Hon. WAYNE MORSE, WASHINGTON, D.C., March 13, 1966. Chairman, Senate District of Columbia Subcommittee on Education, District of Columbia Library Association fully endorses proposal for a 2-year public junior college in District of Columbia as most practical means of meeting present grave higher educational shortcomings. Expansion to 4-year institution should depend on congressional response to current proposal. J. S. ELLENBERGER, Chairman, District of Columbia Library Association Legislative Committee. Senator WAYNE L. MORSE, TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, DEAR SENATOR MORSE: I attended the hearing on March 15 and was impressed with your handling of the meeting. You showed a deep awareness of the importance of education and a real skill in using the resources to help provide what is needed in the District. Such help is certainly needed. The District of Columbia is an anomaly we cannot afford. In today's world where an increasing number of people hear and see so much of what we do (and do not do), we should be certain that Washington is our capital. Whether under home rule or any other plan, we must make it an outstanding demonstration of our democracy. Your emphasis on the individual, on what happens to each citizen, is fundamental. I enclose a report that may be of interest to you in connection with the work of the committee. This report supports the ideas brought out in the testimony of Dr. John Holden. In addition to providing for the youth graduating from the high schools, the program must also assure continuing help to adults of all ages and at all levels. When civic information as well as vocational skills are often outof-date in a decade or less, continuing education must become a reality as well as a slogan. A community college can provide indispensable resources for this. Dr. Holden's stress on having several centers of operation for the community college is excellent. You raised the question about the desirability of having a single system. I believe this should be the pattern. What is needed is a program of higher education and there should not be competition among parts of the program. The problem is to find leadership that will insure uniform development of all parts. I think the reason for separate colleges is the fear on the part of the community college group that they will not receive the necessary attention from the 5-year college group. I think this can be solved and that there should be a single system. I use the term "5-year" college deliberately. It is clear, and was brought out in the testimony, that the program must provide for at least a year beyond the bachelor's degree. This will be true not only in education but in other areas. To use the term "4-year" college might be misleading. There will be need to face the necessity for sufficient funds to insure an adequate 5-year program as a minimum. You and I are products of the University of Wisconsin at a time when the LaFollette-Van Hise spirit made it a great institution. The concept of service to the State was basic and the university was imaginative in finding what this meant. I remember farmers coming to Madison during the winters for the short-course programs. The university wasn't stopped by "standards;" it was concerned with making its resources available to the people. This is the kind of concept that is needed for the District. Best wishes to you and your colleagues in pushing forward on this matter. If I can be of help, please feel free to call on me. After 40 years at Columbia, I am in Washington on a terminal sabbatical. Sincerely, RALPH B. SPENCE. CONTINUOUS LEARNING THROUGH THE EDUCATIVE COMMUNITY (Paul L. Essert and Ralph B. Spence) The purpose of this paper is to identify a concept of the educative community and to discuss some implications for our current educational programs. In the first part of the paper we analyze the elements of the educative community and some of its resources and needs. In the second part we discuss the implications for program planning and research in family education, schools, colleges, and universities and other educational organizations. We conclude with suggestions for the contributions which professional educational institutions might make. Our basic concepts can be summed up as follows: (a) Today's corporate technological society requires that continuous education become an actuality for all. It has long been an ideal in America, practiced in some areas of life but ignored in others. (b) The development of the attitudes and skills required for continuous learning needs attention at all levels in the educational span from the preschool to the senior adult. (c) The achievement of an adequate continuous education requires the achievement of a truly educative community. We suggest classifying the educational resources of the community under three heads: (a) the family educational system, (b) sequential unit system (schools, colleges, and universities primarily), and (c) the complementary-functional system. (d) The actuality of continuous education permits and requires changes not only in our school and higher education programs for children and youth, but in all organized and systematic educational programs. The definition of these changes should be one of the top priorities in professional education. (e) Additional research focused on (a) the nature of maturity, (b) the requirements of the effective community, and (c) the technology of education (the process of achieving maximum interrelation between (a) and (b) is required). These have implications for professional educational institutions and for other centers of research. THE MEANING OF THE EDUCATIVE COMMUNITY There are three major systems of education in the community that are collectively concerned with the deliberate education of all its members: (1) the family educational system, (2) the sequential-unit system, and (3) the complementaryfunctional system. When each of these three systems is operating with full recognition of the nature and function of the others and when they collectively provide the opportunities for anyone to learn whatever he needs to learn, whenever he needs to learn it, the community has reached a stage of excellence in using its total resources for the deliverate education of all its members. This is what we mean by the educative community. The major point of the paper rests upon the assumption that today's world requires that communities take steps to achieve this goal: to use all possible resources, to strengthen the individual parts of the program and to learn to relate the contribution of each to carefully formulated goals. The family is a major educational institution in any culture; in some, the only one. There is a wide variation from family to family in the way in which its members are educationally provided for. Some families abdicate their educational responsibilities, but the great bulk work at it, most consciously with the immature. It is frequently assumed that the education provided by the family is only for the immature but there are important services for all age groups. One of the concerns today in many societies, for example, is to find ways of replacing the educational functions the family previously provided for the aged. One of our beliefs is that in societies in which change becomes more rapid the family will need to be helped to become more directly educational in its impact on all its members. In a society in which