe, make for better conditions for teaching and for better results. And I think that teachers would cheer the prospect of being master teachers in these larger classrooms under the following conditions.

The forte of master teachers would

be the dramatic and superbly skillful presentation of materials, problems, ideas, and techniques of learning. Scientific aids could bring any part of the world right into the classroom-to illustrate lectures, to stimulate discussions, to instruct vividly in those many instances in the learning experience when hundreds of words of explaining cannot make the impression of one perceptual demonstration. We have only to think what films could mean to the teachers of botany, geography, history, physics, sociology; of what recordings and similar equipment could do to aid the teacher of languages. It is enough to make the imagination of any teacher glow in anticipation.

With the right scientific equipment, the Army and the Navy taught varied fields of subject matter to large groups of men simultaneously. With adequate financial resources to draw upon, the Army and the Navy had the opportunity to apply techniques in teaching that had been known to school specialists for many years. Under those conditions, they achieved results that point the way to a degree of efficiency in teaching that has not been approached in most schools. The master teacher of the future may be expected to achieve comparable efficiency.

Another classification will be the junior teacher, a full-time, inexperienced teacher straight from college. There will be the apprentice teacher similar in status to the practice teacher in the junior or senior year of college today. Only certainly the apprenticeteacher system, to be successful, must provide adequate numbers of qualified trainees working much of their time in intimate relationship with master teachers.

The duties of the junior teachers and the apprentices will be to assist the master teachers. Such duties might include taking small groups of students into the smaller classrooms, libraries, shops, and laboratories for individual or small-group attention. Or the duties might consist of conducting experiments, giving quizzes, or holding conferences for make-up work; of accompanying small groups into the community for surveys and excursions, or for supervised work experience.

In other words, the high school of the future will offer the superior ad

vantages of individual and small-group

help where such help is essential. At the same time the school will also utilize large-group instruction in subjects where large-scale instruction is equally or more efficient.

With some alterations of the physical plant, urban high schools with relatively large enrollments may already be able to arrange a program of the sort I have described. Now, immediately, some of you ask about the high schools in those sparsely settled rural areas where the development of a large building is impractical-even with improvements in school transportation and consolidation of districts. What about the rural high schools of the future?

The question is pertinent. I readily admit that the problem of providing equal educational opportunity for rural youth requires close figuring. In spite of real obstacles, however, I am confident that, by better planning on a State-wide basis, we can do much more for rural youth in the future than we have done in the past. Some indication as to how I think this can be done I gave at greater length than I can do here today in a recent magazine article. It may be that some of you saw that article, entitled "The Missing Link in Our Schools," in the February issue of the Woman's Home Companion.

But let me add at this point that a better program for rural high school youth in the future can be pushed forward by such means as the following: (1) a sound and comprehensive system of rural school consolidation; (2) improved transportation; (3) subsistence scholarships; and (4) the use of some high school facilities in nearby urban areas, or in regional high schools or institutes.

I mentioned a moment ago that tomorrow's high schools will be far more attractive generally than most of the high schools of today. I also mentioned one thing that will make them. more attractive and give them greater holding power-far more individual attention than we are now able to give. The high school of the future will provide plenty of opportunity for counseling and guidance.

A Real Program of Guidance

Although guidance is a part of every teacher's responsibility, the teacher

cannot be at his best without a constant in-service program in which the staff services of experts are available. A staff of trained counselors in every high school in the Nation should be the rule. High schools of the future should have such experts to supplement and reinforce the work of teachers, and to give every single youth the specialized and individualized educational nourishment he needs, the particular understanding he needs. In short, the high school of the future should have a place where a boy or a girl can present his most serious personal problems, if he wants to, before a wholesouled counselor of great ability and deep understanding, one who is not responsible for any disciplinary action, one who is fully aware of the individual duties, problems, and dreams of his group of pupils.

The future guidance program will make liberal use of tests and other instruments of evaluation of various kinds. Measurements will be made of academic aptitude, of the ability to interpret data, of verbal facility, of ability to handle ideational symbols. There will be instruments to help in the evaluation of mental health and personality adjustment. There will be school psychologists and psychiatrists to deal with the more difficult and prolonged problems of personality adjust

ment.

Finally, the guidance program of the future will be the spacious avenue that goes between the school and the home, the teacher and the parent. Such an avenue will be built to invite and maintain two-way traffic.

Adequate Clerical Service

There is one additional, indispensable auxiliary service which, I predict, will be added to the high school of the future. That is the provision of really adequate clerical assistance to teachers. They should be free to give their talents and energies to their pupils. They should be free to grow in personal culture and professional competence. Teachers should not have to wear themselves out scoring tests and working mimeographing machines. Genuine Professional Status for

Teachers

No matter what the school plant of the future will look like, no matter how