And if illiteracy in any part of the United States is this kind of a cancer, I certainly feel that if the local community does not take the initiative for one reason or another, it must come from a larger community. And if the State community as a larger community does not take the initiative, I can see the Federal Government doing it.

And we have done it in the past. We do it in health regulations. We have done it in defense. We do it even in postal regulations. I see no reason why in education, which is the backbone of everything we do, in every kind of vocational and professional experience, we should deny that opportunity there.

Some of you may have read, in the education page of the New York Times, yesterday-and some of you put it aside until you could get to it-there was a reference to a report of a project conducted at Bronx Community College, a project of which I was codirector with Prof. Morris Meister and Dean Talbor, which we called Operation Second Chance. And this is even on the college level for young men and young women who could not gain admission to a college, young men and young women who were not prepared for, well, the kind of vocational skills required in industry today.

This report has attracted nationwide attention today, because we were able, through what I would call pure simple adult education, to upgrade them to the point where they could pursue the kind of technology program which prepares the subprofessional for electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical technology, medical lab technology, or nursing. And I could go on and repeat the many things we heard today that are also true.

We find in our State, in New York State, at the time it gave support and aid to adult education, there was a growth in the program. When the State found is necessary to retrench its aid, we find the programs decreasing. Where the programs were skyrocketing to a million, it is back to half a million.

In New York City, specifically, when I directed the program, in which we had as many as 50,000 to 60,000 adults participating, a tremendous budget burden upon a community; but I think that the city did it graciously and willingly enough, but was unable to do as much as it should do.

The main problem of getting the program to people: We have a migrant population in New York City, I think, that still exceeds that of any community in the country. We have some schools in New York City where a teacher would face one set of students in September, and, by the time promotion time came around, the following June, there would be a 100-percent turnover of the student body.

Not only does that affect the elementary school, the secondary school. How to we capture the adult? How do we get him where he is?

We attempted some closed-circuit TV programs, piped the programs right into the home, where the parent could not leave the family, leave the children, and go out to a school at night. But this costs money, and it costs a tremendous amount of money.

I feel that a community that helps, the State that helps, and the Federal Government that helps, is doing a service that would make these United States the model of democracies and would strengthen us in every aspect of education.

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And so I support very, very strongly, not only personally but as a representative of the many associations I am identified with H.R. 10191, because the wording seems to be a little broader, a little more general, and a little more liberal in interpretation, than 10143.

If I may refer to the telegram that Congressman Ryan read, is it permissible to correct the record? The New York Adult Education Council has been in existence 30 years, and not 3 years. I am a member of the board of directors of that body, and I think the record ought to show that it is a substantial organization.

Thank you very much.

Mr. PERKINS. From your education and training and experience in this particular field of adult education-we will narrow your many qualifications to this particular area-do you believe that the passage of this legislation will motivate the States in general, and the local communities, to give more attention and funds to this aspect of adult education by developing qualified personnel and materials as well as programs of instruction?

Dr. SILVERMAN. I am glad you raised that question with me, and I should have referred to it in my address.

There is no doubt in my mind that, first, there is a tremendous deficiency in the training programs in our State, and I think it exists in many States.

Second, I think that the moneys needed for it are so urgently needed for other program, justifiably.

We now have in New York State a Dieffendoff committee, with which I have been in communication rather intimately, coming up with a new State aid recommendation for support of education in New York State, in which all earmarked funds now become part of a single formula. And the moneys which were identifiable for adult education no longer are so identifiable.

I think it is going to do a disservice to adult education in our State, and it is not because the States does not want to support the program. I think it is a question of how many dollars the State has to support education in general, and it is trying to put these moneys in one lump sum and let the local community make a decision where it is best needed.

Now, that is good. But I think that if one phase of education is going to be denied to a community, we are doing that community a disservice and the State and the Nation a disservice. And I feel that if we do have moneys specifically earmarked for adult education, it is a signal for the States as to what they should do and must do and must continue to do.

I feel it will help to develop the programs at the university level, for the training of teachers and directors of adult education. Our own association has a committee for establishment of what we call the status of directors of adult education, so that they meet minimum certification requirements, which call for specialized training, so that they could do a better job.

And as I think Dr. Hand referred to in his address: If all the moneys were used during the first year simply for the development of leadership, it would be the best-spent dollar that I could think of today.

Mr. PERKINS. Thank you very much, Doctor. We certainly appreciate your testimony.

Dr. SILVERMAN. Thank you.

Mr. PERKINS. I understand we have with us Mr. Arthur P. Crabtree, head of citizenship education and supervision of adult education in the State Department of Education, Albany, N.Y.

Will you identify yourself and proceed, sir?

STATEMENT OF ARTHUR P. CRABTREE, HEAD, CITIZENSHIP EDUCATION AND SUPERVISOR, ADULT EDUCATION, BUREAU OF ADULT EDUCATION, STATE DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION, ALBANY, N.Y. Mr. CRABTREE. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am Arthur P. Crabtree, State supervisor of adult education, in the State Education Department of New York State. I am also, for further identification, currently vice president of the Adult Education Association of the United States, which is the other national association in adult education outside the public schools.

I should like to express my deep appreciation, Mr. Chairman, for the privilege of being here, and to go on the record as being completely in support of both of these bills. But, like the preceding witnesses, I think the broader terminology employed in 10191 might be a little more comprehensive to meet the needs of this problem across the Nation at the present time.

In order to save your time and the time of the committee, I would like to omit as much as possible some of the things which have been said by the preceding witnesses, and not duplicate them, and speak a little bit from the standpoint of what might be regarded as one of the affluent States in the field of adult education. Dr. Silverman has touched on some of the aspects of the situation in New York State.

