and which charges them with the responsibility for creating or recreating the whole range of tools for the schoolroom: the text, the films, the television pro grams, the laboratory, the teacher's guide, the test and examinations, the collateral reading-anything and everything the teacher can employ and the student can utilize.

This was the procedure that was employed successfuly by the Physical Science Study Committee, and that has since been employed successfully by mathematicians, biologists, chemists, and engineers. This concentration in the sciences is no accident. Massive programs of educational research and develop ment are expensive at least, they are expensive in comparison with the sums that have traditionally been spent in such activities. And up to now, the only source of financial support to any extent commensurate with the needs has been the National Science Foundation.

This is not to say that the Office of Education has not made substantial contributions. In the field of modern foreign languages a major program has been successfully carried out by the Office of Education, and and it has already made a modest beginning in the field of English. But in relation to the range of activities of which it is capable, the Office of Education has not yet been empowered to move with a vigor equal to that displayed by the National Science Foundation.

Meanwhile, Congress has responded to the success of NSF activities by ap propriating year by year larger and larger sums for NSF course content pro grams. What this bill asks is that Congress support a major effort to extend this enormously successful program to those areas which the NSF cannot cover, and which all of us believe are at least as important to young American students as the sciences.

These massive programs buy for the schools the kind of quality in education that they can achieve in no other way. The past generation has seen major changes in the problems of education, and in the resources that can be brought to bear in solving those problems.

To begin with, we ask more of education. The United States is leading the world into an era of rapid change, social as well as technological. The community from which the child enters school will bear little resemblance to the community in which he will spend the years of his maturity. It is no longer the principal role of early education to make him comfortable within a stable social and economic pattern; today his schooling must prepare him to deal with new patterns, and indeed to help create those new patterns in such a fashion that they will continue to meet American ideals and American purposes.

But if we ask more of education, we have also learned how to derive more from it. Over the past few years, we have learned how to learn and how to teach in new ways and with new confidence in our own technology. Education by television and programed learning are the most spectacular of recent achieve ments, but the solid advances in the sheer knowledge about the learning process are perhaps even more significant.

We have reached a stage where education is so demanding that it must command the skills of the best scholars and teachers, supported by the best students of the learning process. But we cannot put such men and women into every American schoolroom-there are not enough of them in any single subject to staff a moderate-sized suburban community. Instead we must invent some method by which these people can concentrate their efforts and skills and can embody them in forms which will then represent them in the schoolroom. This is precisely what massive programs of curriculum research and development undertake to do.

Materials are produced that enable students to learn. But they can also be used to enable a teacher to teach. The existence of the materials, warranted in quality by the stature of the men and women who created them, serves as a focus for the training of teachers-and without well-trained teachers there is not likely to be any school system worth speaking about. There is good reason to maintain that these massive programs of curriculum research and develop ment are an essential prerequisite for any intensive program of teacher training, whether it is carried on locally or nationally, in existing institutions or by means of television.

There is still one more important aspect of this process which, I think must be mentioned. We are trying, in this country, to balance an urgent national need for quality in education with our abiding faith in the values of local control over education and our suspicions of any measures which centralize that con

trol in the Federal Government. At times we fear that the two are irreconcilable. Here, they are not.

Let me quote from a booklet recently published by the Syracuse University Press,' as part of its series on the economics and politics of public education: "Even though the Physical Science Study Committee's course materials, used as the PSSC prescribes, discipline teaching, Federal support does not control the PSSC's new course and never has. Although most of the money for the new program came from a Federal agency, the National Science Foundation, NSF, has concerned itself solely and continually with the feasibility of the undertaking, not with its content. Feasibility has a hard master; it insisted that every major stage in the new course be spelled out, judged by its appropriate peers, and revised on the basis of their judgment. A national sampling of physicists did just that at the MIT conference in December 1956 * * *.

"The course passed its final test when it found private commercial publishing, supply, and distributive houses willing to take over further management of the new materials. While large Federal grants made this uniquely thorough schedule of testing possible, no Federal employees had taken part in the evaluation. Scientists, classroom teachers, and educational businessmen, acting in their private capacities, had passed judgment on PSSC * * *. The new course did not control-it disciplined. And its discipline was candid and open-put to the test at every step."

I have recurred upon several occasions to the costliness of massive programs, and I would like now to put this matter into perspective. Forgive me if I refer still again to PSSC; it is the course with which I am the most familiar, and which has the longest history.

Education in the United States costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $30 billion a year. Of this physics education in the secondary school-the subject with which PSSC dealt-represents less than 1 percent. Let us say in round numbers, that the cost of physics education in secondary school is about $100 million a year. I am sure that is not the right number, but I am equally sure it is not very far wrong.

PSSC cost about $6 million. But that is not an annual cost-it is a total cost. If I assume that PSSC affects physics teaching for 20 years (and that is more conservative than I like to be), we can say that PSSC cost about $300,000 a year over that period.

Let us be ultraconservative again, and let me assume that PSSC has improved the learning of physics by 10 percent. I know it is more than that, and anyone will tell you so, but I am one of the fathers of PSSC and I must be modest. At 10 percent, PSSC is worth $10 million a year to American education, and all that at a cost of $300,000 a year. That is a 30-to-1 return on your money, and I don't know where you can do better than that.

When there are profits of that size to be made, I am not content to limit them to science and mathematics. As a scientist, I am gratified that the National Science Foundation is doing so superb a job in bringing new quality into science education, and that Congress has recognized this continuing accomplishment by continuing support. But as a scientist, I fear an educational system in which science education is of high quality, and other education is second rate. We need to give at least as much attention to social studies, to the humanities, to languages, as we are now giving to science. I say "at least as much," but I, myself, believe we must give more attention to these fields, for they are all much more difficult than science, to teach and to learn. And let me be sure to make it clear that I believe them to be as important as science and technology, and in all but the most material respects, even more important.

The proper agency for curriculum research and development in those fields is the Office of Education. It has already made modest beginnings, and has earned the respect of the academic world and the world of education. I reSpectfully urge this committee to give it the support that will enable it to make a real impress upon this most important work.

Successes in science

In closing, let me also urge the immediacy of the need. and mathematics have stimulated scholars and teachers in other fields, and they are anxious to get on with the work. Their enthusiasm is not likely to survive a long period of repeated disappointments, and it is a hard fact that at present,

1

Marsh Paul E., and Gortner, Ross A., "Federal Aid to Science Education: Two program"; pp. 86-87; Syracuse University Press, 1963.

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.

A 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 serospace 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 levels. 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