and we have been concerned about the lack of trained personnel, particularly in governmental agencies and also in many of our nonprofit voluntary agencies.

I have one reservation about training, however, and I say this designedly.

I am convinced that, in reference to training, our schools of higher education, particularly our schools of social work, should examine and possibly revamp their present curricula for preparing personnel for this field.

I think that they should be in tune with our current situation and that our personnel on the completion of their training should be willing to work in the marketplace where these difficult situations exist, and to stick with these situations until improvement occurs.

Too many of our trained social workers today do not have the motivation to take on difficult situations, are unwilling to meet their clientele in their own milieu, and prefer to practice a form of psychotherapy.

Senator CLARK. How are you going to do anything about that by legislation? To some extent this is analogous to the condition in the medical profession where it is becoming increasingly difficult to get general practitioners who are willing to work around the clock and be subject to call around the clock, and the tendency is more and more for highly skilled specialists who have more liberty of action, not necessarily less dedication from their point of view, but who lead a better and more rounded and more satisfactory life.

This must be the same in the field you are speaking of. How can you change that by legislation?

Mr. WHELAN. I think the legislation would not particularly change it, sir. I think the conditions under which grants are made might be so stated as to have concentration in this area. We are reaching too few of the very difficult delinquents, the very difficult multiproblem families, and we are doing too little in these difficult neighborhoods. Senator CLARK. In other words, you would increase the inducements, decrease the drawbacks of this particular field, and increase the rewards?

Mr. WHELAN. Yes, sir.

I think that S. 766, S. 1090, and S. 1341 provide for training personnel, and I think that legislation should be encouraged if funds are available.

Senator CLARK. I take it, though, you would give this a second priority?

Mr. WHELAN. Yes, sir, I would.

Third is the relation to strengthening and improving services. Here again we have had a current, chronic complaint from all of our communities throughout the country because of the inadequacy of resources for working with troubled children, youth, and in the families. The hue and cry has been for more short-term and long-term placement programs for delinquents and young offenders and also for more community services. Many of the demands pertain to more of the same rather than to something different.

While I agree that we need to strengthen probation, parole, and institutional services as well as many others, I am conscious of the need to provide services that are geared to meet our current and future needs.

Senator CLARK. Here again can't a stronger argument be made that the strengthening and improvement of services is fundamentally a local and, secondarily, a State problem, and that the Federal Government should perhaps confine itself to the demonstration projects you mentioned and to assisting in improving training for the profession? In other words, would this not be a third priority?

Mr. WHELAN. This is a third priority. However, I do think that if Federal funds are made available for strengthening and improving services, the definition should be broad enough so that it would include differentiation services to meet the current needs such as services for urban residential centers for adolescents who are making a poor adjustment in their own homes, for those on probation who if they stay in their own homes will become recidivous, those who are coming out of institutions who, if they go back into their family situations, will be back in 2 months to a year.

We will have various types of facilities available for children and young people who are not prepared to remain in their homes or return to their own home situations.

Senator CLARK. Let me test your philosophy about this. As you know, the Federal Government is engaged in a public housing program to provide houses for low-income families. We are engaged in a Federal roadbuilding program where the Federal Government puts up $9 for every dollar put up by the State or the community.

Would you think, philosophically, there was as good, better, or worse reason for the Federal Government getting deep enough into this juvenile delinquency field to provide money for strengthening and improving services?

Mr. WHELAN. I think one of our problems is the high rate of recidivism that we have in all communities regarding delinquents on probation, on parole, and other young offenders. I know in New York in just one of our institutions alone, on Rikers Island, we have a 75percent rate of recidivism of young people going back to Rikers Island on a regular basis.

Senator CLARK. That is pretty discouraging. Do you see any hope

that that rate can be cut?

