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loan recipient could well look on the subsequent cancellation of his loan as a portion of his "salary" from teaching. Indeed, if he were to enter any other profession, he would have to pay back $1,000 or so per year, taking away from his net salary.

It is apparent, therefore, that the national defense student loan program has numerous long-term educational advantages. It provides the necessary machinery to produce the additional qualified teachers we so desperately need. It would set in motion a process which could result in a steady upgrading of our educational level.

Unless something is done, and that speedily, in the interests of public education, all of us will suffer. Certainly a student loan program allowing Federal grants is meritorious in its scope and fully warranted by the present status of public education. Therefore, Mr. Chairman, I strongly urge its adoption. Thank you.

STATEMENT OF REPRESENTATIVE HAROLD C. OSTERTAG

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, during the recent months I have corresponded with many of the leading educators in my Congressional District, 39th of New York, to learn their views on the problems of our education system and on the proposals made in Congress for aiding education. This correspondence was conducted with presidents and deans of colleges and universities, chairmen of college departments, and superintendents of public school systems. These educators have set forth well-considered opinions on the subject and I am very gratified by the replies. I think the members of this committee would be aided. too, by the thinking of these gentlemen and I would like to convey to the committee a summary of their opinions.

These educators were opposed almost unanimously to the proposal for establishment of a United States Science Academy by the Federal Government. It was contended that this would be a very costly duplication of already existing facilities. Such funds would be more valuable if used to strengthen and expand science facilities at existing universities and colleges. In addition, such an academy would be staffed at the expense of existing institutions since a great need for more good instructors already is present.

There was much agreement, too, on the value of an increased Federal scholarship program. But almost all of the educators emphasized that scholarships must be based on need as well as ability. They pointed out that a Federal scholarship program would serve little purpose if it only reduced costs for those students who had other means of financing a higher education; the purpose must be to make a higher education available to those talented students who are unable to continue because of financial reasons.

Provisions to improve testing of students to determine educational capabilities also were strongly supported. Apparently, the need for more students is not so great as the need for better students.

But most college and university leaders declared that greater support for staffs and faculties was as necessary at this point as aid to students. It was stressed that if the quality of our science and mathematics instruction is to be maintained and improved, teaching staffs of these departments must be strengthened. There should be added incentives to retain and attract instructors and there must be improved and expanded facilities-equipment and laboratories-in these fields. It was recommended that maximum attention be given to this facet of our educational problem. So important was this deemed, one suggestion was made that every scholarship award be matched by an equal grant to the college receiving the student.

Another interesting proposal would have each recipient of a Federal scientific scholarship serve a minimum period of time, upon graduation, with a Federal laboratory or similar facility, somewhat comparable to the military Reserve officer training programs.

Increased support for basic research was also urged by a majority of the educators. Basic research was pictured as vital to our continued progress.

I trust the members of your committee will find these recommendations as valuable as I did. I was interested in presenting the views of these educational leaders to this committee with the belief that this will be helpful in formulating a sound legislative program in this important field. Thank you.

STATEMENT OF HON. ROBERT C. BYRD, MEMBER OF CONGRESS FROM THE STATE OF WEST VIRGINIA

Mr. Chairman, I deeply appreciate this opportunity to express my views to your subcommittee, and I know of no more important subject that can be given careful study by the Congress than that of education. On one occasion Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to uneducated men. "As much," said he, "as the living are to the dead." Yet, some 150,000 young Americans this year, last year, and the year before did not go on to pursue a college education just because of financial difficulties. One hundred and fifty thousand students out of the top echelon of their classes in high school did not go on to study in college-just because of a lack of means to pay. Each time I think of the Russian sputniks I am prone to wonder how many of those students who did not go to college 10 years ago for the same reason would now be available to help our country, in a time of desperate shortage of scientists and engineers, to win the race for outer space.

Two years ago I was in Africa, the Middle East, and in Asia, and each time I recall my visit to the Asian-African world, where America's vital interests are increasingly concerned, I am appalled once again by the fact that only a handful of Americans can talk the language of the peoples of those two great continents, to say nothing of European languages. It is important to be able to converse in other languages if we are to hope to transmit and exchange the ideas of freemen with the peoples of captive countries. Yet, too few American students today are preparing, through language studies and scientific studies, to meet the challenges that will confront America in the immediate years ahead. It is no longer mere idle speculation that man may someday reach the moon. We have now crossed another threshold into the age of space flight. The first Russian satellite was an important technological breakthrough that provided a warning to us to provide enough scientists and technicians of sufficient quality to enable us to regain and hold world leadership in the technological race or else lose our liberties and freedoms forever.

