Of course, one of the greatest difficulties on the university campus on this score is the School of Education. And if you take the somewhat cynical and kind of cute comments I made about the rest of the university faculties and multiply them by a large number, you have the School of Education.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Can I ask you why you said you were uncomfortable with the term "environmental education"? We did not use the term "conservation education," but thought "environmental education" would be broader.

Do you have a better phrase?

Dr. STEINHART. I suppose it is because I always root for small guys and losing teams. Therefore, the current fashion always makes me somewhat uneasy. I think it is all right. I think the point being made by Dr. Mead several times in this morning's discussion is that somehow there ought to be an inverse-square law relating to people. We not only suffer from most of the troubles, but we made most of them.

If this bill is for a program in scientific ecology, I would find myself in considerable disagreement with Dr. Libby, who seems to be directing environment to some other kind of technocratic expert to tell those people what they should do. This is a human problem.

Mr. BRADEMAS. What you are talking about is having an accurate definition of the phrase "environmental." That is to say, we need to be sure that the phrase "environmental," or that word, embraces the adjective "human."

Dr. STEINHART. I think that is very close to it. What we found disturbing last year, and have been having difficulties with in the program I am trying to join with, is how to bring humanists themselves in the educational system into this collection of questions about the human environment. They seem somewhat uneasy, and no one is sure how to do it.

Mr. BRADEMAS. We invited a theologian and an artist as the lead witnesses on this legislation, because we were anxious to establish at the outset the kind of concern that I think is representative of what you have said, and also, I take it, the reason that you in your report recommended the establishment not of schools of the environment but schools of the human environment.

Dr. STEINHART. That is exactly right. Your committee exhibits more of the understanding of the problems in this case than many of the senior faculties of the university, who look for a collection of specialists to add together.

Mr. BRADEMAS. We are politicians.

Dr. STEINHART. I am beginning to think that is a better preparation for understanding people than academic preparation in many

ways.

Mr. BRADEMAS. I have one more question. What do you have to say with respect to the attitudes, values, life styles, if you will?

Dr. STEINHART. It happens this semester I am living in the midst of the student radicals, revolutionaries, or what have you, at the University of Wisconsin. It is an interesting experience. What I think we must begin doing at some time in the near future is to begin to encourage people to experiment with how they live and inquire seriously how these experiments come out. I am talking about communities, towns, cooperative arrangements of various sorts.

Much of the experimentation is going on among the young, and it is undeniably aimless, frequently destructive, and certainly is not a long-term solution. Yet, at the moment, it is quite unpopular to express the idea that you might permit people to experiment with how they live, or in fact encourage them to experiment with how they live. We, instead, tend to experiment on people. After all, any new Government policy is an experiment on people. We don't call it that, but that is what it is. It seems time to permit some experiments with people than can be turned off after you find out how they work, particularly if they don't work well. I hope there are members of the population over 25 who will become involved in some of these experiments. Some of them are going to be around a long time yet.

Failing that kind of experimentation and discussion of it and analysis of it I really don't see how we can expect anything other than the same kind of aimless, frequently destructive dropout kind of experimentation we see going on at the present.

Mr. BRADEMAS. This has been very helpful, Dr. Steinhart. I think you have alerted our attention to one of the very serious problems in making an advance in this field, namely, the narrow rigidification that prevails in university faculties. And though this bill is not fundamentally a higher education bill. I think the problem you discussed is one we must have in the forefront of our own thinking if we are going to be able to encourage effective environmental education at the elementary- and secondary-school level.

Dr. STEINHART. I think the universities have, and in certain specialized circumstances, can provide feedback into the secondary schools, and the community at the adult-education level. It is the focus on professional education, as little teaching as possible, as much—as many papers as possible that place serious opposition to much more free-flowing higher education programs in which the feedback to the high schools and to the community is not only encouraged but is just the accepted way of doing things.

There are benefits on both sides. Students are increasingly anxions to work in the communities, and with good reason. Members of the community find in this kind of interaction relief for their frustration of not knowing what to do about things that disturb them.

In the case of high school students, some of the letters we get are simply tragic in their dismal view of whether or not there are even going to be a few more years of future to work with. I don't think things are that bad, and let's hope we don't let them get that bad. Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you.

Mr. Hansen?

Mr. HANSEN. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Dr. Steinhart, for a very helpful statement.

To pursue the point you were just talking about, I sense that in this growing interest, particularly among the young people, in the environment there is a tendency to classify people and some institutions as polluters and others as nonpolluters.

Also, it would seem to me that in an educational process a good beginning point is an acknowledgement that there are no nonpolluters among us, and that we all contribute to the problem and have an obligation to help find the solutions.

Would you concur with that?

Dr. STEINHART. Oh, absolutely. One of the reasons I find it difficult to endorse only the need for technical specialists as a solution to the problem is that the solution to the pollution problem is clear. You have only two options. You either spread it around thinly, or you eat it. That is all there is. The rest is engineering.

In a somewhat larger sense, it is the devotion to unbridled growth. When unbridled growth occurs in the human body, doctors call it "cancer." Unless one begins to try to curb this, I don't see much of anything that can seriously be done.

I think that focus, which frequently does occur, as you suggest, that there is somewhere a guy in a black hat saying, "Let's give them another dose of smoke today," is not very useful.

Mr. HANSEN. I appreciate your concept, also, that it is really far more basic, and what we are looking at ultimately is a change in the system of values.