Mr. WHELAN. I think it could be with additional staff and services in the institution itself, but I think also that many of these young people that we have are living in such rough situations, the home is not a home in the sense that we know it. They use it merely to sleep in. They are floaters in the community; they have no roots, they have no jobs. They either become gang members or they just become floaters sleeping on rooftops or in subways until they get into trouble again.

Senator CLARK. So the problem is really deep in the roots of our civilization, is it not?

Mr. WHELAN. Yes; there it is.

Senator CLARK. It is not something that can be cured by a few specialists and a few more institutions.

Mr. WHELAN. I think a great deal could be done to retrieve these young people if we had facilities to take care of them and if we had an interested group of people working with them.

I am thinking also in favor of vocational training camps for such young people who are dropouts from school, who are awaiting in

duction into the Armed Forces, but who are not prepared for employ

ment.

Senator CLARK. In the end, though, do you not have to improve the environment in which they have to grow up?

Mr. WHELAN. Yes, indeed; and that is why I said in the beginning that we have to concentrate on improving the neigborhoods in which they live, we have to concentrate on the multiproblem families from which they come, and we have to concentrate on working with them as teenagers, and too few of us know how to do that.

I think, also, a great deal should be done in terms of improving the moral and spiritual climate of the communities through eradication of dope addiction, dissemination of pornographic and salacious literature, and to encourage better, more constructive use of mass mediums than we have had in the past.

These are just some of the areas that I think strengthening and improving services could include. Also, I might add that we need to have some healthy young people in terms of preinduction courses into the military forces, so they will make a good adjustment once they have been inducted or have enlisted. That is why I think the legislation should be broad enough in all these areas to permit the kind of things that would help to meet our current problems rather than just more of the same of what we have had.

Senator CLARK. Thank you very much, Mr. Whelan. We appre ciate your taking the trouble to come down here. Your testimony has been very helpful to us.

STATEMENT OF WILLIAM C. KVARACEUS, DIRECTOR, JUVENILE DELINQUENCY PROJECT, NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Our next witness is Mr. William C. Kvaraceus, director, juvenile delinquency project, National Education Association. He was at one time the assistant superintendent of schools and director of Passaic, N.J., Children's Bureau. He served as a Consultant to the Ministry of Education in Turkey. He has been a professor of education at Boston University. He is the author of two books entitled "Juvenile Delinquency and Schools" and "Community and the Delinquent.” We are very happy to have you here. Do you have a prepared statement?

Mr. KVARACEUS. I have a statement and we have some exhibit materials we would like to leave for your committee. (See p. 316.)

Senator CLARK. I would like to say to the other witness and members of the public here that we are going to sit even though the Senate is in session, in an effort to accommodate the witnesses and get us out of here by 12:30. If that is not feasible, we will come back this afternoon at 2 o'clock, but I would like to make an effort to complete the hearings in the next half hour.

Mr. KVARACEUS. Let me say in behalf of the National Education Association that we are delighted to render a bit of testimony. I would like to point out that the NEA this year has invested some $60,000 of its dues-paying membership because it is concerned about the nature of this problem, recognizing of course that all future delinquents are sitting in the classrooms of the Nation right now.

There are a number of points which I would like to make that reflect what might be done with funds that were to be made available. All of these points stem from our year's study on this delinquency problem.

First of all, it seems to me that perhaps we have cut too narrow a definition of delinquency here today by concerning ourselves wholly with it in terms of the youngster in touch with the courts, the adjudicated case or preadjudicated case.

There is a great deal of hidden delinquency that is prevalent; the youngster who appears in court for the first time with a first offense is a rarity. Usually he is involved with a number of offenses.

My group says that the term "delinquent" is not a useful diagnostic category. There are various types, and a variety of approaches might be followed. For example, there has been some reference to the culturally developed delinquent. This is the one who engages in the violation of law as sheer sport or high adventure. This makes prestige, standing, status. On the other end of the scale we may have the youngster who steals a car, not to prove his manhood but to do in his parents. Here we have the sick youngster.

