I would say unless you have a certain amount of screening, and maybe more screening than is going on at this time, you simply lower down the higher schools of education with too much ballast, with children who either are not really interested or are not sufficiently talented, and so forth. This lowers the standards for the rest of them. Mr. DIXON. I was interested in your statement, inferring that our teachers spend so much time doing what I might call polishing cobblestones and dimming diamonds, and the statistics will prove how a counselor spends his time and where our money is spent, that we are losing out there. I think that has so much value.

This question of screening, however, is surely a delicate one in the light of the fact that in our country, our safety depends upon an enlightened citizenry, and they all rule theoretically, and I guess truthfully to a great extent, while in a totalitarian state they do not have to educate that broad base, therefore their money can go so much farther to any crash program.

Mr. THOMPSON. Do they have football scholarships over there?

Mr. DIXON. Do you think we have to drift a little more in the direction of a totalitarian state which takes away some of the individuality or individual rights of our people, until we can compete?

Mr. VON BRAUN. Sir, my personal opinion on this subject is that I would not say "drift toward the totalitarian state," but cut certain things out of the school curriculums that may be less important than others. I think too much time in practically all of the schools in the United States go into things that you might call social adjustment or boy-girl relationships in college, and beauty care and automobile driving, and things like that, and too little into hard learning like mathematics and physics and chemistry, and so forth.

I would like to come back to this question of singlemindedness. You take the greatest inventors in the world, these probably were poorly adjusted socially. I mean, even a man like Edison. He could forget the outside world. He closed himself up in his laboratory and devoted all of his time and effort for a whole week to a minor little technological problem. He had no television or anything like that. Although he invented the phonograph, he probably did not listen to it later on. In other words, he just concentrated on this sort of thing. I think the record will probably show that the greatest artists and philosophers and thinkers and inventors and scientists all over the world were pretty poorly adjusted socially, and in this sense even the poor citizens, poorly informed citizens, but they had retained this capability of single-mindedness.

This, in my opinion, is important. We are devoting a lot of time in schools and colleges to these things to make a so-called citizen, but we forget that we make a very average person out of many, rather than a unique, outstanding individual who is still capable of singleminded devotion to a specific purpose.

Mr. DIXON. One other point.

I have gleaned from your testimony that you have the idea that our country, in its treatment of our teachers, is pretty much on the socialistic side, which keeps them all pretty much to one level. In other words, a beginning teacher usually gets less than half of the salary that a full professor does.

In Russia, I guess a full professor gets many, many times more, maybe 10 times as much as a beginning teacher.

Mr. VON BRAUN. He is the man who drives the Cadillac in Russia, the full professor.

Mr. DIXON. They have adopted our free enterprise system of incentives, and we have pretty much adopted the socialistic system of a dead level when it comes to the treatment of our college people. Would you apply the free enterprise idea to college faculties? Mr. VON BRAUN. Yes, sir.

Mr. DIXON. To produce great incentives?

Mr. VON BRAUN. Yes.

Mr. DIXON. You talked about incentives all the way through. Fleming said "Tell me a boy's I. Q. and I will tell you what he might be able to do, but show me what he wants to do and I will tell you what he will do."

I love your statement from that angle of creating a grade incentive, a will to do the thing. I guess this psychology is the biggest thing. I guess that is more important than an I. Q., the will to do the thing. That is what we have to put into our program.

Mr. THOMPSON. Dr. von Braun, I have one further thing I would like to get from you. I have introduced in the Congress for some time now a bill calling for the creation of a distinguished civilian award to be conferred in the name of the Government by the President on people in all fields of endeavor, particularly the arts and sciences, to give them a distinction which heretofore this country has denied. We have the Congressional Medal of Honor for the military. We have some forms of other awards but none at the very top levels. Do you think that it would stimulate interest and competition and give a distinction which they do not now have to scholars if we had such an award by this country to its citizens?

Mr. VON BRAUN. Most definitely; yes, sir.

Mr. THOMPSON. Other countries do have these awards, do they not? Mr. VON BRAUN. Yes. There are even international awards like the Nobel prize, which also adds prestige to the recipients. I think anything along those lines, the more prestige it conveys, the better, and it would be in the right direction.