major changes are spread over several generations, the family could be casual and spasmodic in what it did for children without endangering the society and the adults could get along with almost no educative provisions. Today the rapidity of change and growing heterogeneity of the neighborhood greatly increase the importance of the education provided in the family. The educating of the adult members so they in turn may soundly educate the children makes the full circle in the educative community. For example, it can be documented from various studies that the higher the level of education attained by the adults of a community, the better the quality of education in the schools. The sequential-unit system is that part of the total educational activities which is characterized by gradual steps, graded units or levels leading toward higher or more complex levels, usually measured in terms of grades or units completed. In general this system is inclusive of the elementary and secondary schools, colleges, and universities including graduate programs, and an increasing number of miscellaneous schools. This is what generally comes to mind when "education" is mentioned and it is obviously a vital component. It needs to be still further strengthened and to be much better integrated with the other two systems to make its fullest contribution to the total community needs. The complementary-functional system is primarily focused upon providing systematic learning to meet a particular operational problem of life, not learned or inadequately learned in the family or the sequential-unit system. It is complementary therefore, in two respects: (1) it supplies that learning which is required to meet a deficiency of learning in other systems; and (2) it adds to or enhances the maturing potential of the learner in ways the other two systems cannot do. This educational system predominates in the planning and operation of organized educational programs in three types of social organizations: (1) Organizational purpose programs, sometimes called "inservice" education, designed for improving the knowledge and competency of an organization's personnel, such as programs in industry, the Armed Forces, hospitals, civil service, and short-term leadership education in churches, synagogues, schools. (2) Community service programs, offered by various organizations to anyone in the community who is interested, for the advancement of the public welfare, such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, 4-H clubs, public school adult programs, general university extension and cooperative extension services. (3) Membership education programs, designed by organizations to spread and nourish a particular belief, doctrine, or attitude. It is exemplified by educational programs for the rank and file of labor unions, religious education programs of churches and synagogues, programs of cooperative societies, and various other civic, economic, and cultural groups. While some might question the inclusion of these as educational organizations, there is no doubt of the highly organized, professionally planned, and systematic effort to affect behavior through learning programs. Furthermore, the modern community is dependent upon these organizations for effective interchange and communication of ideas. The interrelationship of the three systems These systems are not entirely discrete. The family system tends to be a sort of pivotal center for all of them, since it is here that the motivations and nourishment of progress of the learner through the sequential-unit system is generated, evaluated, and at least partially financed. Furthermore, it is often out of the needs of the family and the special concerns and varying interest of different members of the family at all age levels that the programs of the complementary-functional system arise. Elements of the complementary-functional system available to children and youth can be found incorporated into the programs of the sequential-unit system, such as the extracurricular activities programs of schools and colleges. Most of the remedial aspects of the complementary-functional system at the adult level, such as evening elementary schools, evening high schools and evening colleges are adaptations of the sequential-unit system to the complementary-functional system. Indeed the very fact that these systems have aspects in common and are not entirely discrete is an encouraging factor in approaching the goal of the educative community of balanced and interrelated use of all of its educational resources. MAKING CONTINUOUS LEARNING A REALITY The major characteristic of the educative community is the concept of continuous learning. We believe that continuous learning involves an attitude, a general method and selective specialized skills. The attitude is probably a cluster of attitudes but its core is the belief that one can almost always learn something more about the tasks in which he is engaged and that one must constantly weigh the merits of continuing to do a task as one has been doing it against the efforts to acquire additional learning to do it better. In the world of change the balance shifts more and more toward the side of additional learning. The general method involves the identification and use of resources, the adaptation to new situations, ways of sharing with others, and continuous evaluation. The specialized skills are the adaptations to the particular areas in which one has chosen to concentrate. This concept has always been a characteristic of American life but has never been fully implemented. Some of the things needed in order to make the concept fruitful today are: (a) A deeper commitment.-In certain areas of our culture our commitment to continuous learning has been very deep. In science and its applications to technology we have always felt "there must be a better way." We have never remained satisfied with what we had; we were always searching for new ways of doing things. In other areas, such as politics, the tendency would seem to be more the reverse. We act as though we believed the Founding Fathers were endowed with all wisdom; we should not tinker with the forms they set up. In education, it has been established that there has been a timelag of almost a half century between educational innovation and general acceptance of the invention, and an even greater timelag between the introduction of a new idea and its general use. We need to see the interrelatedness of all aspects of our life and apply our best wisdom to getting the best we can devise. Not change for change's sake; not the new in preference to the old, but the most appropriate learning for the job at hand, at the most appropriate times. (b) More skill in the process of continuous learning.