SCIENCE AND EDUCATION FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 1958 UNITED STATES SENATE, COMMITTEE ON LABOR AND PUBLIC WELFARE, Washington, D. C. The committee met at 10:10 a. m., pursuant to recess, in the Old Supreme Court Chamber, the Capitol, Senator Lister Hill (chairman) presiding. Present: Senators Hill (presiding), Morse, Yarborough, and Allott. Present also: Senator Hoblitzell. Committee staff members present: Stewart E. McClure, chief clerk; Roy E. James, assistant chief clerk; John S. Forsythe, general counsel; William G. Reidy, Frederick R. Blackwell, and Michael J. Bernstein, professional staff members. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will kindly come to order. This morning we will receive testimony directed principally to title X of the national defense education bill, Senate 3187. Title X relates to research and experimentation in more effective utilization of television, radio, motion pictures, and related media for educational purposes. We have a number of witnesses who are experts in this field, including one witness who will give us a demonstration of educational films as used in the country's classrooms. Our first witness this morning is Mr. Philip Coombs, secretary and director of research, the Fund for the Advancement of Education. Mr. Coombs, we appreciate your being here and we would be delighted to now have you proceed in your own way. STATEMENT OF PHILIP COOMBS, SECRETARY AND DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, THE FUND FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION; ACCOMPANIED BY JOHN K. WEISS, ASSISTANT VICE PRESIDENT AND TREASURER, THE FUND FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION Mr. COOMBS. Thank you, Senator Hill. Mr. Weiss and I, who are both officers of the Fund for the Advancement of Education, were delighted indeed to accept your invitation to make some comments on the problems to which title X is directed. The Fund for the Advancement of Education has been engaged over the last half dozen years primarily in support of promising experiments and new developments in American schools and colleges, both public and private. We have of late particularly been interested in the pos sibility of harnessing to the service of education some of the more modern communications media. So we are delighted to draw upon any experience we have had for the use of this committee. We will, of course, be speaking for ourselves as individuals, since our organization takes no position on any legislative questions. I should perhaps warn you, sir, that I am not a professional educator in the usual sense. I was trained as an economist. I have taught in colleges, but I tend to view the problems of education somewhat through the eyes of an economist. BRIEF ANALYSIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM It might be useful before getting to the other witnesses, who will deal with specific experiments, to sketch briefly an analysis of the educational problem the country faces, as we see it, and to suggest certain basic lines of approach to solving these problems which are relevant to the consideration of title X. In this connection, I would like to suggest that much of the current educational discussion is marked by what seems to me to be irrelevant and often irrational debate at a critical time when we have more urgent and positive business. We can ill afford to divide and spend ourselves debating false issues of education, hunting scapegoats, pining for the 19th century, reacting defensively to legitimate criticism, or blindly resisting change. The real issue that should occupy us is not whether our schools are performing as well as they used to. The evidence is clear and overwhelming. Despite many handicaps, our schools and colleges are clearly doing, on the whole, a remarkably better job than they used to. For this we can be grateful. No society has ever achieved so much and such good education for so many. The real issue is whether our schools and colleges are doing sufficiently better than they used to. Here the evidence is equally clear; they are not. The fault, if there is one, lies with all of us. EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OUTSTRIPPING EFFORTS As a society, we have allowed our rapidly expanding educational needs to outstrip our educational efforts and performance. The task now is to close the educational gap, which has already grown dangerously wide and which could prove even more disastrous for our society in the long run than inadequate military defenses. The children now in school need a far better education than any we could have dreamed of in the past, or can even conceive of now, if they are to cope successfully with the challenging problems and opportunities of the 21st century in which they will live. What is an adequate education for people who will travel to the moon, who will enjoy unbounded solar energy, whose working hours will seem more like our lunch hours, who will live in a world of technological devices as unimaginable to us as TV was to Moses, and whose lives may be as long as Methuselah's? Are we giving an adequate education to the future President of the United States, who is attending school somewhere right now? DUAL CHALLENGE: BOOSTING BOTH ENROLLMENTS AND QUALITY American education must somehow meet the dual challenge of boosting enrollments and quality simultaneously to far higher levels than ever before. This will not be accomplished by returning to a curriculum and to methods which served the 19th century well, nor by spending more money simply to keep doing what the schools