Mr. THOMPSON. Thank you very much.

I have been really delighted with your testimony, and especially pleased with the depth of your thinking.

Mr. VON BRAUN. Thank you.

Mr. ELLIOTT. Thank you very much, Dr. von Braun. The committee is very grateful to you.

Our next witness is Dr. Guy E. Snavely, president of Lafayette College, Easton, Pa.

Dr. Snavely for many years was president of the BirminghamSouthern College, in Birmingham, Ala., a Methodist institution. You may proceed, Doctor.

STATEMENT OF GUY E. SNAVELY, PRESIDENT, LAFAYETTE

COLLEGE, EASTON, PA.

Mr. SNAVELY. I am Guy E. Snavely, interim president of Lafayette College, Easton, Pa. Previously I was for 19 years the president of Birmingham-Southern College in Birmingham, Ala. More recently I was for 17 years the executive director of the Association of American Colleges. Save for the 2 years of World War I, I have spent

my whole life in school and college business, having been at one time or another a secondary-school teacher and administrator, a college professor, registrar, and dean.

In the light of this experience I am emboldened to express opposition to the bills now pending before the Congress that would make large grants by the way of scholarships, loans and work opportunities to college students. There are now ample facilities in all these areas for students who have the desire and motivation to continue education beyond the high school. In fact, statistics show that any lad who has a high scholastic record can obtain readily a scholarship or other assistance for his college education.

Three years ago after retiring from the directorship of the Association of American Colleges, I was unexpectedly called back to be interim president of Birmingham-Southern College. When I left that position 17 years before, the registrar's office accepted and passed on applications for the freshman class. On my return I found a fulltime admissions officer whose job was to persuade candidates of the quality of our offerings. On further investigation I found that our neighbor institutions all had 2, 3, and sometimes 4 admission officers.

On college days at the larger Birmingham high schools came a horde of this new type of college official. A number came for hundreds of miles, some from northern Virginia and some even from New England. Really only a few were looking for good football material. I am sure most were quite honest in stating they desired a wide geographical distribution of quality students. The point I am making is that where a student has an ambition for a college education and is lacking in funds the way is open for him.

The staggering amounts of money involved in the proposed grants will add to a Federal debt now apparently and necessarily to be increased to meet the current economic situation. One wonders where this trend of Federal aid will extend. The railroads will soon have to "holler" for help if they are to survive. Maybe the oil business will need Federal support. Yesterday at a committee meeting of presidents of church-related colleges, a Texan expressed great concern about his financial supporters being unable, through legal bans, to put enough of their product on the market to maintain a reasonable profit.

For the past decade there have evolved plans of unusual giving to the colleges by their alumni. In many instances these annual gifts have reached sizable amounts; in several of the older eastern colleges the totals last year ran over a million dollars. In about the same period annual gifts to the colleges by corporations have increased significantly. The Association of American Colleges played an important role in this movement; 40 State college associations have been formed under its aegis whose members spend several weeks each year with the college presidents going in pairs to interview corporation executives.

Obviously these sympathetic corporations and alumni givers will have to pay the increased taxes made necessary by the expenses involved in this Federal-aid proposal. Thus will be dried up the annual giving now relied on fully by many colleges for the balancing of their budgets. This will mean a double deficiency in budgetary problems because every new student, from whatever source his funds may

come, pays in most cases just about half what it costs the college to educate him.

The various bills take the precaution to limit Federal control through the Office of Education or similar governmental machinery. However, a study of the bills shows clearly that the plan will necessarily operate through 48 petty tyrants instead of 1 of greater magnitude. The enactment of the proposed law will indubitably bring on a generation of sissies. Many of you, like myself, do not regret the struggle necessary to obtain our college education. I trust the hard work we put in, often with little pay, does not make us lose mental, physical, social, emotional or spiritual stature.

For the past 3 years there have come over my presidential desk oodles of offers of postgraduate fellowships for competent seniors to attend the outstanding graduate and professional schools. If some emergency may conceivably prevail temporarily in one or more of the sciences we have an avenue of aid through the National Science Foundation. It seems to operate with little or no governmental redtape. Larger grants to the Foundation may be made from time to time, or even withdrawn, according to apparent necessity.

