in the absence of massive support from the Office of Education, these repeated disappointments are being suffered. Again I can cite a program with which I am intimately familiar. Educational Services, Inc., a nonprofit institution which has descended from the Physical Science Study Committee, has recently embarked on an ambitious program of educational research and development dealing with the social studies and the humanities. It has gathered, from the entire United States, a large group of distinguished scholars and teachers who are prepared to devote their great energies to this work over the next few years. So far, the program has progressed with support from private foundations, but it cannot continue at its best rate unless support on the scale of NSF support becomes available. And this program, in turn, is only one of many that have recently begun, and that must be pressed to completion if the United States is to enjoy the fruits of real public education.

I am grateful for the opportunity to present this statement, and I trust that it will be of use in the committee's considerations.

Senator RANDOLPH. Mr. Straubel.

STATEMENT OF JAMES H. STRAUBEL, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, AEROSPACE EDUCATION FOUNDATION, AIR FORCE ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Mr. STRAUBEL. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman, I am here representing an organization known as the Aerospace Education Foundation, which brings together in our trustees an outstanding group of educators, scientists, and business

men.

We are now in our eighth year.

I appear before the subcommittee to express our deep-seated belief that a certain amount of additional effort is required to gear our educational program in this country to the dynamics of space technology.

In the last 12 months, as in the few years previously, we have sponsored aerospace education seminars for teachers and students across the country, in more than 25 cities in the last year, each sponsored with the active cooperation of the city or State school system.

These seminars have been directed primarily toward the secondary school system. We have, in the last few years, been very proud to have stimulated such innovations in education as the first space science course for secondary schools in Pennsylvania and at another level, the first course on the history of space at the University of Colorado. We have noted in each instance a great hunger on the part of the administrators and teachers for the type of information that we were able to put before them.

We have been ecouraged on the one hand by a deep interest on the part of the school systems to update their curriculums to better keep pace with fast-moving space developments.

On the other hand, we continue to be discouraged with the total effort in contrast to what we believe to be a total requirement.

The scope of the requirement in terms of content, at least, recently was referred to by Mr. Paul M. Gardner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, an education specialist, during a University of Wisconsin conference.

After pointing out the educational needs in terms of the scientific effort, he said this, and I would like to have it in the record:

Behind all of the need for brainpower to sustain research and development, there is yet another challenge to teachers and educators across the Nation. This challenge arises out of the fact that many of the demands of the space age upon

the average person will be nonscientific. These demands will fall first upon the 90 percent of students who are not heading for technical careers, but who will be taking their place in the emerging new world as voters and citizens. These people will be asked to judge events in the space age and to understand the implications of using new technology. Demands upon them will be for open minds, broader tolerance, imagination, and for original thinking. Therefore, the kind of education needed in order to prepare youth to cope with the demands of a changing world such as we may now envision will draw heavily upon the social sciences, the study of history, economics, anthropology, political science, and psychology.

EDUCATIONAL INVESTMENT CONTROL WITH RESEARCH

From a quantitative standpoint, we note that the Nation is now spending as a total investment some $30 billion per year in formal education. Exact figures are not available as to how much of this huge sum is being invested in research and development, but several months ago the former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, in a public statement, estimated that about one-half of 1 percent would approximate the correct figure.

So we ask whether, out of a $30 billion investment, one-half of 1 percent of the total is enough to explore new concepts, new procedures, and new techniques.

The business world has learned from hard experience the sad results of underinvesting in research and development. They know it on their profit-and-loss statements.

So as an organization, we say to the committee that we can expect only sad results from the current situation in education. But to make it worse, we find no plans that are evident to correct the imbalance.

year ago, our foundation reported to the committee that the Government was spending only 1 percent of its total education appropriation on research and development. Figures like that are never completely conclusive, but I am interested in relative positions. For example, we have asked and find that the total Defense Department Lormally spends some 14 percent of its total investment on R. & D., the aerospace industry, with whom we work closely, 17 percent.