Maybe instead of using a dollar sign as the measure of so many values in our society, the purity of the air or the water or the scenic beauty of the countryside will be placed higher on the scale of values.

Dr. STEINHART. It seems to me that human dignity and satisfactions encountered in their lives are the scale of values we would like to have. I am not sure it would be something that would be measurable, or that we should measure it if we could. But I do think that somehow we have to change present values.

The national budget reflects our national priorities. And I assume it represents something about our values in the Nation. I find that disturbing.

Mr. HANSEN. One final question. At least one of those who wrote to me on the bill in response to an inquiry I made soliciting comments of one of our earlier witnesses, took exception to our use of the term "ecological balance." And I suppose the implication was that it was a static system.

Does the use of that term in the bill as we have used it disturb you? Dr. STEINHART. Absolutely not. I think the word "static" is pejorative. But if you talk about it as a "steady state system," I don't see how anyone could object to that.

The alternative seems to be "unstable."

Mr. HANSEN. Thank you, Dr. Steinhart.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Dr. Steinhart, your testimony has been most helpful. I know in discussing environmental education in talks, and so on, here and there I draw heavily on the report that you and your associate, who I understand is now an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, Stacy Cherniak, put together, because it seems to me to represent the most thoughtful survey I have seen on the role of colleges and universities in the whole field of higher education. I hope that we will take to heart what you have been admonishing us to do.

Thank you very much indeed.

We are adjourned for this morning.

(Whereupon, at 11:40 a.m. the subcommittee recessed, to reconvene at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 9, 1970.)

ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY EDUCATION ACT

THURSDAY, APRIL 9, 1970

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SELECT SUBCOMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 9:45 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 2175, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. John Brademas (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Brademas, Steiger, and Landgrebe.

Staff members present: Jack G. Duncan, counsel; Toni Immerman. clerk; Arlene Horowitz, staff assistant; Ronald L. Katz, assistant staff director; Maureen Orth, consultant; Marty L. LaVor, minority legislative coordinator.

Mr. BRADEMAS. The subcommittee will come to order for further consideration of H.R. 14753, the Environmental Quality Education Act and related bills.

The Chair would like to announce that tomorrow we shall continue consideration of this bill with the witnesses scheduled, Congressman Nick Galifianakis of North Carolina, Miss Martha Henderson of the Conservation Foundation, and a representative of the American Forest Products Industries. Then the subcommittee will go to New York City for hearings on Saturday morning of this week.

Our first witness today is Dr. John Cantlon, ecologist and the provost of Michigan State University.

We are pleased to have you with us this morning. Please go right ahead.

STATEMENT OF DR. JOHN CANTLON, ECOLOGIST, PROVOST OF MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

Dr. CANTLON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the committee. I would like very much to speak in favor of House bill 14753. In my view, we now need a major effort in improving the educational resources, the techniques and so on in both public schools and in the mass media for enhancing the understanding of our present and future citizens concerning the ecosystems that sustain them.

Long ago, in this country, we made the very logical decision to have publicly supported schools to impart to the future citizens of the country the minimal skills in reading, writing and arithmetic. Almost as early, we insisted that these students be exposed to a certain minimal level of mastery of the concepts and the knowledge about certain subject-matter areas.

For example, we insisted that each student be exposed to the essentials of how his Government works. These courses are called American government, or civics, or political science, and they are required subject matter in each of the 50 States.

In addition, each State requires that American history be taught in order that each student can appreciate the sacrifices that are required to sustain the social machine that is our Government, and although recently our black citizens have pointed to some of the inadequacies and omissions in American history as it is taught in our public schools, no one has seriously proposed that American history be deleted from the public school system.

Citizens obviously do need to know how their Government works, how it got that way, and what sacrifices are necessary to sustain it. Another major requirement that is widespread in public school curriculums is how an individual's own body works, the basic physiology, the basic structure, the nature of the human body. This learning operation is couched in different kinds of packages. It may be in the general sciences course that all students take in junior high, or in the high school biology course, or in a hygiene course, or in the physical education part of the curriculum. Wherever located in the curriculum, throughout the country we require this minimal knowledge for an adequately educated citizen and human being.

Other knowledge required is a rudimentary understanding of international affairs, a rudimentary understanding of our cultural history, and a bit of general science which is generally limited to disciplinary looks at physics and chemistry, and usually, we required an elementary course in the social sciences.

How strange it is, then, that we do not insist that each citizen have some rudimentary knowledge about the ecological systems that sustain us. Some knowledge is necessary as to how the life support systems of the planet works and what keeps the biosphere healthy. Also, as to how our food production systems work, and how the air purification systems work. This deficiency represents, in my own view, a massive flaw in public education, and one so massive and so conspicuous that it is rather difficult in 1970 to understand how we got into this state. If one harkens back to the nature of the population at the time our public school curriculums were being stabilized, we see that most of the citizens were rural in their origins. Furthermore, the rates at which the human population and technology were then expanding did not appear so awesome. We still had a great deal of the biosphere largely intact. In those times it was reasonable to assume that the average student knew a great deal about food production and the natural state of the biosphere. In other words, the common knowledge students had as they entered or acquired outside school was assumed to be adequate for this facet of the education of our citizens.

Today, one cannot listen to the public media without being confronted with the idea that the earth's life support systems can be placed in jeopardy. Surely we need citizens who are better informed about the nature of the human and natural ecosystems, and most specifically on the fragile nature of these systems. They need to be apprised of the very difficult choices that we will be forced to take, as citizens in a democracy, in the years ahead to make certain that our