which are being used for classroom instruction exactly the way you described it, and it is satisfactory for that purpose. But one of the problems we have in all of this is the fact that it is tremendously expensive to operate a television station. Almost without exception, I will say, a station must get some community support or some public support of some kind. If the community or the public do not understand what is happening, and they cannot understand it when they are not associated or related and do not have an opportunity to witness it, it makes it almost impossible to get the kind of support for a station which it needs to operate effectively. PUBLIC ACCEPTANCE OF TV EDUCATION Senator YARBOROUGH. Do you not really have more roadblocks in the public acceptance of TV education than you do in governmental action up to this time? Mr. WEISS. I do not know. It is perhaps a chicken-and-egg situation. If the Government reflects the public point of view, then I suppose that is true. Senator YARBOROUGH. But you need mass education on the need for educational TV, do you not, if you want to get the money appropriated? It costs money to build a station. Mr. WEISS. I think the hearing that we are having here today is very useful in terms of bringing to the public's attention, the potential of TV and also the problems that are standing in the way of utilizing it. It is very useful. Senator YARBOROUGH. Thank you for bringing these problems to our attention. I have one question, only, for Dr. Coombs. OVERHAULING CURRICULUM Dr. Coombs, you say that We must clarify the objectives and priorities of every school and college. And we must overhaul every curriculum and every course to honor those priorities and to serve these objectives efficiently. In your opinion, in higher education in this country, is there too great a diversity between colleges in the objective and priorities or is there too little difference between them? Are they too limited in college? Should there be more experimentation, research and divergence? Mr. COOMBS. I think, Senator Yarborough, that there is a commendable degree of diversity among our different higher educational institutions, and we could perhaps even have greater diversity. But within those institutions there is perhaps too much diversity. I dare say that the curriculum could stand a careful and rigorous reexamination, because the American college curriculum tends to proliferate, reflecting often the interests and the very commendable enthusiasms of individual faculty members. We keep adding courses. We seldom eliminate old ones. A high proportion of the resources of higher education go into the curriculum. Therefore, if we are going to operate our colleges on a viable economic basis, we have got to houseclean the curriculum and focus our resources upon that com -ination of courses which can best serve the needs, not merely of the aculty, but of the students as well. We need less diversity in the curriculum within the institutions while. e preserve the very valuable diversity among the institutions. Senator YARBOROUGH. Thank you. Mr. Chairman, I have no further questions. The CHAIRMAN. Senator Hoblitzell, we are delighted to have you with us here this morning. Would you like to ask some questions? Senator HOBLITZELL. I do not have any questions. NUMBERS OF STUDENTS IN SCIENCE COURSES Senator ALLOTT. I do not want to prolong this. For the benefit of enator Morse, I think some of the figures he was looking for are in e survey made by the United States Office of Education as follows: hat 1 out of 3 high school students take chemistry, 1 out of 4, physics, out of 3, intermediate algebra, 1 out of 8, trigonometry or solid ometry; 100,000 seniors were in public high schools where no adnced mathematics of any kind is offered. About 61,000 were in hools that offered neither chemistry nor physics; 14 States do not quire as much as a single course in either science or mathematics r graduation in high school. Senator MORSE. I want to thank the Senator. I think we ought to eak it down further along the lines of bulletin No. 2. I think we so ought to have the number of specific high schools. Senator ALLOTT. I think so. In that respect, the Department of lucation on March 11, just announced a new survey of this which has great many aspects. They have tried to cover it pretty completely d have surveyed the high schools to try to find out just what these ures are. The CHAIRMAN. Those figures were submitted by Dr. Derthick from The CHAIRMAN. Mr. Coombs and Mr. Weiss, I want to thank you. ATEMENT OF MAURICE MITCHELL, PRESIDENT, ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA FILMS Ir. MITCHELL. Thank you. note from an examination of my colleagues testifying today that m the only one to represent that group which Senator Allott was rested in, private enterprise in communications in education. I identified with that projection machine that stands here, Senator, the screen in back of me, and the loudspeaker. t is my purpose here this morning to suggest to the committee there are impressive resources in instructional materials already existence that contain some of the answers to some of our conporary problems in education. I suggest that in our study of the crisis in our schools, we give thought not only to construction facilities, teachers, wages, but also to the tools which bring all of these other resources to life, which implement their efforts through the actual process of instruction. TYPICAL AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS I have here this morning samples taken from a cross section of typical audiovisual materials. I daresay, that as I sit here this morning in front of this projector, all of the complete films represented by the samples on this reel are actually being used in schools all over the country. I am not sure that I can answer Senator Allott's earlier question, which interested me a great deal, about why, if these are good tools, they have not been more successfully distributed through private enterprise and why they are not now performing maximum service in the solution of some of our problems. HISTORY OF EDUCATIONAL FILMS My associates have been involved in the production of these materials for 30 years. Our predecessors produced the first sound educational picture for educational use in the United States. It, by the way, was the child of a historical occasion: Al Jolson singing Mammy on the screen of the Paramount Theater in New York City. When that first talking picture was made, it suggested to many educators that a dream they had for ages, as far back as the 17th century and even earlier, a dream that some day they could bring to the classrooms sights and sounds and combinations of them that no teacher had ever before been able to use, had finally come true. Thus there was born, 30 years ago, an instructional materials industry in education known as the audiovisual industry. There have been produced since 1930, several thousand educational motion pictures. As a result there exists in this country today, extensive resources in educational motion