The backward peasant nation that was the Soviet Union 30 years ago has raised itself to a high level of technological accomplishment-even though it may have been at great cost in human suffering. Today, Soviet missiles and rockets face us, to say nothing of a vast fleet of missile-equipped submarines and huge standing armies. America is confronted with a shrewd and ruthless mortal enemy-Soviet Russia, a country under the leadership of atheistic men whose announced objective is the complete mastery of the world, men who are merciless, men who are ambitious, men who will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. Nikita Khrushchev has boasted that the Soviets will be supreme in nuclear power, in consumer-goods production, in cultural activities, in agricultural production, in education. "We will bury you," he has boldly and arrogantly stated to us.

It is time we realize that the Communists are waging all-out war upon us and that we are locked in a gigantic and momentous struggle which will demand every resource of our intelligence and our spirit if we are to survive. We are in a one-game world series, and we cannot afford to lose any more innings. The Russian sputniks and our own satellites are signs in the sky that the race between the Communist world and the free world has entered a new, a deeper, a more profound dimension. And this race is to the swift; this battle is to the strong. To effectively compete in this contest, there must be a fundamental change in American attitude toward the intellectuals-the scholars in our midst.

America needs more eggheads and fewer fatheads. It was Soviet eggheads who got the sputniks off the ground, and it will be American eggheads who get our Nation off the ground if we but give them the support they need. Frankly, I am on an egghead search. I am looking for more scientists and engineers, more mathematicians and technicians.

Not all eggheads are geniuses. Not all eggheads are potential scientists and engineers. An egghead is simply a thinking, reflecting person who may well have a strong streak of creativity in him or her. The basic hallmarks are a concern primarily with ideas, a restless inquiring mind, a dedication to something higher and outside himself. Some are hard boiled and some are soft boiled, but we need them all, and it is time that the American people and our United States Government decided to make it possible for a far higher percentage of young potential scholars to move into positions of leadership.

We must have more teachers, and we must have better teachers. That means higher teachers' salaries, so that a teacher can afford to work at only one job, so that he or she can afford to take further training during the summer months. An average salary of $4,420 is unthinkably low. Only about half of the chemistry and biology teacher graduates in 1956 actually went into the teaching profession. Industry's higher salaries are appealing to the teachers, particularly to science and mathematics teachers.

Last fall at Chicago, at a conference of more than a thousand educators and laymen interested in education, the point was made repeatedly that high-school students are capable of handling much more solid intellectual fare than many are now receiving. The quality and the intensity of our higher education can be rather sharply increased by changes in the curriculums. This is imperative when we think of the degree the Russian high-school graduate is being force fed with scientific education.

The other day I learned this from the United States Office of Education's specialist in Soviet education:

"The emphasis on science in Soviet schools contrasts sharply with the situation in the United States. Whereas each of the more than 1 million Soviet students graduating from scondary schools last June had taken 5 years of chemistry, 5 of biology, 10 of mathematics-including algebra, geometry, and trigonometry-less than one-third of a total of approximately the same number of our American high-school graduates had taken as much as a single year in chemistry."

That is only a fraction of the story. In the Soviet Union the schoolweek is 6 days-not 5. The school hours are longer. Study at home is more exacting. Examinations are more severe. A Russian child learns biology in grade 4, foreign languages in grade 5, physics and algebra and geometry in grade 6. Grade 7 teaches chemistry. Astronomy and calculus are taught in grade 10. This Russian data surely demonstrates that many American high-school students could take a considerably richer diet of education, with a strong seasoning of the physical sciences.

What can the Federal Government do to help in this gigantic national effort which our people must make to provide the yeast of opportunity for the gifted young people among us?

First of all, we need a really intensive scholarship program administered on the basis of merit and need. I have introduced a bill to provide 50,000 such scholarships for the fiscal year beginning July 1, 1959, and during each of the 5 succeeding fiscal years. Persons awarded scholarships under my bill shall be paid $1,000 during each academic year of the scholarship's duration.

Each State would be allotted the number of such scholarships which bears the same ratio to the total number of such scholarships being allotted as its population between the ages of 18 and 21, both inclusive, bears to the total population of all the States between such ages. Any State desiring to participate in the scholarship program may do so by establishing, through its State educational agency, a State commission on scholarships and student loans, and by submitting to the United States Commissioner of Education a State plan which provides for the determination and selection, in accordance with my bill, of individuals entitled to and qualifying for such scholarships. The Federal Government would pay the administrative expenses of the State commissions.

In the same bill, I have proposed a long-term low-interest loan program for college students, such loans to be made up to a maximum of $1,000 to any one student in any academic year beginning July 1, 1959, and for each of the succeeding 5 fiscal years. The bill would authorize the appropriation of $40 million annually for this purpose over the 6 fiscal years embraced by the program. Loans would be made on the basis of need and scholastic ability and for the purpose of pursuing a course of study in engineering or leading to a degree with a major concentration in academic work in a science, mathematics, or modern foreign language.

The bill provides that any college graduate who enters Government service in the scientific and engineering or related fields or who enters the teaching profession upon graduation may write off his loan, 20 percent of the loan being forgiven for each year he or she remains in the required profession. This is an incentive that will keep many young people from taking the jump out of teaching in those first years of typically low teaching salaries.