In Government, the Public Health Service is beyond 40 percent and the Department of Agriculture, 3 percent. This compares with the 1 percent that the Office of Education is investing in research and development out of its total appropriation.

I mentioned that there is little improvement in the last 12 months. Funds available to the Office in the current fiscal year amounted to approximately $650 million for all programs. Of this amount, some $14 million now is available for general studies, but only $7 million of this sum is available for the cooperative research program, which is the principal research and development activity of the Office. Thus little more than 1 percent of this current Federal appropriation is available for what can be realistically considered educational research and development.

I am not qualified to discuss the cooperative research program as such. I am the only layman in the group. Others on hand are well qualified to discuss the program. I represent an organization that is concentrating its efforts in the field of aerospace education and I would like to stick to that area.

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SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING NEED BY CITIZENS

At the moment, I am not talking about the vast and important effort, both public and private, that is being made to develop more scientists and engineers in this country, an effort in which, as the previous speaker has noted, the Office of Education, the National Science Foundation, NASA, and others we know are all engaged. I am speaking of the lack of national leadership to enlighten those in our society who are not technically minded or technically schooled. I am speaking of that overwhelming majority of students at all level, since their lives are to be influenced by a possessive technology, who at least deserve to be introduced to the basic elements of this influence. Doctor Kernan, the Massachusetts State Commissioner of Education, put it this way:

The space is obviously one of science and technology. Yet hundreds of thousands of the Nation's youth are destined to be almost totally ignorant of recent developments in those areas of knowledge which most drastically characterize the age in which they live.

This, we believe, is a dangerous situation in a democracy founded on an enlightened citizenry. Yet the projected Federal expenditure for education in the budget now before the committee earmarks no money specifically for research in the space science. We find this hard to understand in a country that is only a few years away from placing men on the moon.

No one, to our knowledge, and we have checked into this, is engaged in a qualitative inventory of space education activities, and nowhere is there a clearinghouse for this information. This, too, we find hard to understand-hard because the stakes are so high.

I would like to conclude with a statement on these stakes: Superior technology, based on superior scientific research, is the new key to national power. We can find great agreement on that.

In this vast and complex struggle for freedom, we can afford to run behind communism on some fronts without necessarily having the balance of power affected. But we cannot afford second best on the research and development front. We must surmount the barriers we have chosen to live with and want to live with in the cause of freedom, by the application of new concepts and new ways of doing things. For this we need a steady stream of new basic knowledge, available only through research.

Even in the broad field of research and development, we cannot expect to be superior in everything. That may not be in the cards. But certain basic areas permit no compromise with first place, if we are to preserve freedom over the long pull. Basic research, we contend, is one of those areas. The school system is another. And they go hand in hand-one feeding the other.

Up to this time, we have depended to a great extent on other nations of the free world and some not in the free world, for our basic research. We can hope that this input will continue. But our schools. by their very nature, cannot be dependent upon imports to any great extent. Individuals from other nations have made, and we hope will continue to make, important contributions to our educational structure. This is true. But the schools, to function successfully, must garner

their strength from within and build that strength, layer upon layer, in the American way.

Our schools, on these terms, demand aggressive research and development, as do no other American institutions, because the end product is fundamental to all our institutions.

Senator MORSE (presiding). I want to thank you for this statement before I make a comment which I want you, in turn, to comment upon. The record should show that I apologize to you and your panelists for not being here until the middle of your testimony. Unfortunately I was scheduled to make a speech on foreign policy on the floor of the Senate this afternoon. This I delivered, and as soon as I had finished, I came to this meeting. As a result, I sit here a little cold, except for your testimony, with respect to knowledge of what the other panelists said here this afternoon.

However, I have been scanning the other statements with one eye as I listened with interest to the testimony you have presented.

I am sorry that I was not here to participate in the discussion earlier.