In between we have a mixture of types. We think that perhaps we have been enamored too long of the approach via the child guidance clinic. Only 35 percent of these youngsters are sick enough for this approach.

Our approach should take on the neighborhood and the community for the cure. Perhaps we should try to change the way of life in the neighborhood. It is not a matter of paint, plaster, or plumbing; it is a question of values. Can the school, the housing authority, can the detached worker change the value system?

A second concern we have is with this matter of early identification. We feel that with the trained observation of a teacher who sees this youngster for a long period of time, we can perhaps put our finger on the youngster who is going to show up in the community as a serious violator. We cannot do this perfectly, and I do not think ever will, the variety of causes being what they are.

We feel there are some less cumbersome techniques than are being employed now that ought to be checked out. I am engaged in a bit of contract research ending up with a 3-year study on prediction, trying mass methods, not those that assume we have a Rorschach tester or a caseworker who can go to only a few homes and test a few youngsters. We think more attention should be placed on using the teacher as the checkout point, just as we use the teacher for checking youngsters who may have some physical disorder and then sending him to a school nurse or doctor.

We think that too long we have been doing case studies on children, to children, for children, and it is about time that we got youth involved in the solution of their own problems. There are some notable efforts to get youth to take hold and make youth the subject of the verb "serve", youth serving the community rather than community agencies serving youth.

We are concerned tremendously with the problem of school dropout. The school dropout overlaps very much with the future delinquent in terms of his behavior characteristics. This does not mean just better attendance personnel to see that they get to school, or to up the

compulsory age limit. This means more variegated curricula. This is a curriculum problem. We have yet to learn what to do with the sitter, the kind that is outsitting the school, who knows he is going to leave school, and who leaves with a sigh of relief on his part and, let us say, on the part of the school, too.

We feel that the current emphasis on science and mathematics is making a second- and third-class citizen out of a large bulk of the population who cannot take a first course in algebra or science, let alone a second course; and with the critics of the schools who demand a regression to the old Boston Latin school, we are going to have a tremendous fallout if that is the only kind of curriculum that we can envision as desirable for the future of the Nation's citizens.

Senator CLARK. I think these problems which you are so eloquently outlining are a little bit over the head of the subcommittee.

Mr. KVARACEUS. Well, they are over the head of the educators, too, Senator Clark, and this is where we think some funds might go in terms of trying out new and varied curricula.

For example, we have mentioned this question of the problem of employment. There is a tremendous maturity experienced in taking a job, working on the job, and there are many youngsters who might see more sense in staying in the school part time if we could effect a cooperative school study-work program in many communities. That would be very pertinent to several bills that are presently before the subcommittee.

Senator CLARK. This would be a plea for more vocational training, would it not?

Mr. KVARACEUS. This would be one aspect, except the people in vocational training also say they need people of high academic ability. If you are going to use a slide rule you must be able to do decimals, and there may be some segment of our population who cannot do decimals or are not interested in them.

There is the further question of the adequacy of the teamwork approach. The kind of effective cooperation you need in a community has not yet been achieved. There is a great deal of sniping from under the table and behind the bushes among the various workers in the communities. I think there are a great many conflicts between points of view of the social worker, of the educator, of the police officer, and within this concern there is a great deal of deflection from what we would say is original function within agencies. It may well be that the schoolteacher should remain a schoolteacher and know his role, and also that the policeman should remain a policeman and not become a recreation expert or a social worker.

There is a terrible "Alice in Wonderland" story being told in some communities that spells considerable confusion as to how effectively we actually work together and how we play our peculiar and unique roles.

On the matter of personnel and training, let me say that our group felt there was no such thing as a delinquency expert. What Mr. Beck does and what his training is are quite different from what my training is and what I do. It is an interdisciplinary thing, the nature of this whole operation, in which everybody must get into this act, which calls for differently trained people.

It seems to me in training that every one of these people is trained within a discipline, and perhaps he differs when he gets into the