We have, roughly, in the State of New York, 12 million people who have not completed a sixth-grade education, by our most recent figures. This group includes the Puerto Ricans.

We get, I think, perhaps, with due obeisance to Florida, the bulk of this population group in New York City. Some of them get out as far as Rochester and Buffalo, but most of them stay in New York City.

The second large segment of this 112 million are the southern migrant workers who come up to work in the fields, in fruit and agriculture, and many of whom stay with us through the entire year.

The third group, of course, is the native-born white, who is born among us in the State, and who evaded the compulsory school laws. And then, of course, the fourth is the great mass of foreign born, of which the port of New York City also gets the major share.

I think the aspects of this proposed bill which are worthy of our most support in the field of adult education roughly would be these: No. 1, its provision for teacher training.

Actually, we do not have many teachers doing this kind of adult education. As a matter of fact, we just do not have a very large segment of the total adult education field devoted to this. The teachers who are in it for the most part are teachers of the foreign born, who have been there for many years, because this is one of the oldest aspects of adult education in this country. And many of these teachers are

veteran teachers who have survived through a process of trial and error, and with a captive audience have gotten by with bad teaching for many years.

There has not been much facility for teacher training or for the improvement of this group of our teachers in the field of adult edu

cation.

So teacher training to bring these oldsters up to date and to train new ones for this job would be of tremendous help in this field.

Secondly, we need the money suggested in this bill from the standpoint of materials. Up to about 1942, or along about 1940, we were still using first grade primers written for children, to teach hornyhanded truckdrivers the facetious story, as told, of the supervisor who wandered into a class, and here was a big leather-faced, hornyhanded truck driver who was trying to decipher a sentence, which, when he finally got finished with it, said, "I am a buttercup.'

This is ridiculous, of course. But this is the kind of material we have been using in this field for some time. And only in recent years has there been a breakthrough toward a better type of materials, with which to teach the adult, written in his interest and in his language and in his terminology. And there is still a great dearth of this kind of material in this field, and we need money for the textbook writing of appropriate teaching materials.

Thirdly, I would like to address myself for a moment to an aspect of this which was touched on by Dr. Holt of Pennsylvania.

You have to dig these people out of their haunts in order to bring them into adult education. This is the great inarticulate mass of people, of our market in adult education, who have been unwilling and unable to express their needs.

The very climate of adult education is a voluntary climate. It is a climate of free choice. It is a climate in which the adult comes forth and says, "I want these things educationally."

We have found through years of experience with this kind of adult, the fellow who cannot read or write, the fellow who does not have a third or fourth grade education-he is embarrassed. He does not want to come forth and admit that he is educationally incapacitated. So we have to go out and beat the bushes to bring them in.

Most of your adult education programs at the local level in this country are set up in response to articulate people, the people who want a class in French, the people who want a class in Russian, the people who want a class in oil painting. They can come forward and say: These things we want.

But the fellow who cannot read or write does not do this. So we have to go out and get him and bring him in, because we cannot afford, as a society, to let him stay out there in ignorance.

And I think this aspect of money for this kind of thing is tremendously significant in these times.

Take in our own State of New York. Last year we had over 450,000 people in our adult program under the public schools. We spent about $1,400,000 in State aid; and that is a drastic reduction from what it has been.

But I would venture to suggest-we have no available figures, but a very infinitestimal part of this roughly $5 million bill for the total cost of adult education in New York State-I would roughly suggest

that a very infinitestimal portion of this was spent on this kind of adult education, for the reason that the local administrator who sets up a program in adult education, being human, does not take the time to go out in the byways and in the recesses of society and the ghettoes, where these kind of people live, to do the legwork that is necessary to bring them in, into classes, and to interest them in any form of adult education.

Mr. GRIFFIN. Could I interrupt you there and ask this: How are we going to do that from Washington?

Mr. CRABTREE. I do not think, Mr. Griffin, it is a question of whether it comes from Washington or not. I think it is a question of whether we are going to do it at all or not. And money can do it, by adding staff.

We are now embarking, in New York, on a program, rather coincidentally, of this kind, hopefully, within our own bureau office, the bureau of adult education. And we have been sitting around the last month or 6 weeks debating how to set up a program of remedial reading, which is another aspect, of course, of the thing we are talking about.

And we have pretty well come to the conclusion, Mr. Griffin, in direct answer to your question, that it is going to take additional staff at the local level, somebody working with the director of adult education, who can go to the social service people and say: "How many people do you have on your rolls? Who are they? Where do they live? And can we invite them into adult education?"

To go to the regent of the Puerto Rican contingent in New York City and say: "Can we exert a little more effort to get these people in to master the English language?"

So I do not think it is a question of whether the money comes from Albany or whether it comes from Washington. I think the primary question is that money will enable us to put on more staff, to get the job done that is not being done now; and probably will not be done under State auspices in the foreseeable future, in the immediate future. At least we are not doing it now. This is as simple a way as I can see. It needs a greater effort to come from somewhere.

The great task, of course: Many of the preceding witnesses this morning have talked about the job of getting these people off the relief rolls, to make them more employable. I happen to have been State director of the WPA adult education in Indiana, a neighboring State of both Kentucky and Michigan, in the 1940's and late 1930's. This was one of the great jobs we had to do through the processes of the education program on WPA, to train the people who came to us who were unemployable into other schools, whereby they might get back off the WPA rolls and back into private employment.

But I happen to be even more interested apart from the vocational aspect. I happen to be even more interested in the terriffc toll which this reservoir of educational incompetence, of ignorance, is making in terms of our democratic society.

I happen to believe that the primary business of education in this country at all levels is to make every man who walks the streets of our American communities understand a little more richly what this think we call democracy is. And if the elections in Michigan and Kentucky were similar to those across the Nation, fewer than 60 percent of the eligible electorate sent you gentlemen here.