OPPOSITION TO FEDERAL EDUCATIONAL AID

As I scanned this testimony, and as I listened to you, I think our problem is in the grassroots of America, where there is still a surprising amount of opposition to Federal aid to education. I was in Hot Springs, Ark., last Thursday, and in Chicago last Saturday. I read in the papers between here and those points a considerable amount of adverse comment on Federal aid to education. These comments expressed, in my view, a head-in-the-sand attitude, when we consider what has occurred in many fields of knowledge since you and I were in grade school. Although I may be your senior by more than a little bit, I think you are still of my generation.

When I think of what we learned and needed to learn as in contrast. to what boys of this generation, and girls, too, should learn and must learn if they are going to survive in this great contest between freedom and totalitarianism in their generation, I keep asking myself the questions: "What can we do to get the people of this country who are opposed to the Federal Government assuming its fair share of financial responsibility toward educating our young; what can we do to get them to see that 1963 is not 1906 or 1912, or 1923?" That was the bracket of years which covered my formal education from grade school through my baccalaureate degree. You can understand why I find it is so important to have men of your expertness come here this afternoon to say the things that you have said on this record.

I make these statements as a preface, because I need your help in getting into this record an evaluation of my observations even though they may seem to be somewhat in the form of rhetorical questions. Could you tell me, for the record, if I am wrong when I point out that the training which is now needed from grade school through high hool and through college, should be directed toward the development not of the specialist but of educated men and women? Should not our education aim at producing men and women who will be trained and qualified to carry on their obligations to society? That 1s, should it be an education which, politically would result in statesmanship, and economically would enable the individual to produce for

society to an optimum degree what his or her mental ability would make possible? Is not this better than to limit the individual producing under his potential capacity because he has not had the necessary training?

FEDERAL INTEREST IN TRAINING FOR NATIONAL NEEDS

Am I correct in my observation that the needs of the Nation for Federal programs of defense and space are such that no local school district, no State educational system is going to, nor should it be expected to, fulfill and pay for the cost of that Federal need?

Before you comment, let me clarify my thought further. You have spoken about space and you have testified in the last few minutes that no local school district, no State government really has any responsibility as far as their governmental jurisdiction is concerned. to maintain a program which will train and qualify educated citizens of this country to fulfill the needs of the Federal Government in respect to a space program during your lifetime.

Do you think I am wrong about that?

Mr. STRAUBEL. You are very right about that.

Senator MORSE. I wish we could get that idea across to your local school boards and our parent-teachers' associations. I was aghast to read that the parent-teachers' association down in Florida recently passed an anti-Federal-aid resolution except in terms of some little special bracket of it.

We cannot expect a local school board or a State adequately to finance the kind of technical training program that is going to be needed. We will require increasing thousands of our people to be trained if this Government of ours is going to be able to carry out its Federal responsibilities. The United States has a tremendous responsibility in the field, for example, of foreign policy. It has responsibilities in space communication, in defense needs, and in all the other scientific areas about which and in which fields the panel qualifies as expert witnesses.

Do you agree with me that some way, some how, we have to get the individual citizen at the grassroots level to realize that the Federal Government and only the Federal Government can be expected to do the financing for this phase of the training which has to start in the first grade? Am I right?

Dr. ZACHARIAS. Senator Morse, you are dead right. I think the various people would admit freely that they might not be competent in space sciences or in physics. They are not likely to agree, although I agree completely, they are not likely to agree that they are not competent to handle this in history, literature, the study of man. archaeology, and so on-music, the graphic arts. I believe, as you just said, I believe that the Federal Government has to pull the programs together, not only because of the financial side of it, but because you have to pull out of the universities and out of the schools enough people to make the programs big enough so that they are really telling programs.

Senator MORSE. Doctor Zacharias, you make me feel a little better. With this kind of expert testimony you are providing you will make it easier for me, when I plead this case, as I have been doing before