and colleges are already doing. The surest way to guarantee a steady erosion of quality at every level of American education during the next 10 years, when we can least afford poorer education, is to cling passionately and stubbornly to all of our present educational practices and folk-lore. Nothing short of a prompt and far-reaching revolution of present educational practices along with vast improvements in the curriculum, will enable our schools and colleges to avoid an erosion of quality and instead to raise quality along with enrollments. This, sir, is a strong statement, but I would like to indicate the basis for it, briefly. MUCH LARGER INVESTMENT IN EDUCATION We need, obviously, a much larger investment of dollars in education in the years ahead. We need more buildings. We can have both of these if we wish them strongly enough. The one thing we cannot have, however, is an adequate supply, over the next 10 years, of highly educated, highly talented manpower of the quality needed not only for teaching but for every other profession, for business and for government. Thus, the principal bottleneck to better education in the years ahead will be a manpower bottleneck. It will take education itself ultimately to break this bottleneck by developing the potential talents of our youth as fully as possible. GROWING TEACHER SHORTAGES Let me illustrate. We calculate roughly that over the next 10 years the elementary and secondary schools of this country, on the basis of present pupil-teacher ratios, will require a total of new teachers equivalent to better than 40 percent of all 4-year college graduates who will be emerging in the same 10 years. If we had to rely entirely on the colleges to staff our schools, we would then require 4 out of every 10 college graduates to enter elementary and secondary teaching. This is, obviously, not going to happen. We have recently been getting as much as 20 percent of the college graduates into school teaching, at least for a time. At the college level we have estimated that over the next 10 years the total number of new college teachers needed, calculated on the basis of present teacher-pupil ratios, would be, optimistically, 3 times the number of new Ph. D.'s likely to be produced in the same years. This assumes a substantial increase in the output of Ph. D.'s. But since no better than half of the new Ph. D.'s can be expected to enter college teaching, now that industry and government have discovered the Ph. D.'s and paid them better, we must anticipate that if we adhere to our present patterns of teacher utilization, that by 1970 the proportion of all college teachers with Ph. D. training will have declined from the present level of about 40 percent to less than 20 percent. In other words, the average college student in 1970 will have only half the chance that a present college student has to be taught by a teacher with Ph. D. training. This is not something that is going to happen; it has already begun to happen. A recent study of the NEA shows that of the new college teachers hired 4 years ago in this country, better than 31 percent had Ph. D. training. But that percentage declined each year since, until last year instead of 31 percent it was already down to 23 percent. The quality erosion I mentioned earlier has already set in, in full force. FAR-REACHING REVOLUTION OF EDUCATIONAL PRACTICES Thus, I repeat that nothing short of a far-reaching revolution of educational practices and procedures can avert a serious decline in the quality of American education at every level over the next 10 to 20 years. It is to that technological revolution in education that we address our attention today. No one can blueprint in detail the changes that are needed. They must be discovered through widespread ingenuity and experimentation. But the following general lines of approach seem indicated: First, we must clarify the objective and priorities of every school and college. And we must overhaul every curriculum and every course to honor these priorities and to serve these objectives efficiently. This is a task for laymen and educators alike, working in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Second, we must find ways to enable teachers, much better paid teachers, to raise their productivity. We must make it possible for every well-qualified teacher to serve more students than now, and to serve each one better than now. This can be done by freeing them to teach to their full potential; for example, by giving them helpers who can perform the clerical and housekeeping chores and the lesser professional tasks which now rob the teacher's time and energy and lessen the attractiveness of teaching. Third, we must, above all, enable our finest and most unusual teachers those masters both of the art of teaching and of scholarship who will always be in short supply-to extend their reach to a greatly enlarged number of students so that all may benefit from such stimulation and excellence. HARNESSING MOST MODERN MEANS OF COMMUNICATION This we can do by harnessing to the service of education the most modern means of communication-television, radio, films, electronic tapes, and the like-just as the printed page was earlier fashioned into a potent instrument of learning. Properly used, these potent new instruments can do much to pull today's poorest classroom up to the level of the best. Even more important, they can greatly raise the level of the best. Television and films can make rich learning experiences available to students which even the finest teacher in the best conventional classroom cannot otherwise provide. |