-Self-education has been another of the characteristics of American life and our annals are full of stories of men with little schooling achieving great things through self-study. The picture of Abraham Lincoln reading borrowed books by the light of the fireplace is a classic not because it was exceptional but because it was typical. It would be interesting to have more accurate information about how pervasive this belief in one's ability to educate himself still is today. Certainly the availability of resources for doing so are far greater than in Lincoln's time. However there is reason to suspect that our very emphasis upon the level one has attained in the schools and colleges as the major criterion of an educated person has undercut to a certain extent some of our faith. It is true that the increased complexity of knowledge has made it more difficult for one to master the necessary information and that the wealth of available resources sometimes leads the learner to give up rather than try to choose. This means that communities must provide more and better organized continuous education, and counseling on how to use it, to help establish and maintain the techniques of continuous learning. Two kinds of skills will be needed by the learner to use these facilities. One is the kind of generalized skill described above that should be started in the earliest years and grow as one has experience with more and more complicated knowledge. It is a way of defining the problem, knowing what kind of information is relevant to it and where this information can best be found. It is what we would call the skill of learning how to learn. The second kind is the more specialized one related to the particular area in which one is working. It involves keeping up with the developments in one's field of specialization and knowing the most appropriate ways of dealing with the matters at hand. This second type of skill might be thought of as the skill of selecting what needs to be learned at any given time and finding where it can best be learned. (c) More facilities.-It was pointed out above that more facilities would be necessary. Many of the facilities are basically present in our communities; it is a matter of extending their potentialities to make full use of new knowledge and technology and of interrelating the various sources of help. The picture of what a library can be in a few years is exciting. One of the added resources in the library, for example, will be a greatly expanded range of self-teaching and individual home-study materials-programed texts, films and filmstrips, tapes, and the like. These materials for individual use will be complemented by opportunities to learn with other like-interested persons. This will be true primarily because learning certain kinds of things is more effectively done in a group than alone. The development of concepts is facilitated by discussion and the ability to make effective judgments once one has the relevant information is greatly sharpened by the interchange that comes in a group situation. The second support for group learning is its economy. When there is value in having an instructor in person, it is more economical to have this instructor deal with several learners rather than a single learner whenever this can be done without impairing the learning for each. Classes still have a significant place; in fact they will be greatly expanded but with more flexibility in time, place, method, and organization. A third type of facility that has scarcely been tapped for its continuous education potential is that of carefully planned and constructive social action. That various types of organized social action result in change of behavior of the participants, such as the participation of people in racial demonstrations, political campaigns, strikes, and various community development projects, there can be little doubt. The question of whether many of these social action programs are consciously planned and organized to aid the participant in learning to learn or in selecting new learning rather than simply to enlist emotional response to some pre-determined end, depends to a great extent upon the leadership. Nevertheless, social action programs do have a powerful potential for continuous learning, particularly in the improvement of citizenship, if they are thus viewed by the leaders. THE TASK BEFORE US We have presented up to this point a sort of three-dimensional model for reexamination of the role of education in modern society. One dimension is that of thinking of the basic goal of education as speeding up, not only our belated adjustment to, but our anticipation of change as challenge. This is the goal dimension. The second dimension of the model is that of the process. We have suggested that the key to process is commitment to continuous learning as a way of meeting change and skill in selection of learnings needed and in learning how to learn. The third dimension of the task before us is that of organization: to provide and organize the resources and facilities required to relate the goal process. The remainder of our article will focus its efforts on suggesting some of the implications for research and educational planning in each of these dimensions. However, it first seems desirable to suggest some implications for organization so that we have some focal point for viewing the interrelation of the parts. IMPLICATIONS FOR STRUCTURE AND ORGANIZATION OF THE EDUCATIVE COMMUNITY It is not the purpose of this paper to describe in detail the organizational instrumentalities that would be required to make the educative community effective. Each community should determine its own organizational pattern, aided and encouraged, when called upon, by State and National departments of education in the provision of research, planning leadership, and materials for study of the community and its needs and resources. Indeed, the planning of the organization of the educative community should in itself become a genuine continuous educational experience for the citizens of the community who are to be affected by the organization's actions and decisions. However, leadership will be required that takes positive and foresightful responsibility for the advancement of the concept of continuous education as an important commitment of the community. One of the functions of this leadership should be to establish some kind of organic form through which the family educational system, the sequential-unit system and the complementary-functional system can communicate and advance the concept of continuous education. To date each of these systems has tended to leave the development of the concept of continuous learning largely to chance, particularly insofar as its respective efforts are concerned with understanding and utilizing the resources of the others. The nature of such a community center for the advancement of continuous learning can be determined only through carefully planned research and experimentation. As we have pointed out above, each community should be free to find its own best way. But each will need the benefit of organized research and experimentation that will formulate and test different alternatives of design and organization under controlled conditions. We suggest a few of the alternatives here as illustrative of possible patterns of organization and structure of the educative community. (1) One possibility would be the enlargement of the traditional commitment of local public boards of education from that of planning, supervision, and control of education in the sequential-unit system to that of taking initiative and leadership in coordinative planning of the educative community. Partially developed models of this alternative should be studied and evaluated. (2) The potentialities of the university continuing education centers on campus and the off-campus extension centers as media for bringing the planning of the educative community into focus should be examined. (3) The rapidly emerging American community college has unique potentialities for assuming leadership as a regional catalyst for bringing the educative |