I thank you, sir, for inviting me to come and present my voice in the wilderness, and I will go back to my duties.

I want to say without hesitation that all the comment that was made here this morning, drawn from the distinguished German doctor here, meets my approval. I do not think it had anything to do with granting Federal aid to scholarships. I do not know what he said in his original paper. I came in after he delivered it. All of the conversation had nothing to do with what I am talking about.

Mr. ELLIOTT. Dr. Snavely, someone has called these two main bills pending before this committee the "inspirational approach." Some refer to it as being massive. But when you get down to the fact that we only have 27,000 high schools, if you fix a number of scholarships somewhere in the neighborhood of, in the proportion let us say of, one scholarship per high school, all that can amount to is an inspirational attempt to lift up American thoughts about education, particularly among its young people. At least, that is our theory. That is the theory that we go upon.

I never have thought that the proposals we have will come anywhere near solving, as desirable as they may be or may not be, the problem of trying to get the upper 25 percent of our students in college who do not now go.

You have had a long and honorable experience in the educational field. Do you think that America would profit greatly if it could get its upper 25 percent, or one-half of its upper 25 percent, who do not now attend college into schools?

Mr. SNAVELY. Well, frankly, I do not see how this will tend to motivate or stimulate a desire in boys who want to go to college, any more than it does now. They have the finest opportunities to go with the scholarships prevailing at the greatest colleges and universities. I do not see how it is necessary and why it would help any more. Mr. McGOVERN. Would the chairman yield?

Mr. ELLIOTT. The gentleman from South Dakota.

Mr. McGOVERN. Dr. Snavely, I think you heard the discussion when Dr. von Braun was before the committee here a few moments

ago, when he suggested that one of the things that is needed here in the United States is a greater awareness on the part of the public of the importance of education; that we have got to do something to lift the prestige of scholarship and convince our young people that education is worthwhile.

Would not the endorsement of education by the Federal Government to the extent suggested here in the chairman's bill and in other proposals make a contribution in that direction? We would be serving notice that the Congress thinks that scholarly attainment is important enough so that we are willing to recognize it by some financial encouragement.

Mr. SNAVELY. Let me ask you, how does that help the teacher, the high-school teacher or the college professor? This giving of money for students to go to college does not give the teacher any prestige, does not raise their salaries.

Mr. McGOVERN. That may be true. I do not think that a Federal scholarship program is a whole answer to our educational problem, but perhaps it is one part of the answer. We have to do more than that if we are going to solve the problem that faces our teachers and our institutions, but perhaps that is one step in that direction.

Mr. SNAVELY. Frankly, I thought the main contribution in the discussion that I heard here was Dr. von Braun saying, in effect, that we have had a sloppy way of educating our elementary and high school children. John Dewey would certainly have turned over in his grave if he had heard him. They are taking courses to get in out of the rain instead of preparing themselves to be students in college, and later life.

I think there is our problem. How can the scholarship program in the United States Government rectify that thing? I think we have to have continual talking and publicity and discussion in those

areas.

Mr. ELLIOTT. Dr. Snavely, do you think we might accomplish something by airing these viewpoints about education at this time?

Mr. SNAVELY. I will admit that, but I should err to think what will the tendency be as I have indicated in my remarks.

Mr. ELLIOTT. We have looked into these scholarship programs a bit, Dr. Snavely, and I say in the greatest good humor, because I have great respect for your attainments as an educator. Are you not on the advisory board of Walker College?

Mr. SNAVELY. I am, sir. You are the man that keeps that organization going. But will the United States help that type of school which is doing a wonderful service in the community? They will not get the opportunities that they could get in Birmingham or other places. I think that is a fine school that should be encouraged.

I would not say that the United States Government ought to go in and help the school survive or grow.

Mr. ELLIOTT. Let us take another example. I was in a high school last December in Alabama and asked to see the laboratory at the school and they carried me into a room where there was a washbasin. It was not a manufactured one, apparently, I think it had been built in the shop. It was a square basin built out of iron or tin. I was told that that was the laboratory.

This bill has a provision providing for matchable grants to the States with which to bring laboratories up to some degree of pro