pictures. There also exists in this country today, an impressive nucleus of trained teachers and educational administrators who know how to use these materials and have developed their skills in classroom utilization, in selection of films and in the procedures of distribution. A POWERFUL RESOURCE This would suggest, it seems to me, that we may have at our fingertips a useful-indeed a powerful-resource for which we do not have to invent anything new. We do not have to tear apart the existing school buildings. We do not have to radically change the process of teaching. We have a resource that may be employed literally overnight, if it could be made available in sufficient quantity and under conditions which make it truly available to our teachers. It would make a major contribution immediately to the solution of one of our most vexing problems in the educational crisis, the problem of equipping the teacher to deal with the constantly increasing content of the curriculums, to deal with the great flood of new material that has been added to just the simple logistics of teaching since this committee and I went to school. History has proceeded a great deal further since the days when I studied. They stopped teaching physics long before they split the atom when I was a physics student. The problems of delivering these new concepts, the problems of dealing with some of the abstract and complex processes in nature, in science, and biology, that confront teachers have been solved in thousands of classrooms around the United States by these materials. And the use of these films has hortened the teaching process, relieved many of the pressures on teachrs and improved the quality of education. Why are they not more widely used? HELPING RELIEVE BURDEN ON TEACHERS The problem in education in the last decade or two has been the remendous burden on educators to absorb, with available funds, the ost of educating an increased population, of dealing with problems f teachers' salaries, of building new buildings. I suppose I could nswer your question most simply if I said they just haven't had the oney. In addition, these things take time. Traditionally, in education, it as been said it takes 50 years for a good new idea to penetrate and ain adoption through the full length and breadth of all the instituons of education. We are now only 30 years into the development of hese techniques. Perhaps we are 20 years away, but in those next 0 years, if we can accelerate this development the teachers of the nited States who will have had increased access to these materials an make distinguished use of them in the solution of many of our ost pressing problems. I think it is safe to say that at no time during the past 30 years as the demand for these classroom films been matched by the availole resources. I do not believe there is an educational film library the United States, whether it exists at the State level, the university vel or the county level, that is not now operating at much more an 10, 20, or 30, or 40 percent of the real demand that exists in its vn area for these films. PRESENTATION OF FILMS Perhaps I should now stop talking and turn to a showing of the ms themselves. I have prepared for you an extensive statement hich I hope you will find useful in your consideration of the place motion pictures in contemporary education. I will impose on your ne now for a few moments to show you excerpts from some of these ms, in the hope that this will give you some idea of what they atmpt to do in the classroom. What I have here are 30-second, 1- and 2-minute segments, from a oss section of films and a variety of subject areas and grade levels. The first one you will see is a slow-motion picture which shows a a hawk in flight, from a film called Beach and Sea. It is used in e study of nature. By the way, only students on either coasts in the ited States can personally study our beach and sea animals. It n otherwise be taught only with difficulty in inland areas. I would suggest, Mr. Chairman, if it seems convenient to you, that ce I have placed the screen for the benefit of the committe, you may want to ask the audience elsewhere in the room to change seats so they can also see them. The CHAIRMAN. I want everybody here to have the opportunity to see the screen. TYPICAL EQUIPMENT USED IN THE CLASSROOM Mr. MITCHELL. Perhaps I should observe, before we throw the switch, that what you are seeing is a typical projector used in the average classroom, a screen of a kind that would be used in the average classroom, and we have lighting conditions that are not unlike many of the new schools. We refer to them as greenhouse schools, with their great expanses of glass which, by the very nature of this kind of construction, make it impossible to adapt the classrooms to modern devices such as the motion picture. I suggest to you that there is great concern in the audio-visual field with respect to this trend in school construction. To get back to these films, what I have first to show you is an excerpt which runs about 30 seconds. It was made for children in the middle grades and junior-high-school biology area. It is called Beach and Sea Animals. Here, in a few seconds, from a portion of that film, is how a teacher might show youngsters something they might not otherwise see in any other medium. [Screen: Excerpt from Beach and Sea Animals.] I will switch now to a senior-high-school biology excerpt to show you what some people have referred to as a tour de force in photography, an incredible piece of photomicrography. This is a protozoa film. We asked the photographer to draw the eye of a needle across the field of a high-powered microscope to show the comparable size of microscopic life, of protozoa. Then we produced in color a remarkable view of an ameba. [Screen: Protozoa.] The alternative for a teacher who does not have this film is to attempt to explain or describe it, with a result that many teachers call verbalizing, which is one of the great enemies of good education. A student who has memorized a set of words which are a part of his textbook or lesson book sometimes can repeat them on examination without having any understanding of their meaning. This is verbalizing. It is not learning. No microscope ordinarily is available in a biology class which would show streaming protoplasm in an ameba, in color, as you have just seen. The next film, Flowers at Work, shows the pollination of a tulip. This is a teaching problem, not only in biology, but also in the broad subject area of agriculture. This film was made for the midde grades. [Screen: Flowers at Work.] What you have seen here is the camera synthesizing time, using a technique called time lapse to illustrate and describe a process that no class could see otherwise. The next film is called Monarch Butterfly. It is a classic visual demonstration of the metamorphosis of a caterpillar to a butterfly. This was also made for the middle grades. [Screen: Monarch Butterfly.] One interesting experience that we have had from this film was a byproduct that no one expected. Many youngsters learned to define |