My bill would also authorize appropriations for the acquisition of science teaching facilities for institutions of higher education to carry out the program. The appropriation of $75 million annually would be authorized for the purpose

of making payments to teachers for advanced study in summer sessions offered by institutions of higher education, and an appropriation of $25 million annually would be authorized for the purpose of making payments to teachers for advanced study in extension courses.

Moreover, 1,500 graduate fellowships would be awarded annually for periods of study not in excess of 3 academic years in the fields of mathematics, science, engineering, and modern foreign languages.

Congressional citations would also be presented by the Commissioner of Education to high-school graduates for outstanding scholastic achievement. Federal control of education would be prohibited under my bill.

Mr. Chairman, we must do our best to find our potential leaders in science and industry. We need technicians, we need diplomats, we need engineers and scientists, we need young people who can speak other languages, men and women who can probe the atom as well as the vast and outer reaches of the universe. I shall do my best to provide our young people with the opportunity they deserve and which our Nation's own vital self-interest demands-the opportunity to develop their talents and faculties through higher education. The discovery of a single genius can upset the military balance of power. The same discovery can contribute more to man's prosperity than the discovery of some vast new body of iron ore. The discovery of a single scientific genius may mean the difference in freedom and slavery, peace and war.

Mr. Chairman, if this free civilization of which the United States is the most formidable part should fail to survive the menace that now confronts it, the historians of the future will point to the tragedy of education in the United States as having been our Achilles' heel.

Sputnik has dramatized our sorry condition. I submit, then, that we must rededicate ourselves to the cause of freedom through education, freedom for our generation now and freedom for posterity. Freedom and survival for the United States and those who want to be free everywhere. I trust that the Congress will act to insure this freedom.

Education in the United States has become the neglected stepchild of American progress. Not only education from the standpoint of financial support, but education from the standpoint of substantive content. Our system of education has been so developed that it has been possible to go through grammar school, through high school, and through college, and emerge in a state of utter educational mediocrity. It is an educational system that has flaunted as an ideal, as if it were a religion, not the exceptional man, not talent, certainly not genius. It has flaunted the chap who knew how to make friends and influence people. It has not been what one knows that matters, or what one has achieved, or could achieve. There has been a consequent breakdown of discipline that has corroded the home and debased authority. The handwriting is on the wall. We must act now lest in the end we are weighed in the balances and, like Belshazzar, found wanting.

Mr. Chairman, I wish to compliment you and others of your subcommittee. In conducting hearings on this important subject you are paving the way for legislation which cannot be excelled in its importance to our country's welfare and security. I want to commend you upon the forthright and courageous position you have always taken in this matter, and I am supremely confident that your continuing interest in so vital a subject will direct you and your subcommittee and the full committee to reach an ultimate solution to the grave problems which confront us in the field of education. The very survival, not only of our free educational system but also of our liberties and freedoms as Americans is in the balance. I urge you to continue in your quest for the facts which will enable you to report legislation eventually to the Congress for action whereby the means may be provided to promising students throughout the land to enable them to go on to higher education and to prepare them for the type of leadership so greatly needed if ours is to continue to be the land of the free. I trust that your subcommittee will look favorably upon the provisions included in my own bill, H. R. 11776, but, in any event, it is my greatest desire that legislation be devised which will meet the needs and accomplish the objectives I have sought to achieve. You are in the position to know what legislation is best. I am grateful for the opportunity to submit my views. Action is the order of the day.

(Information prepared by the Legislative Reference Service, Library of Congress, at the request of Congressman Carl Elliott:)

The percentage of degrees earned in 25 fields of study to total number of degrees earned, 1955-56 (bachelor's and 1st professional degrees)

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Total of all sciences, mathematics, engineering, and foreign language, the fields mentioned in H. R. 10381..

99.8

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1 U. S. Office of Education. Earned degrees conferred by higher educational institutions, 1955-56. Pp. 6-10.

STATEMENT OF RICHARD C. CADWALLADER, A MEMBER OF THE NATIONAL AMERICANISM COMMISSION OF THE AMERICAN LEGION, ON H. R. 10381, H. R. 10278, AND H. R. 10908, APRIL 3, 1958

Messrs. Chairmen and members of the subcommittees, my name is Richard C. Cadwallader. I reside at Baton Rouge, La., and I am a member of the national Americanism commission of the American Legion.

At the outset, I wish to thank you for permitting me to submit this statement in connection with your hearings on the three bills above mentioned. With your permission I would like to present the views of the American Legion in connection with the proposed legislation, which is now under study by your respective subcommittees.

On the basis of its record of performance in the field of education, I respectfully submit that the American Legion is entitled to speak on this matter and that its views are worthy of consideration.

CONVENTION ACTION

At the 1957 national convention of the American Legion the question of the role of the Federal Government in general public education was reconsidered and the 3,118 accredited delegates to the convention, representing every State in the

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